We don’t want to talk about our bodies. Except that we want to talk about our bodies.
 
We were brainwashed as children not to talk about our bodies. It was uncouth and vulgar to do so. We did not even have words for our private parts. I remember the shocked silence in Washington’s National Theater, when Eve Ensler, standing downstage center in her famous play, listed thirty names of the female genitalia. I thought the prim lady next to me in the box would faint. Eve went on to say that her mother would instead use the pronoun ‘it.’ That struck a chord for me, for in our very articulate family, even in a medical emergency, we spoke of a private part as ‘it.’

​When I joined school, we not only competed on how far we could make our urinary stream go, we also learned the choicest names for the unmentionable parts of our body. A classmate had overheard his uncle saying something endearing to his wife or a brash cousin sharing a bawdy joke with his friends, and he would proudly share his acquisition with us. Unknown to our teachers, so went, in the back benches or during the recess, our first lesson in the human anatomy.
 
That is where our education stopped, despite the occasional purple passage we would find in some novel, for we had no real or visual understanding. My friends, who are primary-care doctors, tell me that some young, eager couples come to them with problems that are both sad and hilarious, and spring only from abysmal ignorance of male and female bodies.
 
Among my school friends, I emerged as a hero, for I had found, in my father’s library, secreted behind Shakespeare and Tolstoy, volumes of Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes. They were not easy reading, but I persevered, and finally figured out what Lady Chatterley was really doing with her robust gardener. I now drew diagrams that I had seen in the Stopes volume and stunned my classmates with my expertise.
 
Of course, it was nothing of the kind. 
 
I understood very little of the physical aspects of coupling. Worse, I understood nothing of its emotional aspects. Surely, I was not unique in my appalling ignorance. People who go through a process called education often get to know little of what is going to affect their life so much.
 
Yet it was not for want of interest. We were dying of curiosity. We wanted to know why adults always talked about some things in whispers and tried so hard to keep us out of hearing. We were eager to know what certain words and events in the newspapers meant, especially as the adults clearly reveled in talking about those. We simply wanted to know. But nobody told us anything worth knowing.
 
Trying to learn about our bodies from Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes is like trying to learn language by scanning Facebook and to learn music from a couple of pop albums. You can go away, as I am sure I did, with a lot of wrong assumptions and suppositions. Growing up, I did not encounter Japanese or Korean women, and I nurtured the silly notion that a woman with almond eyes or a button nose simply could not be pretty. I was lucky to sit in a seminar next to a stunning French-Chinese girl and experienced a severe case of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ a conflict between my idea and an undeniable reality. I was young, and my hormones quickly told me the truth. Swiftly, I shed my naive assumption.

More serious is that many of us develop a poor notion of our bodies. My friends and I compared ourselves with movie stars and, predictably, came up short. We were not tall or muscular enough, nor did we have the right features or complexion. It did not help me that I had a friend who actually entered films and became a matinee idol, cavorting with pretty heroines. I am told that it is much worse for women, for they are matched against tougher standards. Like we learn the parts of speech in a language class, young girls have to learn the parts of corpus, and how to tinker with each part. Of course, the face must be just right, with ten types of cream and twenty types of make-up, to bring it the closest to Scarlett Johansson or Aishwarya Rai. In addition, great attention must go to the bust, posterior, thigh and hair, to bring a woman in line with standards of acceptability set by godlike gurus of fashion.
 
I am all for people looking their best, but it does little good, to men and women alike, to grow up with the idea that they normally look terrible and must resort to desperate means to come to par. Nor does it make great sense for people to spend enormous amount of time and money to achieve the perfect eyebrow or select the right color and switch for their hair. I could have done without the feeling of inferiority that the modes of the time foisted on me. I can recall the time when I ran to the mirror, the moment I left my bed, to make sure that my hairstyle was appropriate. What a relief it was, alas far too late, when I started shaving my head as well as my cheeks.

A friend reminded me that younger people these days learn about their and others’ bodies by watching explicit videos, on their tablets and their phones, and don’t need to hear about birds and bees from their parents. I saw several of such videos and decided that, as mentors, those are scarcely better than Havelock Ellis or Marie Stopes. Perhaps the videos reduce, to an extent, their ignorance about our bodies, but they may emerge with an added dimension of inferiority about their capacity for sexual acrobatics.
 
We live in our bodies. It helps to know of those abodes. It helps also to have that knowledge without acquiring false ideas about some standards our bodies need to meet.

Last night I dreamed of Siwa. I saw myself walking among sand dunes.
 
Siwa is a legendary oasis in the immense western desert of Egypt, close to the Libyan border. From Alexandria, the city named after him, Alexander the Great traveled 300 miles on a white stallion to reach Siwa. A poor imitator, I covered about the same distance from Cairo in a black airconditioned car. Alexander had gone to see the oracle of Amund and ask when he would see Macedonia again. I went to see the desert and evade the stale Christmas festivities in the capital.
 
In reality, there was a bigger reason for the trip. my family had been fragmented. I was living in Washington, Jane was working in Cairo, my daughters were dispersed in Pennsylvania and Egypt. Siwa gave us a quiet holiday together. It meant a lot to me, perhaps to all of us.

