Mosaic

Copyright Disclaimer:

When I write these, they belong to me.

When you read them, they belong to you.

And perhaps one other.

Mosaic……...
The art of piecing together small items and fitting them together to form a whole.

Each small colorful tile plays a role, every piece has a specific place.

These are events of my life and they are in no particular order.

Most are mundane and need embellishment to make them withstand any interest.

They stroke my ego, make me feel slightly more important, even if it's brief.

The feeling of relevance is what we all strive for in the end, in one form or another.

This is my attempt at relevance. Hopefully it may not be my legacy.

Not all events are in their appropriate sequence and yet they somehow fit.

The art only comes together when each of them fit within each other, splendidly.

So is life……
Stories (01.25.2002)

It’s interesting how we’re influenced by a piece of writing for hours and days.
When a year later someone asks you

“What was this story about?” he asks, and you barely remember reading it.

But a part of it is still with you.

It changed you the very moment you read it.

In that action of reading, it is woven into your psyche,

Becoming a part of you.

For the rest of your life….

The Faces (11.26.2005)

I used to believe that people determined their own lives.

That we were in control, commanding our futures.

Choosing our spouses, picking professions, responsible for the decisions that shape the course of our lives.

And yet there is one force that is more powerful than our free will...

Our own conscience.

Underneath the bespoke suits, behind those closed mahogany doors, we are all ruled by the same desires.

And those desires can be raw and dark and at times deeply shameful.

The more you watch someone, the more you realize –

We are never who we say we are.

In fact, hidden underneath that thin veneer of the smile or just behind that handshake is always a lingering secret.

We might actually be someone else….

Wings (12.09.2017)

I like to tell stories.

I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the cashier says, here’s your receipt. Here's your receipt, he said.

I conjure a story for my life, for each step that I take, on some days. I say, "And so he dragged himself through the
winding street filled with laughing people, his shiny black shoes walking down the road to the office that he rather
dreaded working in."

I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a boy who didn't want to belong almost anywhere.

We didn't always live in Anne lane. Before that, we lived in fountainhead lane on the third floor, and before that, we
lived in Middleburg Heights. Before Middleburg Heights, it was Lang Road, but what I remember most is Meri Vadi
in my hometown Udvada - The tall whitewashed house with a regal-looking terrace, the mango trees around it, the
house where he belonged, but did not belong to.

I write the words down on a sheet and once there, the ghosts do not scare me so much anymore. I write it down and
the mango trees weep and say their goodbyes sometimes. They do not hold me with both arms anymore. I am no
longer a small boy who used to hug them.
One day I will pack my bags of pencils and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Meri Vadi. I am too strong for her
to hold me here forever.

One day I will go away.

Friends and neighbors will say, what happened to that boy with his crazy antics?

Where did he go with all those pencils and paper?

Why did he go off so far away? So far to those cold lands. Cold enough that they fear he will lose his warmth, that
warmth, and light he cultivated under the Indian sun…

They will not know he has gone away, only to come back.

For the ones, he left behind.

He wanted to fly for the ones who didn’t have the wings

So that he could come back with a bag full of stories to regale them from those cold distant lands...
Memories (03.21.1996)

My memory captures the shiny, pretty, easy things and lets the rest drop away.
It’s finicky.

I remember the night I met Ana. She and a common friend were driving a beat-up two-wheeler while I was standing
in the middle of the road with two sisters that had been to a music concert with me – The stud that I was.

They pulled over on the side and asked us if we needed them to get a three-wheeler auto from ahead, and the girl I
kept hearing about was suddenly real, standing right across from me.

I vaguely remember saying hello.

Her face was lit intermittently by the streetlamps.

Flash - high cheekbones, Flash - Pale skin, Flash - The eyes. Those big kind eyes.

I don’t remember every place that I have visited in my life, but I remember how she looked like, on that one night,
in the summer of 1996.
Memory is stubborn, revisionist, and fickle. Everything I’m about to tell you is subject to persuasion, bias, and
desire as much as any history is.

It is singularly one-sided.

Time molds things retroactively, usually into what we wanted them to be.

Time - the things we think it takes from us - allows us the dramas of our lives.

I’ve tried to remember everything that mattered, even those things I didn’t want to remember.

Some things have happened that I am still not ready to put on paper – yet. But for the things that I do, the attempt is
to be as faithful as possible.

Most of all, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story that is not strictly mine.
The Last Ride (03.29.2000)

It's almost 11.00 PM as everyone piles into a taxi that is racing towards the airport in traffic that just refuses to
subside even at this hour. My mother is silent, but I can almost read her worry.

What will my son do in a foreign land, what will he eat, and who will he talk to?

I am not that concerned, or maybe it hasn't struck me just yet, the enormity of my decision to move to a country not
knowing anyone or barely having any viable skills to work with.

In a foreign land, loaded with degrees and certifications obtained by hours of cramming, but almost talentless
precisely because of it - almost, except a faked veil of confidence and an uncanny ability to convince people that
their well-being lies in ensuring mine. Maybe this was a talent that was worth having.

The airport is filled with throngs of people everywhere. Each one hugging or holding and wishing their goodbyes
suddenly realizing the worth of that person just when he or she is about to go away even for a brief while.

I hug everyone muttering empty words. My younger sister is holding back tears, just almost.

I turn away as usual, before I get too soft, smile and wave goodbyes to everyone as I enter the air-conditioned foyer
of the airport for the first time, guarded by a raft of policemen totting AK47’s with their safety off, separating the
lucky ones from the not so lucky who strain their necks to see the interior.

The cool crisp air suddenly comes as a wave of relief, away from the hordes. The world feels different, safer, richer,
and more elegant on this side.

In school, we would likewise demarcate territory on the two-person benches we occupied. Even as children, we
were constantly trying to claim space. The important thing was not to get crowded off the space you happened to
possess at the moment. It was a useful skill learned at an early age, for survival in a world where every resource had
multiple claimants.

This might come in handy someday shortly.

As I sit in the flight, awe struck by the size of the plane, it dawns on me that the only airplane that I had been in
before this was the concrete replica at Juhu, the local park in the city where our mother used to take us to visit
during our summer vacations when we were kids. It was a mid-size replica made in the ’80s when plane rides were
still a novelty. Since then it had fallen into despair, used as a place to defecate many times by the homeless.

The real one is much grander, well-lighted, and smells nice. I find my seat in the middle of the four-seated row,
disappointed at not having a window seat.

I keep craning my neck to look outside the small window time and again even before the flight goes up, a bit
uncomfortable and apprehensive on the inside, but still brave-faced on the outside.

A white-skinned woman in her mid-40’s sitting by the window looks at me with amusement.

"Do you want a seat by the window?”

"Yes ma’am, I would like that", I think internally.

I nod eagerly, head rotating attempting to communicate the eagerness at the same time trying to hide it. The Indian
head-nod that is meant to convey an affirmative, but usually ends up communicating otherwise is for once
understood.

She willingly exchanges her seat.

I do too, without the realization that she has just given up her six hours of comfort as an act of kindness for this
scared dark boy, to be crammed next to a male stranger who will probably take every chance to accidentally touch
her once the lights are off.

We can leave the country, but for some of us, our hard-earned habits will continue to travel with us.

The engines are revving up and the flight takes off with a thundering sound. My fingers are slowly sliding over the
rough cloth seat which feels like rich velvet to someone like me. Scared but defiant. Just like the rough seat cloth
that has seen a thousand flights.

Looking out the window, the gravity of the situation dawns with a sudden realization that comes completely
unexpected.

The expectations of the parents who educated you and are now looking forward to a comfortable retirement.

The girl that you loved, now left behind waiting for you to come back to her

or the fate of your sister who might either stay single or get married based on the state of your finances.

Everyone is looking at their freshly recalibrated expectations in the newly polished mirror,

That is you.
Loss (12.19.2014)

She saves everything. The proud way her parents looked at her when she took her first steps.
Her school uniform, the notes she wrote to others in class while the teacher wasn’t looking.

That box filled with old photographs, the old gray sweater that belonged to her brother, her first love letter, the
locket, and the secret that it held.

Later, records of every greeting card she ever received, unfinished plans, old formulas, proposals, even if they never
saw the light of day.

He throws everything out. He doesn’t like taking pictures, and what others take, he rarely looks at. He sells off
books after reading them, scribbles in notebooks he disposes of once the pages are full.

Her past is her treasure.

His life is a hard, clear line that does not curve backward. It is scrubbed clean of the memories.

She finds solace in looking at the list of her friends on Facebook.

Asked about how many friends he had in his life; he replies - “Zero”.

He does not attach meaning to objects; favors clean surfaces and empty spaces over buying a quilt that will remind
him of that trip he took, back when everything was different to the way things are now. Neither does he believe in
souvenirs - The same ones that she collects and sticks them to her refrigerator.
They are the same, you see.

She, terrified of losing something that was once hers even if only for a moment, holds on to everything she can.

He, convinced he can’t lose what he doesn’t possess, attempts to holds on to nothing.
Trajectory (08.05.2000)

At a birthday party north of the Panhandle, my Portuguese office friend Mona’s roommate, Mary, sat down beside
me and struck up a conversation. I felt, all of a sudden, very handsome and interesting. Never in my life had I pulled
a girl across a crowded room. Later, I would learn that this was just Mary’s approach to social gatherings: as a
software marketing executive who hung out almost exclusively with people who had majored in the humanities, she
was sensitive to outsiders, predisposed to seek out and engage the person who looked most bored at a party. I had
been sitting alone on the couch, she said later, not talking to anyone, trying to keep my feet from tapping to the
tropical house playing out of someone’s phone, and staring at the bookcase: programming manuals, books about
ethical polyamory. Her’s was an easy kindness.

Mary was soft-spoken and lisped, lightly, when she pronounced the letter S. She had iron straightened hair and a
crooked, narrow smile pointed slightly upwards, towards the right. She asked questions and then asked follow-up
questions, a novelty. It took a while for me to steer the conversation over to her. What do you do, I asked, like the
esoteric Indian therapist that I faked myself to be at times. She worked in a startup, she said, but didn’t feel like
talking about it at a party. A girl who worked in tech who didn’t want to talk about tech: very endearing.

As the night slowly wound on, our talks progressed to more deeper topics. Our trajectories had been asymptotic, we
discovered. Mary and I had office friends in common—mostly software magazine editors and coders who worked
on Mission street, whom she knew from college. Her band had played a show on the lawn of my startup when it got
it’s second round of funding. I had even been in that event, I remembered, on a detour before heading back home to
Fremont. She’d been home that night, she said, cooking dinner in the back. The more we compared notes, the
stranger it seemed that we had not yet met.

We wandered into the kitchen together, in pursuit of fresh beverages. A cluster of people sat on the linoleum,
drinking wine out of jam jars.

“What is your most or least favorite trait inherited from your parents?” one of them was asking, with great
solemnity.
A man wearing a light fleece jacket with slippers leaned forward, placing his chin in his palms.

“Resilience,” he said. Everyone nodded.

“And do you feel like they see that in you?” someone else inquired with equal seriousness.

Nightmare, I thought. The prospect of engaging in therapeutic maieutics with a group of strangers seemed more
stressful than a tech interview. I could not fathom interrogating my relationship with my parents as a form of
socializing. I felt uptight, conservative, repressed, corporate by comparison—but I also felt okay with that.

I eyed the back door and then looked across the room at Mary. She nodded slightly and then started to move slowly
towards the exit. On the way, she grabbed two cans of beer and lifted her head back at me to smile.

Back in the living room, people were beginning to mobilize for karaoke: wetting down the hookah charcoal,
collecting empties, wrapping road-beers in handkerchiefs and recycled paper.

Mary and I continued talking as the party slowly paraded toward Chinatown. I felt calm around her, at home ,
somewhat familiar. The night was slightly chilly yet the spirits of the people around me were warm and bright.

Winding through Alamo Square Park, she gently took my hand and put it in her jacket pocket, holding it there as we
walked, as if it belonged there in perpetuity….
The Painting (08.24.2017)

I visited Ana’s brother’s kids in Pune. They are six and eight, little balls of irritation and delight.
A couple of days with them is enough to exhaust me. This is telling me that I am getting older at a speed that I am
not yet ready to comprehend.

They would like to play toy house with uncle Z.

We sit under a homemade tent of old sarees. They give me tea in miniature plastic cups. I drink the fake tea, eat the
air sandwiches, and burp out fake air - loudly.

We three giggle conspiratorially.

The younger one asks me to draw a dragon.

“I can’t draw, little buddy.”

He looks at me, indignant, nonplussed. He furrows his eyebrows.

“But Uncle Z. You can do anything!”

And so, I draw. The paper is small and as I draw, I find myself wishing it was bigger so I could express my
creativity a little bit better.

I am suddenly engrossed in it. Invested.

I run the color pencils and the crayons over my creation again and again as a man possessed. I conjure up the shades,
the scales, the colors breathing my vivid imagination. It feels like an eternity as they surround me and watch me
with bated breath.