It was a beautiful time. The weather was pleasant, the pensione we lived in was comfortable, the food was different but good. Lina and Monica quickly chose a room with a large window, looking out on a glorious row of palm trees. I settled down on the portico and deliberately chose a dry martini, for it came with a truly remarkable olive. Siwa’s olives are famous and cost double of other olives. All around were miles of sand, of course, but the little oasis had a unique charm of its own.
 
Even in the thirteenth century Siwa had only seven families and forty residents. Now it has thirty thousand people. It is a special community whose people are identifiably different from the Egyptians. Ethnically they are Berbers, a part of the world community of Berbers called Maghreb. The Berbers were a dominant group in North Africa, in countries like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania, and the Siwans have a lot in common with Berber families of Libya. When the Arabs prevailed and Islam became the main religion, the Berbers lost their language and had to fall in line.
 
I heard the Berbers of Siwa call themselves Amazighs, meaning free men, a term of defiance against the Arabization of their world. They are certainly proud of their tradition, keep themselves apart from Egyptian culture and have occasionally risen in revolt against Egyptian authorities. The story is told that when King Fouad first visited Siwa, he was offended by their homosexual practices and could not believe that it continued in a Muslim land. By now most Berbers have become Sunni Muslims, though some have converted to other religions. This was my first encounter with a major pre-Arab group and I had to confess that the only two Berbers I knew about were Saint Augustine and the famous Roman general Lusius Quietus, who brought the Jews to heel.
 
The food in the oasis, given the fact that we were sitting in the middle of a desert, amazed me with its quality. The Berbers commonly serve cous cous, now fairly popular in the western word, along with a delicious meat stew called Tajine or Pastilla, a fragrant chicken pie. For breakfast, we had Bourjeje, a kind of pancake with flour and eggs and Bouchiar, wafers soaked in butter and honey.

The children were eager to explore the place and we decided to brave the midday sun. We took a quick look at the mosque Aghurmi, stopped to see the picturesque salt lake and then made a long detour to the ancient town at Shali, with its extensive ruins evoking the image of large buildings in a once-vibrant city. What they seemed to enjoy the most was sliding down the mammoth sand dunes in slides that I had only seen used among snow piles in Minnesota. Up and down they went until we were all covered with gritty sand.
 
For me the most interesting was the desert itself, the surrounding expanse of sand. A desert is a bit like its opposite, the sea. The vastness leaves you breathless. I was a young school student when I went, with some friends, to a beach. It was my first encounter with the sea. I was speechless with its beauty and grandeur. As I gingerly waded into the water, I thought: I don’t need anything else to be happy. The memory returned as I wandered in Siwa. The desert does something similar to you. Its immensity staggers you and makes trifles of your petty miseries and disappointments. I just stood there, at the window or just a hundred yards from my room, and I watched in silence the endless, undulating masses of sand, glistening in the moonlight. I felt I needed the desert to leave behind my inane heartaches.

​The next morning, we went to the temple of the Oracle of Amund. Few pillars remain. That was where princes and generals came to ask monumental questions of war and pestilence and to humbly learn what the future held for them and their kingdoms. That was where, after conquering the world, Alexander the Great came to learn about the future – his future. The august Oracle of Amund acknowledged Alexander as the new Pharaoh of Egypt, but, in a staggering blow, told him that he would not see his beloved Macedonia ever again. As predicted, though just 32, he died on his way back home.
 
I saw the vast Egyptian desert and sensed its majesty and peace, but could bring little of it back with me.

I was a student in the university in 1959 when the Nanavati affair burst upon the Indian scene like a tsunami. It dominated the front pages for weeks. Understandably, as it had all the elements of a succès de scandale: a brutal murder, a pretty woman, love and sex, jealousy and hate, military brass and political leaders, and even communal hostility.
 
I remember the scandal for a curious reason. My view of the affair was quite different from everybody else’s. In fact, quite contrary. In any discussion – and discussion was insistent and widespread – I stood out like a sore thumb and felt quite sore about it. Even after sixty years it is good to look again at this colorful crime-and-punishment story, if only to understand that contradiction.
 
What happened was this. Nanavati, a senior officer of the Indian Navy, barged into the bedroom of Ahuja, a businessman, and shot him dead at close range. Sylvia, Nanavati’s wife and mother of their three children, had just told him that she was in love with Ahuja and had been intimate with him.

The facts were never in doubt. The killer was too much in rage to cover his tracks. Nanavati had gone to his ship and taken out a gun on a false pretext. He had brazenly entered Ahuja’s apartment and intruded into his bedroom for the kill. On his way out, he had told the guard that he had shot a man because the man had a “connection” with his wife. He had said about the same thing to a fellow officer who later directed him to a police station. Nanavati was jealous that his wife had slept with another man and too angry to disguise his motive.
 