And finally, I am done. I turn the painting around so he could see it.

I am nervous – as nervous as I was before the exam results came in. His reaction is fierce. His jaw drops an inch, his
eyes grow wide.

He breaks out into an evil evil grin as he looks up at me.

“More fire uncle Z!”

And there it was.

A dragon with extra fire and a dollop of added flames so hot, I streaked them with blue.

And just like that, I am now the Picasso of my creations.

Realization (08.12.1987)

I always thought we were rich when I was young.

We had a one-bedroom apartment, a small boom box, and we always had food. I did not understand why my dad
was always working either as a priest or in the bank, or why my mom was at times nervous and irritable.

I did not notice that it was always the same food, and there were rice and vegetables and very rarely some meat.

I didn't know other people got pocket money. I didn't realize a lot of things.

One day, in school, I noticed that my friends could buy ice cream candy or samosas from the local vendor who stood
outside the school.

I asked how and they said they got their money from their parents every week. They had no idea what I was talking
about.

My mom deflected the question when I asked, and my father threatened to smack me when I persisted.

I got curious. I noticed we did not go to the store to get clothes.

I always went to a tailor who had a sewing machine on the side of the road and that my clothes were always made a
couple sizes bigger than me so that they lasted for a while.

My shoes didn't have the same logos as my friends, and my pencil box was a simple Camlin metal one, not the soft
magnet encrusted one that my friends had.

My dad always wore the same pair of boots to work, and I had happily chiseled the crusted blacktop off of them, so
they looked nice over the years. I began to see that my school bag was older than most and made out of jute rather
than the fancy plastic ones with action figures.

I saw the overall quality of what we had was slightly shabbier than my classmates’ things.
It all began to make sense.

There was no “aha" moment. It was a slow dawning realization.

We were slightly lower strata of the middle class. Not absolutely, but relative to our community.

I would guess we were one loan payment or one medical catastrophe from being struck out at any point in time, but
it never felt that bad.

My mom figured out I knew before my dad did.

My demeanor didn't change, but my behavior did.

I asked for less. I didn't demand anything for the Parsi New year that season. Or any year after that I remember.

I never asked to have birthday parties at home.

I was never big on clothing trends and usually wore clothes until they fell apart or I had completely outgrown them
although I did fancy those fitting ones my friends wore, especially the long pants while I wore loose-fitting half
shorts - even in 9th grade.

I stopped stealing money for samosas at the shop close to the school.

I walked to school more and took the BEST bus, saving some coins.

I paid attention to prices when we went grocery shopping and asked for fewer big-ticket items.

I did not tell my sister, but I started to share more with her.

I accepted more invitations when my friends’ parents offered dinner or birthday parties.

I asked my friends to come over less often. I learned to repair my worn-out things, sew, and cook.

I started to turn off lights when going out and started to wonder if I would be able to provide for all of them when I
grew up.

I understood things that my parents had hidden from me. The loans they took to pay for the apartment or how my
mother stood for hours outside financial trusts and donation centers to collect scholarship money.

I adjusted. I started to help out.

To write applications for educational scholarships and even deliver them to obscure moldy offices of the Parsi trusts
managed by shriveled cranky women.

I learned how to charm them and win their approval by appearing slightly humbler than I felt within.

My parents accepted that I was helping in my way.

To my parent’s credit, they would offer to buy clothes, try to tempt me with the small toys that I had long outgrown,
and would pay attention to everything I would eyeball at the shops.

They would not let me avoid buying the schoolbooks or the one-month subscription to the local library during the
summer vacation, since they knew my great love was reading.

I still have that love.

What they fostered - It grew.

I too grew up - to be frugal, weighing the cost of items against their value, buying mostly from thrift stores, and
living just too simply, sometimes embarrassingly so, even when I could afford to splurge a little.

I learned to cherish experiences and people more than objects.

I learned that I was never truly poor in any sense.

I just lacked money.

Buses (05.06.1996)

When I have a lot on my mind I get on a B.E.S.T bus late at night and stay on it until the end of the line, then get
out and ride it all the way back.

Being in transit gives me the illusion of a suspension of time.

While on the bus, I find solace in its uneven movement.

I look out into the Bombay night and its soft glimmer and am reminded just how restorative, how indispensable
beauty is.

I eavesdrop on conversations, which tend to cast my own bright life in a different, more forgiving speckled light. My
problems suddenly look a bit softer, less troublesome.

I glance at my books and think, think, and sit with my legs up in an ambulatory setting with an ever-changing view
where I am not interrupted.

The resulting, partially accidental proclivity of my mind finally settles me.

Like a mother soothing her child with a gentle soft song.

I am weary of platitudes. I don’t need reminders of the value of life or the importance of love or our lack of control
or how change must be embraced.

I already know. I just already know.

I don't have to be anyone here, especially someone who I am not.

I play that role all day.

My role on this bus is that of an anonymous, slightly disheveled, young boy sitting with a pack of books on his lap,
without any known destination.

I am no one's friend, no one’s coworker or lover or son or brother or tenant.

I need to do nothing.

On this late night, as the pace of this city slowly comes to a crawl, I am no one here, just the weak, see-through
reflection on someone's large, dark windowpane.

The high-pitched, possibly grating, multi-language conversation another overhears, perhaps casting his own life in a
different light.

I have the most beautiful city in the world unfolding - displaying itself to me, and it’s just a bit beyond my reach
because, in reality, I am somewhere else right now.

Somewhere that exists only in the person I used to be.

Interactions (03.05.2018)

When you went to the store today, think of the cashier, the person standing behind that counter looking at you.
Imagine her day that led up to that point. Imagine standing in the bathroom mirror, curling your hair, getting ready,
perhaps talking to a friend on speaker phone.

Imagine being her, sitting in that car, driving to work, your back against the car seat, music playing as you drive to
the dead-end job that you don’t love, where you get little respect and little money.

And then, for one brief moment, you interacted with her at that store.

Were you nice to that cashier? Did you think down upon her for her menial job as the others did?

You might be taking a class. Perhaps a teacher irritated you recently. To the point that you left school muttering
curses at him.

Maybe he gave a condescending response to a question or ignored you in class…. like you never existed. Made you
feel small...

Imagine being him.

Imagine being on the life journey that led him to that point. He was probably a great student, whose parents bragged
about his grades, who cute girls came to for help on their studies.

Maybe he went on to get a master’s degree, again as a great student, an idealistic grad student at that, with big hopes
to change student’s lives, to foster a smarter generation than the one before.
And then he was probably hit with the rude awakening of public education: a stacking series of disrespectful
moments with terrible students that slow-dripped acid on your morale.

Maybe his idealism quickly broke under the weight of a micromanaging administration, which served only to make
his job more difficult.

Perhaps he had had a number of those bad moments in the classes leading up to the one where he yelled at you.

Or maybe he had a terrible fight with his wife the night before, followed by his rude supervisor hammering him
about something the following morning.

Perhaps, you were in the crosshairs at just the wrong moment.

Will you hate him for now? Would you resent him forever?

The message I need to take is probably this - I think we take too lightly the existence of others. We are all so
wrapped up in our world and worries that we forget the people around us could have easily also been us. Maybe,
they are indeed us.

A staggering array of variables lead to every interaction you have ever had with anyone.

As a whole, if you truly believe, people are good.

Believe in people. With the same fervor as you believe in yourself.

If you start to think about your antagonists as could-have-been-you's, looking back at yourself….

You’ll probably realize that both of you are, just the same.

Two small drops in a vast infinite ocean. That we call, existence.

Darkness (07.30.1995)

The moment your blood rushes down from the center of your head –
It’s like suddenly falling, something giving away underneath you. It's not like a shock, because there is a horror that
somehow you knew deep down, without realizing. The trepidation that this terrible event was always there,
obviously the whole time and you just didn’t see it coming.

As you look ahead, you know now that there is no repair to that event. There is no going back. That whatever life
you had, whatever fights you thought were so important then, now looks so naïve. That what you thought had been a
fight, was merely a warning of fate – A caution of things to come. Your biggest fear was nothing compared to this.

The weeks go past, and friends come and go. They tell you that things will soon get better if you pull yourself
through it. But it doesn't. You do everything to wake up from that bad dream but as you pinch yourself you realize
the horrible truth – That you are not in a dream and this is your new reality, a life without, and somehow, it's done.
It's happened. It's too late.

She's gone.

You go over the past, what you did, what you said - Again and again and again. What should you have done? Did
you get it wrong from the start?

You run from it, stumbling over memory rocks, the exact ones that you so desperately try to avoid.

The feeling of hatred for everyone around you multiplying, but still minuscule compared to how you feel about your
self.
Hate (08.02.1995)

As I sit on the steps of the fire temple outside late at night, I can feel the tension in the air, his eyes piercing mine
with a feeling I cannot yet quantify.

I have come to stay at this temple in Pune barely five days ago as a practicing priest for the ten-day Muktaad
ceremonies. It’s a time when the souls from the other realm visit us, they say. It is also the time when most patrons
pay a visit to the temple. For an unemployed teen down on his last dime, it’s also the time to make money.

“The head priest’s daughter who you have been talking to late at night was his ex-girlfriend”, a tattler spills out and
suddenly everything falls into place. I smile in my head. You just dislike me, my friend. You will soon learn to hate
me.

He hangs around almost everywhere I go, silently lurking just in the background. I know he is around, just behind
the periphery of my vision. He is judging me, that is clear, but it is more than that. It is as if I am under surveillance,
every move watched, every action labeled as wrong. The more he lurks, the more I sit down and talk to his ex-muse
- For hours on end. She has the most interesting stories, of boys who are soft for her and how she sees them only as
friends, a slight arrogance born out of privilege. The rest is nurtured by the constant adoration that she gets from the
starry-eyed men around her.
But I am more interested in his reaction than the girl. She is not my type – The ones who are aware of their beauty
and their effect on men are not the ones I usually go after. I am still trying to understand the extent of his dislike and
if by now, it has turned into hatred. I am aware and I understand why he dislikes me, but as he glares at me with
those flinching eyes, I feel a sense of comfort, of superiority built within me.

I try to find an ounce of hatred within me so I could hate him back with equal fervor. Instead, I find within myself a
sense of cruelty sitting side by side with a dose of pity.

He has no idea of what I have been through in the last year - The death of someone I held close, the insanity
surrounding it, and the violence in its aftermath.

I find myself slightly jealous of his simple uncomplicated life.

It’s just after dinner and he is standing across from me dropping roses in the flower vases – A daily night ritual to
prepare for the next morning’s prayers. The tables are lined in rows and each table has a glimmering silver pot filled
with fresh roses for tomorrow.

His girl is standing right next to me making some conversation that I nod at, hardly registering. I look up to him and
he immediately averts his eyes, looking away from me, yet the intense hatred glimmering. He can barely conceal it
anymore.

I smile.

This is what I was asking for.

I turn to the girl now giving her my full attention as I put a hand across her shoulders and pull her close. She smiles
and looks up to meet my eyes, slightly surprised, but my glance is somewhere else.

I smile as I let her go. My job here is just done.

Another person who hates me with such unflinching intensity -

It’s such a comforting feeling.

The Bursts (05.11.2002)

I write short vignettes.

I love the idea of a capsule, an epistle, a story that contains a universe. I like the frugality of it, the minimum space it
occupies, summarized, tight, compact within its economical space.

All my writings are a collection of brief offerings, observations, insights into myself and the other.

Sometimes I am looking outwards. At other times, the torch on awareness is diverted inwards, towards those dusty
corners of the conscience.

I will go weeks without penning anything as if a well has dried up.

No matter how deep you dig, there is nothing there to find.

The land will be parched, a mundane routine covering it like weeds growing in the kitchen garden. Yellow, dark,
unused.

And then it happens…

A burst of memory from days forgotten - triggered by an event close by. A thought explosion, an instant bridge
between that precise moment and this second.

As the stream of consciousness erupts, I step on little pockets of memory treasure that burst open and waft out their
scents. The thoughts will flow one after the other and I just have to pen them down, like a primal urge to mate.

It’s then that I sit at my desk or on the bus or the flight and I write.

I don’t write. The universe writes itself. Quickly, furiously, almost furtively, lest those thoughts escape.

And in a few quick paragraphs, I am done. It feels complete. The release feels sublime.

I may write these not exactly as they have happened.

Just as I remember them…

Permanence (05.03.2011)

These stories are about permanence and temporality - Two equally opposite and strong poles of human yearning.

Death is tragic, we feel. The death of time, also equally tragic. Another birthday, a sinking helium balloon, the slow
distortions of memory, tragedies all.

Most of us need to think these things won't happen to us, so we make choices that might root us to ourselves: we get
religion, attend seminars that promise to alter the course of our lives, get married or buy a house, have a kid. But our
acquisitions only tell us how mortal we are - glued to one entity that keeps trying to run away from all our lives -
ourselves.

But on the other hand, if we have chosen nothing - rather if we have chosen to linger always in a state of
possibility, never committing to a place, a person, or job, an argument, an idea, then how do we know who we are?

What can we point to, to account for ourselves? To make ourselves feel valid.

I will have left no impressions on the soil that I walked or the skins of the people that I touched. I would never know
what it feels like to eventually die in the same place where I was born, the knowing, that stability, that rootedness of
it all.
I am going to admit, albeit haltingly that I am terrified by sameness. The thought of not changing my life
periodically is like a lead weight on my chest.

Left to my own devices I would rather recycle my life every few years in whatever way I can.

But back when I was sixteen, before the short-haired girl with those sparkling eyes found her rich boy leaving me all
by myself, I had a wholly unfair expectation that she would be my permanence. That wherever I went, whatever
choices I would make or at times refused to make, that she would choose me permanently, over everyone else, and
keep some part of me safe and constant.

With the passing of years and the arrival of wrinkles, those inclement thoughts finally drifted away.

We end up being good friends. Good, not close. But we laugh and I ignore talking about those days. The hurt and
the possibilities - What could have been's.

She ends up becoming like the clay ball in my coat pocket –

Shaped less like herself than the curve of my hand in which I hold it,

Wearing to the grip of my fingers, grooved with the lines of my palm.

California Dreaming (01.22.2004)

I am in California for a week-long workshop on Phowa which is loosely defined as the “Transference of
consciousness at the time of death" or “enlightenment without meditation” conducted by a Tibetan veteran monk
who goes by the name - Adzom Rinpoche.

It’s almost 8 PM as the last day of the workshop, an especially intense one comes to an end.

As I am walking back from the meditation hall to my quarters excited about meeting my family back again
tomorrow, I accidentally take a wrong turn and end up in a narrow passageway leading through the kitchen and into
his room.

Two burly monks stop me just outside his room as he peeks out from behind the curtain sitting on a flat cushion on
the floor. He smiles and waves at me to come inside and pats the area on the floor next to him.

I sit down next to him, in his broken English turns his gaze towards me intently and asks,

"Who you?", he asks in broken English, peering into my eyes intently.

I interpret this as a greeting - How are you? And I start to tell him I am fine and some empty words about how this
workshop was great and...

"I asking, who you?”, he interrupts my incoherence.

"Ah, I am Z. I work as a banking analyst down near...New Hampshire. My family is in..."

He shakes his head at me disappointed.

"But me asking...who YOU?", he puts a hand on my shoulder and peers straight into my eyes, his gaze suddenly
unwavering.

He has suddenly morphed from a gentle smiling chubby man to a ferocious lion.

As I search for an answer, my mind suddenly goes blank.

Completely blank.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space that opens up and nothing is filling it at the moment.

A wave of something unknown washes over me. Something divine.

Everything is near and everything is simple. Everything is real.

Nothing else matters. It just is what it is and that is profound and that is enough.

I almost feel like laughing.

I almost want to say - “Ah, so this is it."

Deeper gratitude, an understanding, something mysteriously magical? maybe.

I just don’t know.

All I remember is the colorful katas (Triangular Tibetan flags) hanging above his bald head and the smell of incense
permeating the room.

In that instance, it feels like the knowledge of eons comes rushing at me. I am at a complete sense of peace, of rest,
as if there is nothing more to accomplish.

It feels like a long time but it's probably over in a couple of minutes.

He sits back, smiles, and then nods to himself murmuring something to Anya, his closest disciple, and assistant who
doubles up as his translator.

She stops translating, suddenly looks up at me, and nods gently, hands folded together ahead of her.

He closes his eyes, murmurs a prayer, and then rings a small bell that seems to materialize in his left hand.

We talk about how I have traveled so far on a whim and how this experience has turned out.

After a while, he turns back towards me.

"What …. you want to become?", he asks me with an inherent curiosity of a child.

"I would like to become kinder, gentler, more understanding “, My professionally attuned brain churns out an
appropriate response.

"Down", he makes a downward motion with his hands and then says something in Tibetan to Anya.

"He is saying - Distill it down."

I think for a second.

"I want to, to be satisfied."

"Little Down”, he lifts two fingers as if he is holding something.

“I want to find a meaning in life”, I find another answer.

"Down”, the plump old monk with the shiny bald head is unrelenting, his eyes drilling into me now.

"I DON'T want anything. !!”, I suddenly blurt out.

As soon as I say this, the peaceful feeling that had enveloped me a short while ago is back, like a heavy fog
descending upon the whole room.

My mind is completely blank again and yet I am aware of every single detail in that room. Not just what's happening
ahead of me and in the periphery of my vision but also in a weird way behind me.

I have no idea why I said that or even what I mean by it, but even without any translation, he understands.

"Aha! ...He hits his thigh with his right hand triumphantly as Anya looks at me with a sudden smile.

The atmosphere in the room visibly relaxes. The monks who seemed to be on an edge, exhale.

I don't understand much of it and in a couple of seconds, I am back to normal as my brain starts to churn out
thoughts back again at a rapid-fire pace.

It's the closest I have come to having an out-of-body experience and I am greedy for more.

"Go back home now but we will meet again someday......in Tibet”, Anya translates his words as he waves his hand
smiling.

I head out late into the night to head back to my quarters a walking distance away from the main building.

Tomorrow, I will be flying back home to Boston.

The mountains are casting a quiet shadow into the valley and the temperature has dropped a couple of California
degrees.

There is a whirling inside my brain and inside every whirling is a quiet, after the howl undoes itself.

As I walk slowly followed by Anya, I stop her.

"What did he tell you in Tibetan when it happened? I know you suddenly stopped translating”, I asked not expecting
an answer.

She thinks for a second and then instead opens up her arms while holding her brown, orange robes.

As we hug, she slowly turns towards my ear and whispers.

"He said to me - This is what a ripe mango about to fall from the tree looks like.

"He said, this guy was ready".

Sacred (08.12.2017)

Any place can become a sanctuary. Some of my most revealing moments have taken place in unlikely spots: the
temple in Madras where I went every Sunday in my twenties; a left turn off Santa Monica coming down the
mountains as you suddenly see the ocean open up in front of you; a chikoo tree in our village backyard where the
carefully pruned trunks of trees could be seen right next to the water well. Some of these places have made my heart
soar, which is probably the closest thing I could relate to a sacred experience.

Maybe it why we have built these structures over centuries and eons - These formal settings - The temples, churches,
mosques, or zendos—Maybe it’s where the practical, scheming, actively configuring mind is finally stopped dead in
its tracks and in that pause, a small gap opens up - Between the end of one thought and the lack of origination of the
next – Because you were, for that smallest second raptured by the beauty of your surroundings. Maybe this is where
prayer might be possible?

I take my mother one afternoon to visit an Agiary – A small Parsi fire temple buried deep in the by lanes of Navsari,
a sleepy town in central India. These are ten days of Muktaads, a sacred time when we celebrate the visits from
those souls in the other realms.

The temple was barely a few miles from our house, a distance covered in an auto-rickshaw through the bustling
streets lined with dust, cows, and busy people going about their daily work. I had vaguely known the fire temple was
there—I noticed a discreet sign on the side of a road—but I hadn’t given it much thought. That blustery winter
afternoon, I walked down the hill to the temple, which is nestled into a cove tucked behind the main road. I dropped
the Rickshaw in the visitors’ lot, then walked past what looked like the main house—a restored Indian farmstead—
to the main temple building, hoping to be alone in this deeply beautiful solitude.
But now the young temple priest was walking with me as I paid a visit. It turned out that he wanted to know more
about what America looked like, how we lived there and if the American women were as promiscuous as he read in
his magazines or if people walked with guns on the street. In return, he wanted to give me a tour.

The priest introduced me to a few of his colleagues, then began to show me around the place. There was a small
cultural hall attached to the place. We walked through one of them that was busy with some celebratory party. The
hall seemed like a nice place, warm and cozy for a small party. A place to enjoy yourself with your friends and
family. As we carefully traversed the grassy paths among the many people, we talked about what I might be able to
do for them – If a small donation in dollars from some patrons abroad was possible?

We walked across the temple, behind the gardens to the small well, and stopped at a plain wooden structure that
stood isolated from the other parts of the building, different from all the others. It was almost ancient in the
simplicity of its design.

“This is our oldest chapel,” the priest said. “Let me take you instead to the newer one we built last year.” As he
turned around, his cell phone rang, and he walked away to take a call on his cell.

Instead, I climbed the wooden steps to the austere interior of the chapel. It was slightly colder inside, the wind
whipping through it as I heard the leaves rustle outside. I figured they must be the older rooms. The chapel itself was
empty of furnishing, save for some tables lined with roses that ran around the perimeter of the room. In the middle
of the room, a fire burned in a specially designed vessel – Sticks of sandalwood lying to one side. The rustle of trees
outside when the wind picked up.

The late-afternoon sun cast its last light across the floorboards. I stood in the center of the chapel and breathed in
deeply. Although the prayers were over in the morning, the air still smelled of sandalwood and loban, a form of
sandalwood incense, but there was something else. A surprising sense of peace, wisps of smoke that rose from the
smoldering log of sandalwood on the fire, and a sacred sense of quiet interspersed by the sound of occasional wind
that in itself had its ethereal quality.

The walls didn’t meet the floor. Even the wind floating in through the windows slowed down to respect the space.
The smell of firewood, roses, and incense - Of a life lived many centuries ago. Nature would always be present in
this space. The interior and exterior worlds, seamless, existing in concert. I stood there right in the middle of the
room soaked by a pulsating state of sudden emptiness, that vast abyss of quiet solitude – Not a sense of lack of
sound but something completely different. I felt it for a second or two, perhaps another, suddenly aware of the space
between the two breaths, aware of the life I had lived before this and the one to come after. I had an image, then, of
my father at his funeral. Those four men would carry his body on a metal thatch up the hill where the few remaining
vultures were already circling. Meant to give back to nature what we took from it when we were born.

I took another deep breath as I struggled to get a grip on myself. I didn’t want to let the priest be aware of where I
had been in my head.

What was it about this place? It felt…sacred. Just standing there felt like a form of prayer.

Precisely because of its simplicity, it vibrated with all of life.

The Chronicler (01.12.2004)

Don’t be my friend.
Don’t tell me your secrets - what you might fear, what you think about your brother, how you landed that job.

Don’t tell me anything.

Don’t come by my house and laugh with your eyes closed and your mouth open. I'll watch how the lines under your
eyes crinkle and know when you are faking it.

People like me who have very little to say for themselves are usually careless with the lives of others. Occasionally.

I can be a fierce keeper or a careless spiller of your secrets - They splash easily out of the sides of my mouth.

People like me who watch others and write about the lives around them, have no ethics - If by ethics you mean
respect for the lives and secrets of others, and if by the respect you mean leaving them be and never seeing them as
fodder.

Words are the currency and the lives of others are an entire economy. How much to tell? How shall it be told?

What you know of someone else's life has one value when kept to oneself and a completely different value when
told.
One transaction when you close the door and lean against its frame and sigh and lean in close to my ear. A
completely different one when I recollect that years later and decide to put that pen to paper.

When I watch your face changing contours like the moon gliding over the water. We feel so close, those
intersections of our lives, the small transactions we exchange as your life spills into mine and mine entwined into
yours until we can no longer differentiate where yours ends and mine starts.

And then there is the ability to turn your sigh into a metaphor, our walk down the lane into a narrative with an
ending that mirrors our reflections.

That time when I sat in your house drinking coffee and your girlfriend made an adverse remark. It was subtle, very
softly delivered so, but I looked at you and saw your face crumple - ever so slightly for the briefest of moments
before you caught yourself, looked at me, and smiled again.

I saw that and, in that flash, that moment, it became mine. And you knew you saw it and it became ours. Shared.

We all want to be loved, but some of us are willing to gut our lives of secrets, their moist tender insides, red in color,
spilling out of our carcasses.

Some of us are willing to never live a moment until we have inked it.

Some of us don't know how else to live.

So, if you can help it - don’t be my friend.

I am a chronicler – and I might just betray you.

The Parent (02.01.2008)

I’ve been trying to sort out my feelings for a few days.

My father passed away this past Monday, a few days shy of his birthday.

It was a long time coming, as my father had failed kidneys several years ago.

He had signs of dementia, and afterward, he steadily lost his cognitive and motor functions.

In the past couple of weeks, my dad could no longer walk or feed himself or recognize my younger sister or me.

So, it was not exactly a surprise when it happened.

But yet, it was.

The way I felt, the way I’m feeling can’t be summed up. My feelings were a mass of conflict.

There was a relief. Relief that my father was no longer trapped inside that immobile body. Relief that he’s been
released from his twisted, broken shell.

And a selfish reprieve.

A secret gladness that I would no longer have to see my dad that way. And relief that my mother would no longer
have to make the long trips for his dialysis to the nursing home.
And guilt.