But he had friends and resources. His smart lawyers advised him not to go gently into the good night. They revisited the story as a crime passionnel. Why did he go to see Ahuja? Only to make sure that he would do the honorable thing and marry Sylvia. Why did he carry a gun? Only to protect himself, because Ahuja might shoot him. Why did he shoot Ahuja? Only because Ahuja said that he did not have to marry anybody he slept with. Shoot to kill? An accident, only because there was a scuffle when Ahuja tried to wrest his gun.
 
The story went to pieces as the facts came out. Nanavati did not go to find out Ahuja’s intention; he knew, from the letter Sylvia had shown him, they were in love. Nanavati did not carry a gun as a defensive measure, for Ahuja never had a gun. He shot Ahuja in seconds after forcing into his bedroom; there was no discussion and no scuffle. Ahuja could not have grabbed for the gun, for Nanavati carried it secreted in an envelope. Above all, he had volunteered that he had gone to deal with a man who had messed with his wife.
 
No matter. Nobody seemed interested in the facts. ‘Honor’ was very much in the air. Nanavati had done the honorable thing by doing away with the lewd Lothario who had bedded his wife, his prime and inviolable property. That was the critical factor. Laws did not matter. Nanavati was entitled to kill the miscreant.
 
India was agog with admiration of the hero, Nanavati, who had struck out for the sanctity of marriage and family. Sanctity of life was a small price to pay. Men showered him with checks. Women swooned at his sight. The Zoroastrian community, usually a sensible group, rose to support him with legal luminaries. The Indian Navy, instead of shaming a wayward officer, begged for him a comfortable naval detention instead of prison. Blitz, a low-brow tabloid, suddenly became respectable with rabid advocacy of his cause and, worse, rabid calumny of the victim. The rest of the Indian press became tongue-tied as Blitz suggested, through unverified stories of Ahuja’s misdeeds, that he died because he deserved to die.
 
Finally, when the case came to trial, predictably the jurors wasted no time declaring Nanavati not guilty. He was to go scot free. Then events took a slightly different turn.
The judge was not amused and declared the verdict perverse. He referred it to the High Court, which reviewed the evidence and found Nanavati guilty. His lawyers took it to the Supreme Court, which confirmed the guilty verdict.
 
How could a hero, who had so valiantly defended India’s moral values, languish in prison? Barely had the prison gates latched behind him, Nanavati was pardoned by the state Governor, none other than the Prime Minister’s sister. India retained its reputation as a country where anything could be done, even murder, if one had the right connections.
 
I think now, as I thought then, that Nanavati – despite the millions the navy had spent on his education and training – was essentially a vulgar man, who tried to solve his problem, like an untrained street hooligan, with a gun instead of a brain. He was no hero. His petty jealousy would not let him allow another man to have Sylvia’s love which he had clearly forfeited.

​More important was what the affair portended and still portends for India. A woman is not entitled to follow her love if it does not suit the men around her. She remains a man’s property – at first her father’s and then her husband’s – to be dealt with in line with their priorities. She may follow her passion only if it fits in with others’ preferences. If she changes her affection, from one person, say her husband, to another, as men do all the time, she will invite the society’s wrath. What Silvia wanted simply did not matter; that Nanavati chose to kill her lover instead of her was just a roll of the dice.
 
The Indian society thought it was an honor killing. Hence it was honorable.
 
All the honor killing that goes on still is an understandable legacy.

The life of our family changed dramatically on 5 April 1944, when Major General Shigesaburo marched 30,000 troops of the Japanese Imperial Army from Myanmar into India. With him came, under Operation U Go, Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army. They attacked Kohima and Imphal.

In preparation for the invasion, the Japanese had dropped a few bombs on Kolkata, the principal city and vital port. Father suggested that mother should leave Kolkata with the two small children and be safe. He could not; he had to remain on his job. Two of her brothers, affluent doctors in Bihar, affectionately welcomed her.
 
They each owned two large houses and assumed that mother would stay in one of their houses, as her exile was temporary. They hadn’t reckoned with their sister’s fiercely independent bent. Mother had already written to a cousin to rent one half of a small duplex. Our new home had two bedrooms, one for mother and the other for us two brothers, a tiny living room and a tinier kitchen. The charming feature was a verandah at the back and a porch in front, both of which we loved. My brother and I would rush out on the porch to see war planes roaring by, and then sketch our impressions in colored chalk on the floor.

The other feature that had appealed to mother was the large open space fronting the house. It was only reason the ill-designed locality merited the misleading name of Bose Park. We played soccer there every warm afternoon, and mother liked that she could keep an eye on us whenever she looked up from her books or emerged from the kitchen. Enthusiastically, we kicked around an old football until dusk, making up by energy what we lacked in skill. The boys of the community had accepted us two brothers, on the false expectation that we would be skilled soccer players. That misapprehension arose from my brother’s cannily dropped hint that we had received training from the captain of India’s Olympic team. The fact was that, Dr. T. Ao, father’s friend and a very genial captain, had indeed given us a few lessons, but the gain in our proficiency had been minuscule.
 
Mother, who was the uncles’ favorite, invariably took us weekends to visit an uncle and our large brood of cousins. It was a culture shock for me, as if I had been teleported instantly to another planet. Everything in our family was low-key: we talked about literature and society, quietly and decorously. Our cousins were noisy and rambunctious; their talk was about movies and fashions. I was shocked, but I also had fun. Dinners were sumptuous, in between we ate endless cookies and drank limitless cups of tea. Life was a party in high decibels.
 
Mother sprang a surprise. She announced one night that she would go back to work, acting as the principal of a school. She had taught before she married, and she liked teaching. She explained that she hadn’t as many domestic chores as in Kolkata and she wanted to supplement father’s income. She added that, while my elder brother was already slated for another school, I would attend my mother’s school.
 
School, my first school! I was both excited and intimidated. My class teacher, Mrs. Das, assured my mother that she would take good care of me. She did. She was young and pretty, and had come to her first job with the mission to win every young heart. She did. She spoke softly, explained clearly and took pains to carry her pupils with her whether she taught reading or arithmetic.
 
At the end of the first day, she reported to mother that I did well, but seemed to have a urinary problem, for I rushed out at the end of every period. Embarrassed, mother had to explain that I did not go to the restroom; I went to her office every time to say that I was hungry. Mother said, firmly each time, that I could have my snacks only during the recess after the morning classes.
 
I did not find the lessons interesting, but I adored Mrs. Das and wanted to please her by learning my lessons well. I found it far more interesting, doubtless influenced by my elder brother, to read the books mother brought home for us. They were mostly literature, sometimes history and biography. That was when I first discovered that most biography is really hagiography, often fiction. Surprisingly, it was fiction that was far more real and, as Rousseau said, better designed to make us decent. 

​I was reading a breathtaking Tarasankar story about Thuggees when uncle arrived, breathless, with the news that the Japanese threat had ebbed. Their supply line had been overstretched. The samurais had receded less from the heroics of British India’s garrisons than from the fevered, furious onslaught of malaria. No more bombing, Kolkata was safe. Uncle did not have to wait. Mother’s decision was swift.
 
Father stood beaming in Howrah station as the train disgorged us and our baggage. Facing him, mother stood demurely, I was deeply embarrassed to see, like a new bride. My brother and I stood quietly, almost ignored, till one of them condescended to say, “Let’s go.” Our nine-month war-time exile was over.

Nothing is sillier than what I do every day. I sit upright on some cushions in my living room, facing the woods at the back of my home. Often, I close my eyes. Then I do what every living person does, I breathe. The only difference is that I keep, or at least try to keep, my mind on the breathing. I know when I am breathing in and when I am breathing out.
 
You would be surprised, were you to try it, how difficult it is to do this simple thing. You will find that in a minute or two your focus has shifted. You are thinking of something pleasant that happened at home or something unpleasant that occurred at work. You are regretting something you forgot to do or planning to do something important. You just can’t keep your attention on your breath.
 
As adults we pride ourselves on what we can do and what we can control. It is disconcerting to find that we have such poor control over something so central to our existence: our mind. It is like having a Rolls Royce and not knowing how to drive. Worse, we have learned to drive it ineptly, and can only manage to drive it into a ditch.

​Jefferson remarked that a person who can but does not read has no advantage over an illiterate person. I see the point of that remark every day. I have many bright, educated friends who read little beyond their electronic mail and newspaper headlines. They live in the past and bank on the dated reservoir of their past knowledge. Their convictions and conclusions are rooted in what they heard or read decades ago. They have chosen to forgo the advantage of their education.
 
Many more of us forgo the advantage of our mind. What Einstein or Goethe used to such advantage we let lie fallow and use for trivialities: we maintain a home ledger, we follow a mediocre television serial, we look for on-line bargains, we wangle a holiday travel deal. If someone made the mistake of gifting us a book of Nietsche or some poems of John Donne, we will not read it. If we attempt reading it, we will give up after the first three pages. Our best asset has long rusted.
 
So has our ability to react to the world around us. A remarkably beautiful, challenging and provocative world is unfolding around us every morning, and yet our life is nasty and brutish and – yes, in its limited span of absorption and enjoyment – short. Catholics speak of the Kingdom of Heaven, while Buddhist texts hint of a Land of Purity. Pathetically, some imagine these accessible only in the hereafter or in another incarnation. Those are at our door, if we get up and open it. Those are accessible now.
 
That is what I am trying to do.
 
I am humbly trying to see what is around me. Like everybody else, I live in a fog of distraction and preoccupation. A prisoner of my fears and hopes, anxieties and reliefs, worries and solaces, expectations and dire disappointments. It is the up-and-down that obstructs my view. As in the Zen saying, it is the silence between the notes that makes the music and it is the space between the bars that cages the tiger -- and me.
 
When I sit down on the cushion, shut my eyes and start heeding my breath, I am doing the most important thing for myself: I am giving attention to me. I don’t know anybody, except a hypochondriac or two, who pays serious attention to himself. I don’t. When I sit quietly, I notice how my thoughts flutter around and curious sensations float through my body. For once, I connect my body and my mind. For once, I am fully in myself and living in the moment. Not in the past and its miseries, nor in the imagined joys of the future. I am here and now, experiencing my real life.
 