Guilt for feeling relieved. Guilt that I didn’t visit India more often after I realized he had not many days to live. That
I was too engrossed in making money.

When I first heard the news, I didn’t feel anything.

I thought it made sense that I didn’t feel any grief. We were all prepared for it. I was ready.

Except that I wasn’t.

Although the tears didn’t come, there was searing hotness in my chest. And a prickliness as if a heated piece of iron
was logged next to my chest.

And dullness. As if a giant, heavy blanket had been draped over everything.

My invisible hundred-pound blanket weighed me down and threatened to cloak everything around me.

Take some time off work, my kind-hearted manager said.

I couldn’t. Work needed me. I was lying. I needed work.

But yet I let someone else do the work, to take over my body. I watched my body operate my laptop and listened to
my voice talk on conference calls.

But it wasn’t me.

Who was this person doing things in my body?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know, but I found myself hating him. I hated him for going about his day, churning out work. I hated him
for talking and laughing in meetings. I wanted to slap him, to shake him.

I was angry.

The world still looked and worked the same as it always did.

Such selfish bastards. Nobody cared, except those fake furry eyebrowed concerns of people who wanted to know the
details.

Standing in the grocery store the other day I looked around.

Don’t you see anyone? - My dad’s not here anymore.

Can’t you see? Something is very wrong. Doesn’t anyone care?

Tonight, I go back to the old house in Andheri where we used to live many years before.

I open my dad’s cupboard, the shelf that we had left intact for several years since he never could go back to that old
house.

As I look at the small pile of his familiar shirts, it just happened. I started to mist up a bit - silently afraid someone
would hear me, judge me.

I was all alone.

My kind father, who finally got his own space, his room, after we all lived for years in a single bedroom apartment
sharing compartments in a single rusted iron Godrej cupboard.

My silly father, who kept little belongings in a small glass cup, a Swiss knife, the little pins, his watch, and his little
cash in a small black square tin box - The box from which I stole for my pocket-money to sustain my indulgences
during those lean years...

I loved him so much and I know he loved me even more.

As I sat down on the bed watching his belongings, everything turned slightly hazy.

Overriding amongst my kaleidoscope of feelings, was a sense of profound sadness.

It felt good to cry.

Connections (07.12.2015)

The world has shrunk smaller in a million ways, and we are closer to one another than we have ever been in human
history.

Only we aren't.

This observation did not require me to have an advanced degree to bring it to light, and I am most certainly not the
first one to point it out either but it’s saddening all the same.

Technology has smoothed wrinkles from many aspects of our lives, but it has also distanced us in a way we haven't
seen before.

Behind laptops and mobile phones, tables, and television screens, we have instant access to the lives and eyes of
almost everyone we have ever met, even those with whom contact would have been lost years ago if not for social
networking.

We can, in the half blink of a moment, initiate contact with nearly anyone, but still at what cost and what does this
type of contact do to us or them?

Despite our hyper-connectedness, somewhere along the way we have lost the ability to speak to people, truly speak
to them as a person, with eyes finding eyes and ears ready to listen.

As our fingers type faster, our thumbs more proficient, we have slowly lost our voices in many ways.

We have lost the ability to make any kind of genuine connection.

Standing in line at the bus terminal, I suddenly decide to turn to my left and ask the girl in the black dress with her
headphones on.

“How are you?”

She stares at me for a second, then takes off her headphones and stares at me again.

Somewhere deep within buried below the technological habits is still a person. It takes a while for it to surface.

She blinks again searching for an answer.

To speak instead of type.

“I am doing well…...and you?”

Shifting Sands (12.02.2020)

Ana and I are slowly crossing over into the late summer of our lives. Our mothers are getting old. Her mother can
barely go out anymore without help and my mother is almost seventy-four. My dad passed away some years before.
They had been together for thirty-six years, and their marriage was one of the most stable ones that I know. Note
that I used the word stable or rock-solid to describe their union, not the word happiest, which would have been my
idea of an ideal marriage. They were two completely polar opposite personalities. My father, a happy-go-lucky
individual who used to spend his salary by the 15th of every month, hung around with rich kids from Cuffe Parade
and went to parties twice a week. My mother on the other hand was a devout Parsi, an even more fanatical saver,
and a righteous person in demeanor. She married him because he was a Priest, an echelon of primary in terms of the
Parsi hierarchy of eligible mates. They were, however, partners in everything - they bought their own house soon
after marriage, had kids, and did right by us always - they've hardly ever spent a night apart.

Like most couples, my parents had their narrative: a story they've told themselves about how the rest of their life
together was going to play out, based on what's come before. In this story, if one of them was going to suffer from
poor health, it would be my mother. Thin, underweight, and with low blood pressure - She was prone to fainting
spells. My father on the other hand was strong, well-built, and loved to eat. He enjoyed a good scotch occasionally.
Some years back, my mother's blood pressure dropped so precipitously that by the time she got to the hospital, the
doctors didn't know how she could still be conscious - much less have gone herself to the emergency room.

But it turns out that my father - fit, good looking, highly independent - was the one who was the weaker link. He had
diabetes running on his side of the family which then led to Kidney failure and subsequent dialysis. He had been in
and out of the hospital numerous times. His condition was delicate. His slowly dying kidney, it seems, was not
cooperating with the narrative of their marriage. Now, he was the one who needed taking care of. Neither of them
had been expecting this.

I used to talk on the phone with them most nights - almost religiously so, especially on those days when he went for
his dialysis treatment. I could at times hear the frustration in his voice.
"I wish I could eat and drink anything I wanted," he said wistfully.
I thought of my father those nights. He was a person who was jolly at the worst of times, and how frightened and
bewildered he must have been. This wasn't what he had in mind. He was living one story, and suddenly he found
himself in another. It's a lot to ask of a sixty-year-old man, still struggling to transition into old age. It's a lot to ask
of any of us - and yet this is what happens, again and again.

We are always adapting to new circumstances. We think we've found an answer that we can carry with us for our
whole lives - and then it turns out that the questions themselves have changed. We think we've hit on something that
will ease our suffering, or protect us - a talisman, a ritual, a form of prayer - and if we are honest with ourselves, even
these keep changing. The sands of circumstances are always shifting under our feet. Acknowledging that is the first
step. Accepting it wholeheartedly, almost welcoming it is a different matter altogether.

I had once driven down to visit a colleague who had recently been divorced. His problem-solving and management
skills were beyond par. He had an ideal life - He was still relatively young, good-looking, was well-liked and
respected by all, had a large-sized house not too far from the city, a fabulously good paying job, a beautiful wife,
and three kids, almost a suburban dream you would say. Yet, to me, he always seemed slightly uncomfortable in his
skin. Those deer-in-the-headlight Christmas card pictures I would see posted on Facebook or being too involved
with work, it was as if he was trying to realign his world, get rid of something, and change everything.

In a couple of years, life did change for him. The divorce that probably took him by surprise, surprised me too. We
Indians after all, just suffer through things. Divorce, after all these years, was still a very American concept for me. I
never knew of any Indian who was divorced. I did not watch anyone go through the process. To his credit, he was
dignified, honest, and relatively open about it all - As much as he could be, of the process yet keeping his personal
life private. He talked to me about signing the house over to his spouse and moving into a smaller apartment. He
seemed almost happy about it like I would be when my wife went to India for three months with the kids. A sense of
freedom, detachment, almost abandonment. Weirdly, I knew I could relate to him.

As I sat in his house drinking tea, I watched the afternoon sunlight on his face. His son, a quiet kid playing on his
iPad would probably bear the brunt of the separation. It's always the quiet ones that you have to take extra care of.
The younger daughter was an absolute heartbreaker, very affectionate, and probably the sunshine of the entire house
as she ran around shrieking in delight. Yet there was a lingering cloud of quiet melancholy around the house that I
couldn't shake off. Just the general disarray of things that probably reflected the happenings in their lives or maybe it
was just a perception that I carried. I just didn't understand that for the longest time. We talked about things here and
there, gently steering clear of the painful topics. I had known him for many years, but our relationship had never
crossed that level where the warm intimacy of my questions and general curiosity could take over.

The little girl ran over to us, breathless from her romp with the pup. Her thin little frame leaned into me as I hugged
her tight. Her voice had forced me fully into the present. I felt it all, all at once - the way that time can slow to a near
standstill simply by existing inside it. By not pushing through it, or past it - by not wishing it away, nor trying to
capture it. It was a lesson I needed to learn over and over again: to stop and simply be. To recognize these moments
and enter them - with reverence and an unprotected heart - as if walking into a cathedral. I needed to do it because
things would change from that moment onwards to the next. They would never remain the same as they had been, at
that moment. I would never see this amazing little girl again, not for a long time. I imagine her growing up into a
girl my daughter's age and I wished she would remain happy, as happy as happy could be.

Detachment can easily be misunderstood as abandonment. Minimalism can as easily be misconstrued as miserly.
Where is that thin line that separates those two and on which side am I or my colleague residing? According to the
colegend, the Buddha was a man of twenty-nine when he left home in search of enlightenment. Until that point, he
had been protected and nurtured by his adoring parents; he grew up surrounded by wealth, beautiful things, and a
life full of ease. But as he grew up, he began to experience the pain of being human - the impermanence of the body,
the inevitability of loss, and seeing those he grew restless. He saw that happiness and beauty fades. Possessions
disintegrate, given enough time. Love was a predicate that led to suffering and grief. The Buddha - or Siddhartha, as
he was then known - longed to join the ranks of homeless ascetics and monks who lived in the forest next to the
Ganges River, all searching for what they called "the mystical happiness" or Samadhi.
Then one night it finally happened. After an evening of debauchery, he slipped away in the middle of the night -
afraid to say good-bye to his wife lest she tries to convince him to stay. After all, his son was only a few days old.
But he wanted nothing to do with his child. In fact, he gave him the Pali name Rahula, which means "fetter."

This is how the Buddha and the spiritual seekers of his day saw the ties of domesticity. Fetter: to manacle, shackle,
handcuff, bind with iron, tie in chains. Fetter - is an English verb, an active thing: to restrict, restrain, hinder, hamper,
impede, inhibit, curb, hold back. Or informally, to hog-tie. It was very clear. Having a family - loving and nurturing a
family - was a drag to a life of seeking, one that holds you back, one that refrains you from finally flapping your
wings and soaring.

Not much has changed, really, since the time of the Buddha - Not for me or my mother or my colleague. The monks
had another word for all forms of attachment: dust. As in grime, filth, smut, soot. To love someone with attachment
is to have one's legs tied in a chain. To exist in the daily world lined with possessions, large and small, is to see life
through a lens distorted by frail and tender human longings. Whether it be the Buddha sitting deep by the river deep
in the forests of Pali, my friend seemingly excited to live and seek by himself after a divorce, the Christian monks
who spent their years in small isolated rooms, me returning home with a sigh of relief after leaving my family at the
Boston airport or those Tibetan monks who left home young to reside deep inside those dark caves - We all were
looking for a semblance of what we could have called as accepted lonely - to transact our private business with the
fewest possible obstacles or the most minimum possessions.

For those who sought to ignite that holy flame in their hearts, it seemed best to do so alone.
What we can (02.18.2004)

At some indistinct point, the grey pre-dawn fades into bright white, and the sun is up, albeit invisibly behind a bank
of clouds. People—whoever they are, from whichever tribe—shake hands, hug, and say, “We have turned the year!”
We do it, too, much to the bafflement of the children, who are now immersed in a fantasy in which the stones are
dragons and they are their keepers. There is no distinct moment of release. It’s reminiscent of a missed orgasm—the
long, intent, breath-holding buildup that comes to nothing much. The significance is the same either way. Light is
coming back into the world, after months of encroaching darkness. The end of winter is near.

I stay near the entrance of the hospital early one morning, hoping that the clouds will clear and I’ll get to glimpse
that golden ball framed by standing stones. But it’s not to be. As I walk back inside, past the abandoned chairlift and
up the staircase, my father lay on his back in his dialysis chair. Snakes of infusion tubes ran from his hand collecting
blood to the dialysis machine which made a churning sound as it’s dial rotated. On the opposite wall hung
photographs of an American flag. His eyes were half-open.

His attending physician, Dr. Holmes, sat in a chair nearby, reading his chart as if it was an old copy of a Reader’s
Digest.

“Look who’s here,—it’s your son!” my mom said.

I bent down so that dad and I were face-to-face. Was he cognitive? Or not? It was hard to know. And if he was,
would he be happy to see me? I was the one who stayed far away. The one who came once a year to visit—much
worse.

“Hi, Dad,” I said softly. How are you feeling?.”

He nods a little and smiles. It could mean something. It could mean anything. I look at his frail frame and in some
ways, it reminds me of myself. Many years from now.
When I was taking my dad to the local hospital’s dialysis center during one of his visits to the US, I would stop by
Carl, a veteran being treated in the vascular surgery section. He and I had met by accident and I liked the way he
asked about my father – In a nonchalant, but genuine manner - every time. Carl talked about everything except his
time in the marines.

During the weeks, I picked up some basic information about Carl from the surrounding doctors and nurses. By six
every morning, Carl could be found indulging in his first pack of the day down by the loading dock of the hospital.
For breakfast, Carl, a diabetic, ate marshmallows and candy corn, before presenting to dialysis. The rest of his days
he spent whittling away his legs as the dry gangrene slowly ascended. We were literally watching him disappear, bit
by bit, from this world.

“Why doesn’t he stop smoking and take better care of himself?” I asked Dr. Holmes, the senior medical surgeon
who was also an Army veteran.

He looked up from scribbling something in the chart, thought for a moment, and said, “I don’t know. But I know
nobody asked him to stop smoking when they sent him overseas to defend our country. No one asked him to take
better care of himself when they sent him out to be shot at. He did what he could for us then”.

“And I’ll do what I can for him now.”

The Flying Monarchs (05.05.1990)

First, it was the monarchs.

I was young and thought that the world was finally right when the butterflies descended. They were melodramatic in
their numbers, obscene. The air was thick with them, fanning my sun-fevered skin with their wings.

Everything was at once uniformly ablaze, pulsating in the same orange and black. When I lifted an arm or kicked a
leg, I could raise a hundred flutters.

But then they began to die. Our little gravel road - the one with the grassy center and two-wheel ruts- became one
great clot of twisted insects. The bodies of the dead butterflies deflate and shrivel, their wings disintegrate from the
edges.

I remember picking up a few and tossing them in the air, willing them to twitch their wings, pretending I didn't
understand death.

Some of us are born with a great capacity for nostalgia and idealism. I was born willing myself to unknow almost
anything I learned.

Six years later it was the dogs.

Every summer a dog or two would get caught under a wheel on that gravel road. They were perfectly symmetrical
and stiff. We as boys sometimes picked up their bodies and threw them at the younger ones terrorizing them,
showing our dominance - On them as well as on death, us naive souls.
The younger ones would run screaming as we ran behind them, with our stone callused feet.

At times walking back from school when a girl was with us, we would slightly behave and sidestep them so that we
would be the "good kids".

For life to remain precious, I must have reasoned, the least scrap of it - down to their dried shriveled bodies must be
mourned. I probably thought that it would make me present to them as a soulful young man - the types that the
younger ladies would prefer, or so I thought.

I probably at least hoped that everyone else would think so too.

But in truth, I was motivated more by fear than by image.

I was afraid that I actually felt nothing, that I could have gleefully kicked their dead carcass from one end of the road
to the other just for a moment's amusement.

I was willing myself to know what all around me was: little deaths everywhere, the broken twig, the half-cracked
pigeon egg oozing its precious yellow insides.

I don't know which species died the next summer or the year after, because I wasn't there.

What I do know is that I haven't changed a bit. I am still willing myself to unknow what I know: People grow up,
one identity disintegrates as the other is forged, the wild half psychotic to the soulful gentle one and just because I
write doesn't make it so.

I am creating the most elaborate shrine to unknowing I can imagine.

No, I haven't changed a bit:

Here I am - A liar and his accomplice.

The Party (07.26.2004)

S
“ o, this is the VIP section of the VIP party?”

“There is always another room more VIP than the last one”.

“Care to smoke?”, she asks.

“No”, I say without hesitation.

We settle down on a red couch on the corner. There are people all around us, behind us, above us. It is the gathering
of the century.

She looks around, taking stock of everyone – Her eyes lighting up at every identification.

“This moment at parties, don’t you just love it?”

“See, it always happens the same way. It’s the moment everyone knows the party is coming to an end, but nobody
wants to leave. The ones who wanted to go home have gone.

“And then suddenly...This thirst to want to enjoy it, even more, emerges - A desire for something to happen”, she
says looking over my head, blowing smoke in my direction.
“You know, the whole time I was with you, I was scared shitless. I wasn’t even listening to you. I just couldn’t.

“Why?”

“Because all I could see was a girl intent on destroying herself. But I wonder…”

She cuts me off.

“You wonder if she will ever have the same opportunity for redemption as you had…”

Suddenly there is a commotion on the upper-end deck where a red curtain is laid out as a background.

A man is gesturing to a girl to come up on stage.

“Don’t be shy now, come up.”

A girl around the age of 24 reluctantly walks up to the stage.

“There she is!!!”

“Shut up. This one’s mine.”, someone shouts from the front row.

“Take a look. This is a rare gem. A real collector’s item.”

“Starting bid at one thousand dollars.”

“Twenty-five hundred”, a voice picks up from the back.

“Twenty-five hundred? Going once.”

“Three thousand”

“Three thousand. Anyone else?”

“Are they actually bidding on her”? I ask incredulously.

“Yeah”, she says without any emotion as she looks ahead at the girl on the stage. Another girl from behind holds her
waist as she waves her free hand urging the crowd for the next higher bid.

“It’s not too different from what we see in the day-to-day world. The same as likes on Facebook, but with money”.

“Thirty-five hundred”. The auction reaches a fever pitch.

“It looks like fun.”, I hear myself saying. The atmosphere and the second-hand weed smoke are taking an effect on
me.

“Going once...Twice.”

“Last chance, people”

“And sold!”

“To her own loving husband.”

Decisions (05.01.2010)

Somewhere out there, not too far away, there is a vast, gorgeous, sparkling universe full of unspeakably beautiful
things that do not organize themselves in the function of me being or not being ready.

I have vacillated hard and heavy when making even the simplest of decisions.

To do this or not to. To take this or take that.

The moment I choose one, the other starts to look in a better light.

Sometimes it’s just easier to pick one and let things fall as they may, without any specific regrets.

Everything I have in my life right now - really, everything - arrived when I had other plans.

I turned things down, walked away, and ultimately found myself walking back and saying yes not because I was
ready, but because those things were here.

I don't worry about being ready anymore or try to not heave about choosing one or the other.
I think it does not even make sense to deliberate too heavily on some decision.

Your decision is not earth-shattering in the larger scheme of things, even for your existence.

You will end up going one way or the other.

Either of which you pick has already been decided by the universe – Specifically for you and will work out fine –
Just the way it was meant to be.

The universe does not care about your plans or the amazing thought process you put behind your so very important
decisions.

A specific field of study, the next big career move, dating, marrying, divorcing,

Your life will end up fully well just the way it is. It is not that complicated.

Is something right in front of you, offering itself to you?

Do you recognize it as valuable?

Take it. Sort yourself out later.

If not, let it be and move ahead - In peace with yourself & more importantly, without regrets.

Yeah, this is probably terrible 2c. Easier said than done.

But maybe, this is just how life happens.

Appreciation (10.02.2012)

A
" re you sure you want to pass judgment this early before the week is over?", I blurt out slightly red in face and we
both laugh.

I am in London running a weeklong workshop on a new retail banking software that we gave developed and are now
selling to one of the biggest banks in London.

There are around 15 people and I am taking questions from multiple sides and working through them. The fact that I
flew in on the red-eye last night is starting to catch up with me slightly but I am feeling confident.

As usual, I have Bryan, our account executive sitting in one corner watching the audience like a hawk. In our
company we always operate in two man teams - One running the show while the other checks the temperature. In a
session where a make or break could cost the company 5 to 6 million in revenue, this is an easy decision.

Today is especially critical as the CTO of the bank is in the audience too. Chris asks a lot of questions, some
uncomfortably so while I try to answer those patiently.

As I start to get a feel for him, I switch from the PowerPoint to the whiteboard which is soon littered with boxes and
arrows of red and green.
I am not sure how well its received or the fact that we left the slides midway and never got to them as my manager
would have wanted.

As we break up for lunchtime, a number of people linger around to talk to him. He wraps up and then comes up to
me.

"Care to walk for a bit?", he seems affable but the British stiff upper lip could go either way.

As we walk , I realize he is taking me to his office and gently closes the door. I am starting to dread this interaction.

The room is huge, oak panels everywhere and papers strewn around all over. I gingerly step over them as we move
to the chair.

"You know what?....", he starts to say and then pauses for a second to collect his thoughts.

"I have met a ton of vendors and we go through them like napkins", he says as we sit down on two adjacent chairs
next to his office table. This conversation has not started on a good note.

"But, you did something that I have never seen before. You dropped the formal slide deck and started scribbling.
That is f****ing amazing". The British coolness has evaporated in his brief serenade.

"Are you sure you want to pass judgment this early before the week is over?", I say as we both laugh over it.

We talk about here and there for a bit. Then he looks at the clock behind me and I know when to cash in my chips. I
shake his hand, thank him and we wrap up.

As I walk back with a warm glow in my heart, I see Bryan coming down the other corner. Before I could relate to
him the happenings, he turns towards me, hands in pocket.

"I wish we could have done this slightly differently. We should have stuck to our presentation. It covered
everything"

As I am about to say something, he fires off another salvo.

"Is Nicole coming in tonight for tomorrow's workshop?". The verbiage is meant to convey that it would be better to
have someone more senior taking up tomorrow, Nicole being my direct manager.

"No. I am planning to run this all the way through", I say and then relay the recent conversation.

“Really?....Damn!”, he asks incredulous, but also hugely relieved at the same time, A newfound confidence in the
brown boy's capability to handle the white armies and keep them at bay.

He walks away and I get a feeling as if someone just questioned the reason for my own existence. What if I had not
had that conversation? Would I exist then tomorrow morning doing what I was planning on doing?
If someone asked me if I truly existed, how would I go about proving it?

The question and the tone suggested I might be the figment of someone’s imagination.

I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I am.

Clairvoyance (05.25.2006)

“May,” he says again, tilting his head as he looks at me. The gesture is supposed to be a prompt for me to finally
realize what I have been missing all along, to say Yes, of course, that’s it!

Instead, I stare at him, blankly.

Just weeks before she passed away, Hetali and I had visited an astrologer purely on a whim. It was her birthday, we
were walking back from Jogeshwari, an upcoming suburb in Bombay after eating some street food and had stopped
at a small tin-roofed place where an Indian pandit had taken root.

“Come, let’s go in. Not much can go wrong”, she had said smiling.

The pandit was a big round-bellied old man who sat behind a chair and made up charts based on the birth dates we
gave him — 5th November for her and 14th September for mine. He talked about me for a while in generic tones
which meant nothing much. When it came to hers, he drew lines and charted and then suddenly went silent. We
were young and didn’t think much of it as we took out a fifty rupee note to pay him. He refused and ushered us out. I
learnt years later that it was considered inauspicious to take money from someone they knew was about to pass
away. However, at that time, an Indian refusing to accept money was an anomaly for us,. We chalked it up to
eccentricity and stepped back into the sunlight on that bright Monday afternoon.

This was a detail I’ve never been able to let go of. Beyond maintaining a journal covered with stickers and her name
written on the lower right corner of the front, in her unique cursive style of H, it was one of the few clues I had about
the contours of her last days. To enter that world, I had asked myself the same questions: How was she going about
her day-to-day life beyond what I knew? What had she been thinking?

My friend Todd knew a medium in the enclaves of Canoga Heights, Ohio, and offered to make an appointment for
us to visit his condo. I was willing to pay the $40 “just for the experience,” I said, but I decided I didn’t want him to
know anything about me. I told Todd it was because of my skepticism, that I suspected the medium would use the
internet to gather information before our meeting, so we agreed that he would arrange the appointment. As an added
precaution, we also agreed to give him just my first name when we meet. When the psychic opened the door at the
appointed time, I introduced myself as “Zack.”

The first thing I noticed was his accent — A slight tinge of British smoothed over by years of living in the US. He
offered to make me tea. He was making some for himself, he said. I read his offer as a way for him to learn some
things about me, an attempt to get me chatting before the session began. I said very little, discussing the weather —
already cool for early summer — and sat down at the other side of his desk. The condo seemed new and sparsely
decorated. There was a large computer monitor on the desk and I noted that it was turned off the screen dark. I
angled my body toward him. I was determined to be unreadable, or readable only for misdirection, and to give him
as little as possible, or nothing at all. I was hiding the reason I had come.

After some moments, he spoke. “I see some sort of older presence. Did you have guardians besides the parents in
your life?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know if they are still alive or not . . .” He paused, his words trailing off.

“They are,” I said lightly, adding nothing more. I watched him with a look of mild anticipation as if to say, And? He
had a yellow legal pad in front of him on which he began jotting things down, dates and numbers, phrases that, he
said, he was beginning to hear as the dead sidle up to him. I thought instead that he must realize he’d already
reached a dead end and was considering a new approach. I was reading the medium, too, using what I thought must
be a similar methodology. He was perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, white. His curly hair, worn on the longer
side, was gray.

Deep in my head, I rolled my eyes. This wasn’t going to work for me, this baseless psych war. I started wondering
how long I had been sitting there, and how much longer this process was going to take. Would he be insulted if I got
up and left? I was twitchy, impatient. Disappointed, too. It was rare that I allowed myself such a self-indulgent, not
to mention expensive, hour.