I love the apocryphal story of two monks who saw a banner fluttering in the wind and one said, “The banner is moving,” and the other contested him, saying, “The wind is moving.” When they could not settle their dispute, they turned to Dajian Huineng, the eighth-century Zen master of China. Huineng settled it by simply muttering, “Your mind is moving.”

My friends have been nothing if not diverse and often fun to know.
 
“I can see that you have made a great effort to blend in,” said Michael, the first time we met.
 
I met him when I first came to the US and worked for the international center of a large company. It was a huge property on the edge of the Potomac and the office was spread over five large buildings. Each building was color coordinated, meaning the curtains, cushions, screens and dividers of a building would be the same color and different from the next building’s color. On arrival the first day, I was assigned to the blue building.
 
I was wearing a blue shirt and a navy suit, with a light blue tie. That was the occasion for Michael’s initial remark. He had the eye for an interesting detail and the wit for a sardonic comment.
 
Michael was a six-footer, with reddish hair, strong arms and twinkling eyes. While most affected a dark suit, he usually wore a sports jacket and preferred dark-brown suede shoes. He came to work with a weather-beaten black briefcase, which he claimed his wife had bought him some years ago and he dared not change.

Our backgrounds were quite different. From an affluent family in Texas, he had graduated from a local university with an engineering degree and worked eight years for a medium-size construction firm before moving to Washington for his present job. Lonely in the new city, he had struck acquaintance with the daughter of an Italian chef, who worked in her father’s restaurant as maître d'hôtel, and married her. Martina was kind and soft-spoken, and took good care of his friends, especially hungry friends like me.
 
Our work group consisted of four people, a quiet couple, who kept mostly to themselves, Michael and me. About our projects we all talked often and met in meetings at least once a day. But Michael and I worked closely together or discussed issues more often. Our views were frequently very different. For me the context was important, and I would interview the client group, for whom a product was intended, repeatedly, to find out what their concerns were. Michael had what I sardonically called the engineer’s view of things. He would study the problems the client had reported and felt he knew right away what the right product should look like. We debated spiritedly, at times ferociously. But we always ended up friends, with a better grasp of the other’s preference. I believe the clients ended up getting a better result.
 
I particularly remember the time we had to design a training program for sales people. Each session was one hour, and I felt we should aim at covering three, at most four, main points. I wanted the trainees to understand the points and retain them, through exercises and illustrations. It meant we had to distil a lot of material into essentials. Michael saw this as ‘babying’ the trainees. He wanted to throw much more stuff at them and expected them to sweat through it and master it. Both the trainees and their bosses liked the program that took shape, but they never knew the blood and tears Michael and I had to shed to reach an accord on the material we should include (or, as Michael would say, the material I wanted to ‘crazily exclude’).
 
Yet we remained steadfast friends and I kept turning up for Martina’s pasta. Having heard of the South Asian bent for rice, she would serve me variations of risotto rich with butter, onions and seafood. I discovered then that she longed for New York, especially the east Harlem area called Little Italy, where most immigrants from southern Italy live and where Martina grew up. Frustratingly, she found that Michael longed as acutely for Childress, a conservative town in northern Texas where he had spent his childhood and which Martina found singularly unattractive. Big Apple remained for her a painfully elusive dream.
 
Two years later I left the center and took assignments that took me overseas. For a while I stayed in touch with Michael; then, as I spent long years in Southeast Asia, I lost contact. Seven years passed when I returned to Washington for a spell. I called my old company, but Michael no longer worked there. He had left no forwarding address. The house he occupied had been sold. The new owner suggested I call a number in New York.
 
The number was of a Brooklyn restaurant. The person who responded was Martina’s brother, an accountant who had been running the restaurant after his father’s death. He said Martina was the sous chef now. Martina was cordial as ever but shocked me by saying that she was now divorced. She gave me Michael’s phone number in Sacramento, California.

When Michael replied the next morning, I recognized his Texan drawl even after so many years. He said he had become increasingly dissatisfied with corporate life, though his career had taken an upward trend. He had to make a change. He was not sure what he really wanted to do. The only things that he had ever done that had made him feel good were the two years he had looked after his mother when she had throat cancer and could not speak. In fact, at a later stage, she could not do anything; he did everything for her.
 
He pondered and finally took a nursing course. He worked briefly in a small hospital in Delaware. Martina had been increasingly unhappy, and Michael advised her to return to her father’s restaurant. They decided to part company. Now he works as a cardiac nurse for a large hospital group in California and feels quite content. As before, Michael was warm and gracious. He talked at length about how his life had changed. He said he was not as prosperous as before, but he was very much at peace with himself. He paused and added he was happier than ever. I believed him. I felt happy for my friend.

With a breathtaking leap, Reston, the Washington suburb where I live, has hurtled from winter into summer. Last week I wore parkas and windcheaters, as I walked around the lake, and prayed for spring. What I have got instead is this hasty visitor, an impatient summer, intruding on my dream of an equable vernal respite.
 