“I see a grandmother-like figure stepping up. She was very close to you?”

“Yes, she was.” He had a fifty-fifty shot of getting that right.

“There is a young curly-haired woman next to her”

“It’s my aunt. She passed away just after my grandmother”, I volunteered information this time. It was necessary
that I say something occasionally to keep the reading going, so I decided to tell him that.

The trembling in his hands grew more pronounced. He sighed.

My reticence left him with only guesswork, and the details he got wrong served only to harden my skepticism. I
must have been smirking a bit when he said that not only am I “very clever,” but that I “hid my thought processes
well.”

Another tactic: now he was writing the word May.

“I keep getting something about May,” he said, “a month, someone in your family?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“May, Eleventh of May. I don’t know — just think about it,” he said again. It was not the birth month of someone in
my family. It was the month of May, and he was shrewdly surmising the month must hold some significance for me
since it was the very month, I had come to see him.

“Someone is coming through, but it’s a little distant and I’m having a hard time hearing. Sometimes they don’t step
close enough immediately, but someone that you lost many years ago has”.

I was silent now. Slightly taut.

“A female presence. She wants you to know how much she misses you and is proud of what you have become.”
When he told me this, I couldn’t stop the veil from falling away from my face. In my rational mind, I knew this was
nothing the medium had ascertained from speaking with me, but it was true, nonetheless. It was the response he’d
been waiting for. This, the medium must have deduced, is why I have come. There were usually common themes,
archetypal themes, in families. This was the province of the medium: the living want some kind of resolution, the
medium assures us, or forgiveness, or peace. They want us to know they are ok, to find our own peace.

“May 11th,” he said again, tilting his head as he looked at me. The gesture is a prompt for me to finally realize what
I have been missing all along, to say Yes, of course! — and still, I didn’t.

There was nothing left for him to do but wind down our session.

“Your friend is saying you’ll want to come back and do this again; you’ll need to.”

When I left, I tried not to hide my disappointment. I didn’t tell him that for all my overt display of skepticism I
would have given anything for a message from my friend, that I wanted more than anything for the medium’s claims
to contact the dead to be real.

Instead, I had only two options: to believe he was a fraud or to believe that, after all these years, my friend would
not emerge to communicate with me: that she’d have nothing to say.

As I walked back to my car, I made a mental note of our conversation including the date and time down to the last
second. It was a habit I have cultivated many years ago to etch certain events into my memory. I looked at the watch
reciting the date and time: 05–11–2000; 3:28:56

Then I heard it, what he’d been saying over and over earlier: May, May, May 11th. That’s when it hit me; he was an
American and so if I wrote the date numerically, as he might, in his calendar of appointments, it might appear as 5–
11. Americans would read that as May 11, but the Indian connotation was 11–5, the 5th of November, which was
her birthday.

It hit me so hard I dropped the keys. Had I been so resistant that I didn’t make room for her to speak? Had she found
another way to let me know she was there?

I turned the car back around, parked, and walked with hurried steps back to the condo from where I had come. The
door was still open just as I had left it.

He looked up when I entered as if he was expecting me.

“Do you have time to talk?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Let’s go sit outside.”

He stood, then ushered me into the back. We passed rows of desks, most of them empty. A set of French doors led to
a small, well-tended garden. I sat in a wrought-iron chair across a table from him. The yellow legal pad with
scribbles sat on the table between us.

“I think…,” I began, took a deep breath, and started again.

“I think I might want to reconsider what you had mentioned before. Is it ok if I look at the notes?”

He nodded solemnly.

I scanned the legal pad filled with vague musings, numerical notations, and nothing in particular before my eyes
landed on something intimately familiar, the cursive H at the bottom of the right corner — Just where the page
turned.

Birds chirped in the garden. In the distance, a siren. The metallic hiss of a city bus pulling into its stop. Urban
sounds — as familiar to me as the crows and car horns of my own suburban childhood. My mind wanted out at that
very moment. And it wanted out now. My awareness of this was immediate and stunning in its clarity.

“Her presence was very strong before she left, but she is gone now…”, he hesitated for a second before lifting his
head.

“She told me to tell you that …. it’s time to forgive yourself”, his voice was almost a whisper.

I held the side of the table for support as I sat.

“Let’s say a prayer,” he said.

Tears rolled down the psychic’s cheeks. He made no attempt to wipe them away.

He reached across the table — this stranger — and held my hand.

Fistful of Rice (12.24.1993)

It’s that festive time before Christmas.

India does not celebrate Christmas as the European countries and North America does, but it’s still a season of
festivities and happy tidings all around. I see people buying little electric lamps in the markets or bakeries selling the
famous pound cake stuffed with walnuts, which in our childhood we yearned for but rarely ever got to eat.

The smell of the cake from the neighborhood shop takes me back to the time when I used to sit outside that Irani
cake shop just ogling at them through the pane and inhaling the perfume that wafted through. It still brings back
those memories every time I walk around the neighborhood blocks of Andheri station.

I talk to Ramabai when she has a free moment. She works as day labor working on the new wing of my college
building. I gesture to share my apple and a vada pav (Indian burger) and she refuses with the shake of her head.
People might be poor, but they are taught to be on alert, to look out for an agenda.

In India, nobody does anything for anyone without having a motive, we are taught. It’s an integral thought process
and I understand that. I break my vada pav into half and start to eat it. I hold the half and eat the remainder,
nonchalantly.

She watches me eat first and then smiles and wipes her hand against her old saree taking the food and also the apple
which she tucks carefully in the fold of her little cloth bag. It’s now safe to eat the half sandwich.
A toddler, around 8 years walks by and clings to her watching eagerly. It’s her son Munna. His face is covered with
dirt and caked with mud; he looks like an apparition in hindsight. She sighs and splits the half vada pav into a further
half giving the bigger piece to him.

She is hungry too and needs some of it, but the motherly instincts always win out in the end.

Sitting down on a rock, she gives me a lesson on how to sleep well while still being hungry. Half the week they can
eat rice with either vegetables or lentils. The other half, it’s just rice boiled with salt and turmeric, and then there are
five to six days a month when there is no food at all, and they have little to do except just take it.

On these desolate days each month when there is no grain in the house and no work to be found, the entire family
sets out in search of food. They scour the harvested fields of the landlords with their brooms and bamboo trays to
gather the gleanings of stray grains of wheat and paddy that may have fallen unnoticed when reaping.

The irony of life is open in itself. Sometimes the entire set of misfortunes are handled by the less fortunate. Fate has
never claimed a sense of justice.

The apple she saves for her younger daughter.

“I am a bit sadder on those days”, the 10-year-old Munna says matter of fact, when his mother describes those days
when there is no food.

“If there is any leftover food on such days, we give it to our children adding a lot of water to create enough to fill
their stomachs.” It’s a trick that the poor learn early on, drinking lots of water before a meal so that it feels as if you
had eaten a stomach full.

As she speaks, she mistakes the dismay in my eyes – in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp – for disbelief.

“We are facing the south Saab(sir), so we are speaking the truth,” she says with a glowering intensity.

I recall using a similar technique during my hostel days when I would have nothing for breakfast except maybe a
day-old banana, picked up from the mess kitchen overnight, which I used to chew very slowly, savoring it but also
creating this illusion in my head that I was having a lot to eat. There were a few times that I even ate up the skin. It
was bitter to taste so the trick was to eat it first immediately followed by the sweet-tasting banana.

Hunger teaches lessons in survival that are learned fast and heavy, remaining ingrained in your psyche for a lifetime
to come.

I often visit the flora fountain area where the vendors sell old books amidst the gleaming tall buildings. It’s the
perfect blend of old and new, rich and the not so rich all commingled into a single area of existence. I meet Ramesh
who is a bookseller. He is knowledgeable about books, latest trends, New York bestselling list, and the likes,
something he has cultivated by himself in his spare time.

Ramesh often goes to the Jehangir Art Gallery and wanders about the paintings. He says he likes the Sabhawala
exhibition, although I suspect he’s been taught to, by his illustrious friends in the poets’ salon.

Vijay pays Ramesh 50 rupees a day. The money starts going first thing in the morning when he has to pay 1 rupee to
go to the toilet in a nearby facility and 5 rupees to bathe. The owner had suggested a nearby dhaba that serves lunch
for 17 rupees, but Ramesh can fill his stomach with some roti’s, for 6.5 rupees, and 2 rupees for bananas. Dinner is
14 rupees in a nearby “hotel,” rotis and some vegetables.

“I’m lucky I’m vegetarian, otherwise it would cost forty rupees or more.”
So, miraculously, Ramesh manages to save from his salary; he has disposable income. He uses it to buy books, from
pavement stalls all over the city.

“Sir,” he begins, one day, “there is a need for some money.”

“How much?” I ask, suddenly wary.

“Two hundred fifty.”

It is nothing, really—just $7—but by giving him money at this juncture, I feel like I am directly influencing the
course of his life, the course of the story.

Instead, I buy him 500 rupees’ worth of meals at the Samovar restaurant in the Jehangir Art Gallery. That entitles
him to fifteen good lunches of rice and vegetable curry.

“I won’t give you cash”, I tell him.

“I won’t take pity either,” he had said to me.

One afternoon when it’s blazing hot outside, I take him to Mahanaaz a nearby sandwich café. He has never been to
an air-conditioned seating in the restaurant before.

He is in awe as he mutters - “Air-conditioned” again and again.

I watch the way he eats his cheese sandwich. First, he lets it lie on the plate in front of him. Then he eats one quarter
at a time, slowly.

As long as a little bit of the sandwich is left on the plate in front of him, he thinks we won’t be hassled by the waiters
to leave. So, he balances his hunger with the need to stay in a shaded place in the afternoon. It is a precise
calculation: how much of the sandwich will he allow himself to eat, at what pace.

This is what life is for the poor. One filled with hardships but all the more with regret tinged with a sense of
hopelessness.

Regret at things that they could have or couldn’t have done, regret at what life was or could have been.

Hopelessness, that nothing they do would change the course of their future.

That they are buried too deep to crawl out, not in this lifetime.

Speaking of lifetimes, it is a very important custom among the Madiga caste to tie some grains of rice to the edge of
the sari of a woman who dies before she is buried in an unmarked grave.

Ramesh’s greatest regret was that when his mother GajaLaxmi died, there was no rice in the house. It’s considered
inauspicious for neighbors to donate grains for funeral rights, lest someone pass away in their own home.
So GajaLaxmi had to be buried as she had lived, without a shred of solace or even a shadow of dignity.

Without even a fistful of rice…...

Slingshot (09.28.2016)

I know.
Someone says something awful to you and you just stand there, powerless and hurt.

Then, later that day or the next it comes to you: the just-right poison cocktail of words you should have said to
deliver the perfect knock-out verbal punch.

Except that if someone says something mean to me and I think of a lethal slingshot retort and hurl it at them just in
time, I feel terrible afterward.

Except that whenever I have been in possession of the sought-after perfect comeback, it made me feel worse rather
than better.
Working on developing them exercises a nasty side of me I would rather never nurture. Why would I want to get
proficient at being cruel?

Just because someone hurts you doesn't mean you have to hurt yourself too.

You can't regret things you didn’t say.

You don't need to apologize or forgive yourself for something you refrained from doing.

You can't feel small if you never deliberately cut yourself down.

This is how I discovered that when things get ugly, the most powerful thing to say is nothing.
Evolution (02.19.2021)

There is a change in the air. Early morning, when I open the French window to my apartment balcony, it billows
into the hall, crisp, cold, and fresh as mint. I stand on the windowsill blowing white clouds of breath. Winter has
decorated my ordinary life. Some days everything sparkles, glamorizing the lids of bins and the tarmac patchwork of
the pavements. Frost etches mysterious patterns on the roof of our car, and the puddles that collect next to it are crisp
with ice.

My wife and kids have taken out their winter coats. There are suddenly those big black winter shoes in our shoe bin,
and I feel like I am not ready to see them just yet. My neighbor’s dog walks outside tepidly, slightly slower in gait
than usual. The cats on someone’s windowsill look longingly outside, their fur bristling slightly against the cold of
the pane. They are suddenly present in the house, having avoided the humans all summer when the warm nights
invited adventure. Just like us, they now crave comfy cushions and the occasional fire.

I’m changing, too. I drive down to the Rye beach close by a little more often than I would like to. This is the season
when I start to believe that the beach is all mine, miles of unadorned solitude that I can drive along without
encountering another soul. Nobody else seems to enjoy the cold as much as I do. Winter is the best season for
walking, as long as you can withstand a little earache. A good frost picks out every blade of grass, the jagged edge
of every leaf. The cold renders everything exquisite, etched cleanly – like the outlines of a good painting.

The reeds have dried to a rustling beige, and the bare trees reveal a bright green woodpecker flitting between
branches. The tide is higher than usual, and the marsh is transformed into a low, silvery sea. There are pheasants,
too, and a peregrine being mobbed by crows. Amid the transformation of winter—the unwelcome change—is an
abundance of life.
Transformation is the business of winter. In certain mythology, there exists a deity known as the Alcyone. She takes
human form to rule the winter months. She brings along with her the winds and cold weather. Every step she takes
changes the land. She has rocks in her basket that when dropped created mountains while the hammer she wielded
when hit created valleys. Her reign, they say, lasts only until the end of April when Zephyrus takes over and turns
Alcyone to dust. They are the two faces of the same entity: The wisdom of winter, the vitality, and youth of summer.

As I walk along the plank close to the beach, I see a frozen seagull, the dead crab, and the carcass of the fallen
squirrels. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like water in a flowing river. We have seasons when we flourish
and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones.

As a teenager, I used to hang around a homeless saint in the village around Sangamner. It was said that at nineteen
he fell into a coma after contracting bacterial meningitis. When he woke up in his hut, he was paralyzed unable to
drink even a glass of water. But something had happened in the intervening hours, which made it possible to endure
the months of recovery that followed. He had returned to everyday life knowing that he had seen something else: he
was no longer afraid of death, which now seemed to him a benign process. Whenever I used to speak to him, he
would laugh and ignore me. Sitting with him, I used to get the sense that he had more contact with the cycles of life
than the rest of the people. He knew how it felt to cast off old skin. He knew when it was time to grow a new one.

The dropping of leaves by trees is called abscission. It occurs on the cusp between autumn and winter, as part of an
arc of growth, maturity, and renewal. But at the end of the summer, as the days grow shorter and the temperature
falls, trees stop making food. As the chlorophyll begins to break down it reveals underneath it other colors that were
always present in the leaf, but which were masked by the abundance of green pigment: oranges and yellows, the
slightly dark purples.

Even as the leaves are falling, the buds of next year are already coming into existence. Most trees produce their buds
in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales.
The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing
up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing
essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a
source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with
it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.

A hospital creates a particular kind of winter. I roam the halls of Dartmouth Hitchcock looking around with a
certain sense of faith – A faith that they, whoever they are, knew all the answers. That they can save my daughter. I
walk around the polished corridors, the lingering smell of disinfectant. The orderly universe of the hospital helps us
to form our abscission zone, that hardening off of an old life, ready to shed its duties and expectations.

Eventually, I find myself in a room with a weary-looking nurse who tells me that I need to wait outside while they
perform a colonoscopy on my daughter. She holds within herself a maze of inflammations, a wonderland of
malabsorption. Some days later we are back at home, the world of hospitals far behind us, but whose silhouette
always lingering in the background. Quicker than I ever hoped, she lands at the other side of her illness: slightly
battle-scarred, slightly hungrier, and a little wiser.

I feel as though I, too, have shed some leaves: those last shreds of belief in my youthful carelessness, when I could
do anything, had nobody to care about and come back from a large swath of grief unscathed. Parenting has proved
itself to be different. It at times feels like a winter that is asking me to be more careful with my energies and to rest
awhile until spring.

Look at me - It whispers silently. In the womb of death, there is a seed of life.

The Valley (11.25.2000)

Mona and Mary lived on the second floor of a former fire station in Fremont, probably a couple miles away from
my apartment, on a block-long street wedged between two main drags that represented, in near-Dickensian fashion,
the city’s socioeconomic cleft. In one direction was a chaotic plaza—a convocation of commuters, rose vendors and
soft-eyed drunks. On the other side was Mowry Street, a living diorama of gorgeous new homes overlooking the
valley.

The apartment was cozy and welcoming, full of strange artifacts: a bookcase hammered on the wall at a slight angle,
a walk-in closet slightly out of proportion with the room that had shoes and bras strewn at random. In the bathroom,
a half-melted vanilla candle lined the edge of the tub. Mona was climbing the management ladder at the startup
where I worked and kept impossible hours, appearing only occasionally to make generous pots of soup or to do the
laundry. It seemed like the sort of place where the people would share towels, laying claim to whichever smelled
least like mildew, and it was. I loved being there. It was on any given day two shades better than my roach infested
apartment housing six roommates.

I had met Mary at a random office party in which Mona had dragged her along and we got along well. She worked
in a biotech firm as a research analyst and I was fresh off the boat – My third month in this country and just the
second in San Francisco. She would talk about everything – except her work. In a city where bars and coffee shops
and parties were trade-secret word clouds, this was a regionally specific litmus test. But even when we were slightly
drunk, or sitting under the moonlight overlooking the valley, Mary kept company secrets. It was easy to trust her.

One night we three traveled to a Michelin-starred restaurant, which her biotech startup had bought out for the night.
Silent and dark-suited waiters served us almond crusted chicken salad , seared black sea bass and lobster pot pie
paired with bottles of wine. The bar was open. People made out with their dates in a photo booth, unaware that it
was digital—the photos would all be sent to the operations manager the next morning. Energy shots and lines of
cocaine materialized in the bathroom. They danced against the glass windows of the restaurant—napkins strewn on
the tables, shoes torn off—while I shuffled my feet in a corner watching them, avoiding eye contact with the
waitstaff.

Eventually people spilled out onto the sidewalk to smoke. I took a restroom break and found Mona sitting alone,
savoring her dessert.

“This is one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had in my life,” she said, scraping her spoon along the edge of
the plate. Desserts had been placed carefully in front of every setting, and they sat uneaten, discarded. I felt grateful
for Mona, and ashamed. I had slipped so easily into a smug sense of belonging with these first world citizenry. I’d
been so busy eating, drinking, chatting, performing my entitlement, that I hadn’t even tasted the dessert.

Eventually we were buzzed enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves: the people we were
on weekends, the people we had been for years. We talked about where we’d once imagined ourselves at this stage.
More stable, less anxious. More in control. We wanted power, too. Finally , they threw the dead cigarettes on the
sidewalk and ground them out under their toes. Cabs were summoned and we dispersed, off to terrorize sleeping
roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later, Mona and I were back in
the office, slurping down hot chocolate, running out for the free breakfast sandwiches. Tweaking mediocre
Javascript code and writing half hearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the cubicles.

To celebrate his birthday, the CEO of our startup Dennis threw a small party at a campsite, technically a horse
camp, near Muir Woods. The following weekend, Mary and I arrived at the horse camp to find a group of coders in
outdoor apparel assembling, somewhat inefficiently, a trough of salad. Several slabs of salmon lay on the grill. The
corrals were empty. “Ah, you know Dennis,” said a cheerful entrepreneur in a fleece vest, when I inquired about the
salmon. “He is semi vegetarian.”

Mary fell into conversation with an engineer she knew, a designer of conceptual, experimental user interfaces. It was
rare for me to hear him talk about computer science. He was so reticent when it came to his job that I easily forgot
how much he loved the work, the puzzles, the magic of it. I sat on a picnic table and tried to insinuate myself into a
conversation between two people discussing the joys of interface coding.

I had not spent a ton of time with Dennis around other people, but I had spent enough to know I was an outlier in his
social circle, which was largely composed of entrepreneurs, and technologists. I often felt embarrassed to tell this
crowd that I had just come from India and barely knew how to code, then felt angry about my embarrassment. It did
not help that whenever I felt insecure, I tended to get defensive, or quiet, or in over my head. I was always sulking
around most of them.
The mood was upbeat and polite. I managed to behave myself. Conversation rose and died down. When Dennis
spoke, people outside of his immediate radius fell quiet and listened, like he was an oracle. Then again, I wanted to
listen, too.

The salmon came off the grill and we incorporated it into the salad, gathering around the picnic tables to eat. Dennis
did not even touch it. “The maladies of having experienced too much…” Mary said.

After a while, someone brought out a small cake and a candle. We sang “Happy Birthday” while Dennis turned
pink. “Well then,” he said, when the singing was over and conversation did not resume. “Shall we put out the fire?”
Mary suggested we leave it burning. We could set up our tents, then drink whiskey and talk until it got too late or
too cold. This was my first experience of camping and also my favorite part as I had seen in the American movies:
everyone swapping intimacies and confidences, leaning into the evening as time slowed. I was excited for it, eager
to find common ground and see everyone relax a little bit. Dennis seemed confused.

I looked around the group. It became very clear, very quickly, that the plan had never been to camp out. Mary was
alone in having brought a tent. Within half an hour, the party had been disassembled and packed into paper bags, the
grills scraped, the recycling sorted. People filtered out into the night in carpool configurations, carrying leftovers and
coolers. Flashlight beams floated out into the road and disappeared around a curve. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock.

“I guess we have the place to ourselves,” Mary said, looking around. It suddenly seemed ridiculous that we should
be camping out by ourselves in the middle of an outdoor stable in Marin. The site felt rough, stotically large for just
us. The lights down in the valley glimmered and there was a slight hint of mist in the air. I wondered if park rangers
might come through, and if so, whether we would be on the hook. Would we be fined? It was state land. Why had I
thought we were all going to sleep there, like people with nothing to do the next day? Part of me felt bad for
assuming that we would camp out that night. Part of me felt indignant. I didn’t want to feel ashamed about being
unproductive, for wanting to drink whiskey and make up fake constellations.

We should just go back, I said. Mary shook her head—she’d downed a couple of scotch, and I didn’t know how to
drive a stick. The roads were unlit and winding. We set up the tent. In fact, she set it up while I attempted to
help,unsuccessfully. We sat outside in two foldable chairs, listening to the redwoods bend in the wind. The tent
ground looked out across a valley: a bowl of fog. The landscape dripped.

Mary reached deep into her pocket and pulled out a small pill. She cut half of it with her teeth and dropped the other
half into the bottle of orange juice that lay in her lap. As the hour passed by, we drank the bottle and lay on the grass
listening to the cottony echoes of the older couple in the tent next to us. I felt an aching regret about what I had just
attempted, but I felt bold in the moment, almost reckless as I waited while my brain was artificially flooded with
serotonin. She put on a Sneaker Pimps album and we shared revelations about our families. I told Mary my worst
secrets and felt content. I didn’t feel high, or ecstatic—just like myself, but the good parts. My own self, but less
anxious, less afraid. I wanted to replicate the experience with everyone I loved. I wanted to spread the joy, soak in
this newfound warmth of a feeling of deep love. I had never felt more happy or content than at this moment.

Life existed in that moment just as it was - Clear in its simplicity. I thought about the arc of my life so far, all the
way from my first memories down to this moment as my feet touched the edge of the chair that sat empty next to
me. Nothing seemed impossible. I had moved to America with no plans or agenda or qualifications, and now here I
was tonight sitting next to someone who had experienced life much more than I had ever planned to. Mary had put
on sweatpants and was stretching, happily, next to my feet. This was the new economy, the new way to live, I said—
we were on the glimmering edge of a brand-new millenium, and we were among the people heading into it. I did not
know what was to come – A new job, an upcoming marriage, the responsibilities of being the male in the family, but
in this moment I felt light, unburdened by any of those thoughts.

I shared some of this with Mary, who was laying on the mat, her legs dangling behind her , looking at me. I didn’t
know if I believed everything I was saying, but it felt so good to say it.

She shrugged, the light bobbing across the fly. “If you were not engaged to your fiancée, I might have taken you
home tonight. I think you’re underestimating what you have that most men don’t,”..

You? I asked, turning on my side to face her, trying to return her comment with some failed attempt at flirtation of
my own.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “But it’s much larger than that, I think. Just something worth considering.”
What I have (08.12.2017)

An ability to see fragments of myself in strangers. Little mirrors everywhere reflecting parts of me that I cannot see
within myself.

The ability to grumble and complain about people yet feeling immense love for them, each of them without any
exceptions – Like a fish swimming shallow or deep.

The ability to feel a deep well of empathy - Towards every one, even when I am trash talking them, jokingly or
otherwise.
I love them with fervor, with ardor, with vigor, with lust. Love them into the opposite of oblivion.

The capacity to spot inspiration in the oddest of places.

The way smoke curls.

The shape of a cloud.

Café au lait.

The sense of connection, however transitory, that makes me feel like something alive and bigger than me is
unfurling inside me.

A reservoir of hope that will never run out. I am certain of this even when I am very tired.

The knowledge that there is something, not someone out there, that is calling my name.

A way to find what I have lost without losing what I’ve found.
The Buddha (08.09.2011)

I am sitting with a friend who runs a computer business but also doubles up as a social worker. We are in Navsari, a
small town in the northern part of Gujrat.

Sitting in his office we are talking about the good old days and laughing about something when the phone rings. He
talks for a couple of minutes, his demeanor suddenly switching slightly.

" I have a call to head to….", he says as he is already gathering his papers from the desk.

It's my cue to head home. Not much is in the cards that evening. Maybe I will watch a movie or read a book that I
have read many times or grab an ice cream along the way with my mother.

Would you like to come with me to the hospital?", he asks, picking up the keys to the bike.