Granted my morning walk was late, and the usual harmony of birds was long past. My craving for an over-easy egg and a large mug of coffee delayed my saunter. When I finally sallied this morning, I was astounded. The sun was strong and the air was warm. It was decidedly summer, not spring.

Unlike most of my friends, I don’t ascertain the weather by reading the temperature on the computer or hearing it on the television. I check it by stepping outside. It gives me a chance to be surprised. Sometimes I go out on a mild afternoon, without noticing the gathering clouds, and return thoroughly drenched. But more often I step out on a nondescript morning and the sun bursts forth in all its glory and makes me happy to be alive. The ripples on the lake nearby glitter and meld as I pass, and the cool breeze feels like a caressing finger on my face.
 
It seems comical to say this, but Reston has taught me to look around me. There is so much to see. There are so many trees on both sides of the trail that I appear to receive an honor guard every time I walk. I don’t know their names; when somebody tells me, I forget them. What will I do with a generic name anyway, when the trees are so unique? Each one has a unique bark, unusual roots, unmatched shape and a fanciful set of branches. Each is beautiful in its own way, and some are truly spectacular. Nobody loves poetry as much as I do, but I quite understand Joyce Kilmer when she says,
“I think I will never see
 A poem as lovely as a tree.”
 
My brother, Pritish, was a swashbuckling reporter, and of all his remarkable interviews the one that sticks in my memory is the one he did of a quirky Bollywood celebrity. When asked about his closest friends, the star led Pritish to his garden and started introducing the trees by the eccentric but familiar names he had given them. You may not care for the kooky names he had conferred on the trees, but you cannot but be impressed by the tenderness with which he daily sang to the trees, his beloved buddies. I confess that I have begun to think of the giant firs near my home as fraternal too.
 
It was painful to find our arborist has decreed an order of execution on my neighbor’s tree. No doubt she has her reason: perhaps some arboreal disease or a perilous weakening of her roots. But it was a decision that hurt. It is a tree I have watched change through the seasons year after year. I have seen it grow taller and more luxuriant. Now to find that it had to go was not very pleasant.

​What made it uglier was the process of its removal, which I saw for the first time. A huge tree is not gone in a second; it is more like one of the cruelest forms of torture and murder. Experts explained to me that, if you bring down a massive tree, however well you control the process, it may land on a house or a garage and wreck it. The right way is to chop it off bit by bit. A crane placed an expert chopper on a high branch of the tree and he secured himself with ropes to the trunk-top. With an electric saw he cut off the highest branches and the very top of the tree. Then the crane took the man off and placed him on another side of the tree, where the branches came off one by one. Step by step the fellow expertly chopped of all the higher branches and then the lower branches. Little by little he lopped the trunk of the tree. It was execution by inches, some form of heartless killing akin to what was done in the middle ages. Finally, came the last bit: the saw neatly took out the last bit of the trunk, which was placed with the other parts in a truck, to be taken to some lumber factory. The execution was complete.
 
I was saddened by the horrid spectacle. For the first time in my life I understood the enormity of a tragedy taking place around us. Trees are vital to us humans, for they not only create oxygen for us but also absorb deadly carbon monoxide from the environment. They reduce the need for air-conditioning and use of fossil fuels for energy. Thomas Crowther of Yale has painstakingly gathered statistics from different countries and estimated that there are three trillion trees on our planet. About 400 trees for each of us. If that sounds a lot, you better remember that since the start of civilization about 12,000 years ago we have cut down about half of the world’s trees. The planet that is our home is losing 15 billion trees every year.

I am fortunate that these bright summer days I still walk among an opulence of trees. I hope that they will stay and brighten my remaining days. No, there is no better poem that a glossy-green, glorious tree.

To love is to get hurt. Anybody who has loved knows this. One who says “I haven’t been hurt” hasn’t really loved. Peter Ustinov summed it up neatly, in his delightful play Romanoff and Juliet, about the romance between the American ambassador’s daughter with the Russian ambassador’s son, by saying, “Love is hell.”

The problem is it is also heaven. There is nothing in life that compares with it. If you have once experienced the wild whirligig of love, it remains the brightest burning candle in your core. Jit, my neighbor in New Delhi, had gone to Boston as a student and promptly fallen in love with an auburn-haired Jewess in Boston. Her conservative ex-Irgun pilot brother was upset, but more insuperable proved Jit’s sophisticated but more conservative Rajput family. After two bourbons Jit, now fifty, a public sector honcho, could talk about nothing but his lost love and an ineradicable void. He knew he had once glimpsed a zenith no status or success had since let him come near.
 
An elderly, cultivated couple had once sought my help in Nepal to dissuade their daughter, a winsome doctor, from following her ‘crush,’ as they called it, and fly to the US to be with a visiting professor she had met for just two weeks in Kathmandu. Gently but firmly, I sided with the daughter, who I felt had the right to pursue her passion to the end of the earth, should it even turn out to be a chimera. To the parents’ disgust, I even gave her a visa. I cited to the perturbed parents the old saying that the whole world loves a lover – even a hard-nosed consul. In hindsight, I still believe I took the right view, though years later I found out that the relationship had not lasted.

Yes, love can end and hurt you. It can devastate you. But it devastates you more never to have experienced it. What could have been a fecund, flourishing field stays an arid desert. Why would you like to go through life without the exhilaration and excitement of what every poet writes about and every singer sings about? My friend, Fr Paul Detienne, who saw life for decades in Brussels and Kolkata, used to tell me that in a country where young men and women don’t get to see much of one another, perhaps an ‘arranged’ relationship has a greater chance of success. I countered that success did not matter a rat’s tail, for it was a business concept, and none should not give up the joy of existence for the dull peace of security.

​​Forty years ago, I was visiting my brother’s apartment in Kolkata when he showed me a calligraphic poster he had picked up at Russell Exchange, the famous antique dealer. He had loved the poetic words and wondered if I knew where they came from. He was taken aback when I said that they were from a letter sent from Turkey to Southern Greece 2000 years ago. The words had seemed very contemporary to him. I confessed I knew them only because they were in a notable scriptural book. What touched my brother touches me still, and I offer my own updated translation.

“If I can speak eloquently, even like an angel, but I do not have love, I am only a noisy talker. If I have the skill to predict the future and the knowledge to solve all mysteries, but I do not have love, I am nothing. If I have faith firm enough to move mountains, but I do not have love, I have achieved nothing. If I give all I have to the poor and suffer terrible hardship, but I do not have love, I have done nothing.
 
“Love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast. It is not proud. It does not humiliate others, or look out only for itself, or lose its temper. It keeps no record of hurts. Love finds no joy in evil but celebrates the truth. It always protects, believes and hopes. Love never gives up.
 
“Love never fails. Predictions will fail; eloquence will end in silence; knowledge will prove transient. We know things only in part and we anticipate events only in part, but when we see it all, the parts fade. When I was a child, I talked, thought and argued like a child. When I became a man, I left my childish ways behind. Still we see imperfectly, like a reflection in a mirror; in time we will see clearly. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, and others will know me fully too.
 
Only three things last: faith, hope and love. And the greatest is love.”
 
The letter writer was right. What endures after all is love, in your life or in your heart.

There was only one African student in my class, perhaps in the entire college.
 
Issay, I was told, means a person with abundant hair, and it was a name our classmate abundantly justified. He did not have dreadlocks, but his long, dark hair flowed over his shoulders. That was not the only reason he looked different from other students. While we were moving to modern shell frames or rimless spectacles, he wore ancient granny glasses. While others wore white or pastel colors, he fancied clothes that put a rainbow to shame. Moreover, his clothes never seemed to have encountered starch or an iron; they were defiantly wrinkled and had a sleeped-in look.
 
I never saw him talking to a classmate. Rather, none of the classmates ever talked to him. Most Indians are born racists anyway. The idea of bonhomie with a jet-black African was abhorrent to them. For me, I was knee-deep in student politics and talked to every potential voter. Also, my mindset was different. My father’s work brought him in contact with foreigners. We have had Jamaicans, Nigerians and Ghanaians as dinner guests and I had greatly enjoyed an African American as a house guest. I initiated a conversation with Issay.

I might have done so partly out of a realization of his friendlessness. But minutes into the conversation I recognized his independent spirit and spirited individuality. I enjoyed talking to him. With my interest in student politics, we began by talking about political issues. When I spouted some of the leftist dogma popular at the time, he smiled broadly and said he had heard those ideas in his country, Kenya. Then he briefly raised a few questions he said my ideas left unanswered. Our discussion continued, but I knew readily what he was and wasn’t. He was a maverick and kept his own counsel. And he was no pushover; he would never be easily steamrolled into a corner.
 
I knew these about Issay, but nobody else did. The reason was Issay did not take part in class discussions. He never voluntarily raised his hand. If asked, he gave the briefest response in the fewest words. Most professors took him to be uninterested in any exchange of ideas. Most students knew nothing of him, as he didn’t participate in seminars or student exchanges. His classmates didn’t invite him to informal discussions, and he didn’t join them on his own because he felt unwanted.
 
Our friendship, however, gradually developed. I took him home, where my parents treated him with affection, and, later, as they got to know him better, with deference. Mother would sometimes ask him to stay back for dinner; when he left, she would pack a sandwich and an apple ‘for breakfast.’ Issay tried to reciprocate by inviting me for a movie and a meal at a restaurant, but, with characteristic unconcern, bought expensive tickets and chose a fancy steak house. Given his meager scholarship, I realized that he was generous to the point of imprudence, and afterward I consistently resisted what he called a night on the town. I embroidered the truth and told Issay that I preferred him to come to our home because I wanted him to be better accustomed to Indian food. The kernel of truth was that my parents thought well of him and I had grown fond of his unique ways.
 
Issay graduated comfortably, though I felt peeved that his marksheet did not reflect his remarkable capacity for unusual thinking or unique ideas. We had a tea party in his tiny room in a boarding house with no more than five friends, which included a young emergency room doctor who had once attended to Issay and the old janitor of our college, who had possibly never received a moment’s attention from any other student. Then he was gone. Not a trace was left of the unusual Kenyan student who had quietly added color and vibrancy to our lives.

​Even without the swift electronic links of today, we stayed in touch. I was delighted to hear that Issay had joined the foreign service of his country and was assigned to Canada as his first post. We wrote to each other as I worked in commerce for a multinational group and he worked on commercial policy for his country. By the time I joined the foreign service of the US, he was the minister in charge of international trade of his country. I was impressed by his reputation as an unusual and incorruptible leader, who chose, at the pinnacle of his power and fame, to walk away and become the president of a university.
 
In one of his typically brief and blunt missives, he had written to me, “I have enjoyed a modest fame as the source of new ideas and the power to get a few of those ideas implemented. I know neither the fame nor the power will last. I want to work on getting others to generate ideas and equipping others to implement new ideas.” He was always a maverick, eager to make sure new ideas spring.
 
The great pity, in my view, was that my college, my friends and my professors never recognized a man who could have contributed so much to our lives and our work, perhaps even to our country. Prejudices die hard.

My assistant said breathlessly, “A Hollywood actress has come to see you.”
 
Monday morning was the busiest day at the US Consulate, with the longest line of visa seekers.
 
We have had actresses before, and, whatever the issue, their presence attracted a lot of attention and caused some disruption. I had misgivings and wanted to act quickly. I said, “Please show her in.”

The person who entered had a modest smile, but certainly the appearance of a Hollywood celebrity. She was tall and slender, her hair swept up in an elegant pile on top of her head. She looked screen-worthy with her perfect make-up and designer jewelry. She wore a long, flowing dress, simple enough to make her look regal.
 
Her first sentence was to explode our initial assumption. After I had offered her a seat and she had thanked me, she said, “I am Jean, a technology entrepreneur in hibernation.” Ah, a tech executive, with the looks of a screen goddess. I understood my assistant’s assumption. She worked for the world’s largest technology consulting group, but, she explained, she was currently on a sabbatical in this tiny Himalayan country. She traveled often and wanted to execute a Power of Attorney in favor of a Sherpa, who had once guided her on a mountain tour and was now her employee. He could then be authorized to pay her utility bills, collect her mail and do her financial chores while she was away.
 
The work was over in ten minutes, but she stayed for a cup of tea, and invited me for dinner the ensuing week before leaving. The next day I received a card telling me the place and time for dinner. 

Since the place was a ritzy downtown restaurant, I assumed a large group. When I entered, I saw Jean nowhere. I enquired and was asked to go up the stairs to the balcony area. She was sitting in a corner, looking resplendent. Next to her was an ice bucket, with three bottles of Pinot Grigio, of her favored brand. I asked about other guests and she said I was the only invitee.
 
“I thought of inviting some other friends,” she said, “but decided against it at the end. You had seemed an interesting person, and I wanted to talk with you at length.”
 
When I wondered why there weren’t any restaurant clients on the balcony area either, she told me that she had reserved the entire floor. I knew she was well heeled, but now I was getting an idea of her style.
 
She wanted to know of my background, for, she said, I didn’t look or sound like the usual US consul. I told her briefly of my émigré antecedents, then asked about her. She told me an unexpected story.
 
She was flying to Los Angeles, for her work for the technology company, when she met on the plane the chairman of the country’s largest defense contractor. Within three weeks he had proposed to her and they were married in Hawaii in seven weeks. He was an avid collector of guns and keen that she should join him in practice shooting. Barely six months after their return from honeymoon in the Caribbean, he was proudly showing her his collection and showing the unique way each gun needed to be loaded and fired. He demonstrated excitedly his favorite, a Springfield XD-S, showed how lightweight it was and how easy to load, then handed it to Jean. She had barely taken it in her hand and turned it around to see how it works, when it went off with a loud bang. The bullet went through her husband’s neck and he was instantly killed.
 
When she recovered from her shock, the large house was teeming with police and homicide detectives. They checked the guns, took prints and searched the entire home for evidence.
Jean was asked to describe the event to the investigating detective, repeatedly. She said it was an accident, but he did not believe her. He suspected that the large property they owned was the motive. He wanted her prosecuted and got her sister-in-law to be a witness to ostensible problems in the marriage. Good Heavens, how did she manage to avoid that murder rap? Jean said, “Very simple. We owned two expensive homes in Georgetown. I gave her one. The police no longer had a witness.”
 
Of course, she featured on the front page of newspapers as a “person of interest” for several days. Her life was no longer the same. She decided to take a long sabbatical from her work and go someplace she had never been, and nobody would know her or about her. She bought a first-class ticket for Nepal.

​Jean was doubtless a charmer. She was not just beautiful, she was fascinating. We became friends. We would meet every week for dinner and sometimes we went for a hike in the mountains. The hours went by in languid chatter or animated discussion. Oftentimes we differed, but somehow we relished our differences. She was a wonderful adversary to dispute or combat. Whenever our debate reached a point of heat, she would bring her face close to mine and say, in an oblique reference to her notoriety, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”
 
I would get even closer and say, “I would love to die in your hands.”