My train of thought interrupted, I look at him and he is already out the door giving out instructions to his people to
close shop later on. I follow him out as he drives me through the evening traffic deftly weaving through a wave of
bikes and pedestrians.

An hour later we are standing amid mayhem - People screaming, doctors coming and going, nurses passing by and
families of patients sitting in corners waiting, some with anticipation, others with resignation writ large.

He wasn’t a patient in the hospital. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. The only reason they even brought him to the
hospital was that there was no one to take him home at the scene.

Mom, on the other hand, was severely injured— liver laceration, rib fractures with contused lung, and a femur so
badly shattered her leg at first appeared like a piece of paper. There was nothing wrong with her heart though. With
legendary maternal courage, as the truck barreled towards them in the crosswalk, she had shoved the toddler onto
the curb— and took the whole of the impact herself. The toddler spilled onto the footpath out of harm’s way.
Pedestrians scooped him up and there he was, blinking at me while they worked his mother in the trauma bay.

My friend is too busy organizing things and so is everyone. The attention is mostly on the injured woman. From a
lower caste with barely any money for the bills they will incur, her family would need all the help that they can get.

I try to stand out of the way as much as I physically can. The hospital is small, devoid of the most basic trauma care
– The doctors. Even as a teenager, I had already developed a distinct distaste for hospitals, especially kids in
hospitals. There is something inherently wrong with kids being in these green antiseptic confinements. They
belonged to play parks, schools, laughter, and light.

This kid is different though. He just lays there serenely, with this almost god-like smile, watching the commotion of
the trauma bay play out overhead. Not so much as a squirm or a peep. We all marvel at how calm he is for barely a
one-year-old.

On that Saturday night, the hospital buzzing with activity, I consider them lucky to have one happy content person. I
tell his mother as much, and when I hold him up to her gurney, even though her pain she beams with pride and
kisses him before they wheel her off to surgery.

And with that, I gratefully turn him over to the loving auspices of the pediatric nurse. She tucks him into bed on the
adjacent children’s ward, and I return outside the rooms to get some fresh air.

I confess I didn’t give him much further thought that night. But around 7 pm the next day I end up in the hospital
with my friend. I am invested in the woman's well-being now that I have seen them yesterday. Despite my usual
rush I decided to stop in anyway and check on the little guy.

The lights are out, but I can see him from the door, lying quietly on his back. Ever so softly, so as not to wake him, I
pussy-foot toward the crib. But as I approach, I realize his eyes are already open. He is fully awake, just staring out
at the dimly lit hall. I coo at him over the bars and stroke his head.

The night maid in the child ward materializes out of the darkness beside me.

“Quiet as a cat,” she murmurs, and adds, “Not even a wet diaper.” She is a bit impressed, but not concerned.

“Really? Nothing?” My hand pauses over the crown of his head.

“Yeah” she replies with a shrug. “I’ve been checking him all night. I wish my kid stayed dry like that.”

All at once, I experience the sort of nausea, I imagine one feels when thrown off a tall building. My memory now
latches on with some degree of clarity to all the events from the previous evening.

One-year-olds are supposed to cry out loud with all this noise around.

One-year-olds are supposed to stand at the side of the crib and wail for their mom in a strange place.

One-year-olds are supposed to wet their diapers at night.

I am no doctor but I had seen enough TV to make me wildly dangerous. As the night maid walks away, I stand there
looking at him as he stares back at me with blinking eyes.

I snatch a plastic ballpoint pen from the side of the table and with it scratch the bottom of his feet.

Nothing.

Frantically, I pinch his chubby baby finger, maybe a bit too hard.

Nothing.

He doesn't flinch, he doesn't pull back or even cries.

I run out to the resident pediatrician on duty that night. 15 agonizingly long minutes later he validates my worst
fears:

He was a one-year-old quadriplegic.

This happened many years ago, but I still replay that night in my head, down to the hour, the minute, even the
second.

I am well aware that nothing would have changed the outcome— I might not be standing today if I thought I was
somehow to blame. But even now, I can close my eyes and see his enigmatic smile and surreally calm demeanor, I
feel a lonely ache gnawing through me for what he endured, motherless, in silence. The terror of his fragile,
feelingless new world. The inability, in an instant, to so much as turn his head. The strange resignation in his wide
infant eyes.

Much is taught in life. Things that you learn in books and things that you learn outside of classrooms. You go on to
marry, have your kids, make money, grow old, and the experiences that you gather become the bridges that take you
far. You learn to deal with difficult people. You learn to deal with tough situations and unwieldy people, but very
few understand that at times when you least expect, your easiest may be hardest of all:

Like a little one-year-old who expects nothing from you.

Cave Dwellers (08.19.2020)

When it comes to living life, I often tell my children that we are like dumb animals. Passing through life itself is
primal. It’s the way we have always come to understand the world around us - whether we are poor or rich, Indian or
American. And so, it stands to reason that, in order to tell our stories, we tap into something that is deep within us.
Something that is beyond our intellect, especially so - an understanding that is deeper than anything that we can
willfully engage.

Overthink, and our minds make it hard to decide. Should I go in this direction or that one? Would this career be
ideal for me or the one that my parents are trying to get me into? Should I pursue the girl that thinks I am invisible,
or should I stay with the one who thinks the world of me?

Life can become so tangled that our process can feel more like an attempt to untangle the mess that we have made
ourselves. We create these obstacles and then spend our days trying to get out of them. Our minds spin webs that
obscure the light. We second-guess. We become lost. We run circles around the fence that we have created around
our limited consciousness.

But when we feel our way through life, we are following a deep internal rhythm set by the universe itself. The action
precedes us. We see them. We sense their righteousness. How did I do that, we ask ourselves, once we have
finished, once the dust storm has settled, once we have worked through it, slowly but surely. Of course, part of the
answer is that we have worked hard. We have kept ourselves moving. We have listened, pushed, clawed, learned,
and explored. But there is something else - something we can’t explain, and can’t understand, and that makes us all
feel a little bit like maybe we have cheated through life, that maybe we got lucky at times, except that it has nothing
to do with cheating or the coin toss of luck, it is the thing itself. How did I do that?

We did it and we know how even though we do not understand or understand and refuse to acknowledge it. If we
look back, we realize something primal within us - that we are animals, our ears pricked, our eyes wide open.

We look around cautiously, we put one hoof down, look around and then the other, on the soft and pliant earth. The
rustle of a leaf. The crack of a branch on the nearby tree. A slight whisper of the breeze. We do not stop to ponder,
what’s around the corner? We don’t know, but our senses are heightened, the fur on our skin standing, bristling as
we look.

There is only this: the bird’s nest, the deer, the snake curled beneath the gnarled root of that ancient tree. There is
only the sound of our breath. Our pulsating bodies, the slowing down of our heartbeat as we anticipate the next
move of the universe around us.

We are here. Alive, alert, quivering. We are cave dwellers. With a sharpened arrowhead, we make a picture on the
walls of our caves so that the next generation behind us will learn what we had seen - A boy, a bear. The moon.
The Origin of Smiles (03.14.2007)

She sticks her head through the doorframe and smiles wide, her dark-black curls dipping as she tilts her face to one
side.

I am practicing cardio in the bedroom.

“Can I come in?” she says.

I am busy catching my breath.

“Now?”

“Yes, now,” the smile became a pout.

“Why?”

“I need to tell you something.”

I sigh, turn to her, and sit down.

She pitter-patters her way to me, brushes her hair back, and cups my ear, the warmth from her breath tickling.

“I missed you. Don’t go away again for 3 weeks,” she whispers.

A grin spreads across my face so quickly that it was almost as if it has always been there.

And just when my cheeks start to hurt from smiling so hard, she adds, “I am lonely when you are gone.”

I pull back and she buries herself in my arms. We hug for what must have been a long time.
My daughter is five.

It would be easy to argue that she doesn’t yet fully understand what love means, and yet I believe that it is precise
because there is no scarring or mental concepts attached to her understanding of it that she expresses it so purely and
freely.

She shows exactly how she feels, the vulnerability out there in the open.

Her eyes assume an unbearable tenderness; a desire so intense to see me happy that it puts me in a kind of
momentary existential crisis.

There’s no notion in her of regulating the outpour of this love to protect her heart, or of using it to accomplish any
other end but to see my eyes moisten and my mood lift.

It’s almost as if she has to share it; has to give it and show it with the same wonder that you would if a turquoise-
winged butterfly landed on your hand and you told yourself, “Hey you! I have to share this with someone!”

I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve those two girls. To deserve their affection.

But when the days are long or dark, it is one thing I can count on to make my days a little bit brighter.
Invisible Hand (07.28.1996)

“W ere there signs in the universe? And if so, when did they occur -- — and why? I had grown up surrounded by
parents who believed in the invisible hand of someone guiding us, but I had dropped that notion somewhere along
powered by the invincibility of my teenage years. But more recently, in adult life, the notion of signs had crept into
many of my conversations with my friends: I knew it was a sign that I should quit my job. I knew that it was a sign
that something was wrong. How was anybody supposed to know when something was a sign and when it was just a
coincidence? Or maybe “signs” were merely a way of vesting coincidences with meaning.

I had never visualized God as a micromanager. I didn’t think he was up there sending secret signals to me and the
nearly six billion other people who inhabit the planet. As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a free meal. And so,
to the degree that I gave credence to signs at all, I didn’t think they were coming from God — at least not in that
man-with-the-white-beard-in-the-sky kind of way. So then, what were these signs — if indeed, they existed?

So as I continued to mull over these ideas, I was also thinking about the state of my finances. College was ending in
a month and the engineer’s degree did not look like it would bring any fortunes my way. With money running out, I
was a lack of ideas when Sandeep, my friend walked into the room.

“Why are you so gloomy today Bawa?”, he asked in his usual laissez-faire tone.
As we discussed the lack of money, he comes up with a variety of options including my joining him in his dairy
business up in a remote village up north. The idea of milking udders is worse than Japanese hari-kari and is shot
down quickly.

“Ah well then, you can join your father and become a priest maybe.”

It was a nice, even inspired idea, but when it came to do it…well, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Although I
was eligible, I had never learned any of the rituals, but I knew that working part-time as a priest during the 10 days
preceding the Parsi New Year paid well.

“We are going to Pune tomorrow to Budhwar Peth for some action. You are welcome to hitch a ride”.

It’s settled that I would go with them, but then head my way to look for the Parsi temple there that needed a part-
time priest for the 10-day prayers coming up in August.

“Do you know where the Parsi temple is?” I ask almost fifteen auto drivers before one finally nods tentatively. It’s
good enough for me. I am driven for 30 minutes before he drops me at Camp road — one of the busiest roads in
western Pune city, right outside the temple. It’s a rare thing in India — an auto driver taking you to your known
destination.

As I am about to pay him, an old Parsi lady shows up from the left corner.

“Can you drop me at the Komra Parsi Fire temple deekra (son)?” she says.

Before I say anything, she is already sitting next to me instructing the auto driver down another lane.

“Take a left. Take a left”. She is smacking his shoulder from behind urging him to drive based on her instructions.
Five minutes later she disembarked, leaving me in front of another temple -- — minutes away from each other.

I mutter a silent curse as I pay the auto driver. Heading back to the other temple seems like a chore. I might as well
try my luck here, I figure.

“I am looking for the head priest”, I say as she opens the door. She is around my age, fair -- — almost too fair, and
has Persian features with a husky voice.

“He is my dad. Come I will take you to him”, she says with confidence that shows she knows how to deal with the
opposite gender.

And so it is. I am invited to join the 8 other Priests, most of them around my age, to pray, starting next month.

“We look forward to seeing you here soon”, her dad, a charismatic man in his fifties shakes my hand as she stands
looking just behind me.

I walk the 4 miles back to the bus station and head back to Bombay, tentatively employed — for the first time in my
life.
“Hell No! You are not going to pray for the 10 days. You have no training, and we don’t want the tainted money
earned by you” — It’s my parents who are hell-bent on keeping me from going back to Pune. They think I have no
idea of the customs or prayers and would just generate bad karma taking money from patrons who want their dead
relatives to be well tended to. I resign myself to staying unemployed and penniless for the foreseeable future.

A phone call comes in a day before I have to be there. I hand it to my father who takes the call to politely refuse the
head priest. Instead, he ends the call saying that I would be there tomorrow evening. I am slightly confused.

“Our cousin Kersi’s son Hormaz is there too. He will guide him”, he later tells my mother.

We have just put in a couple of hundred roses in the vases for the prayers tomorrow, followed by setting up the oil
lamps and then cleaning the whole temple. Most of the others have gone to sleep, but I am not ready just yet. As I sit
on the stairs outside the temple late at night, she wipes her hands on her sides and comes over.

“They say you are a black belt. Can you teach me sometime?” I laugh as I tell her how martial arts is slightly easier
than dancing, but equally useless when it comes to the real world. We sit and talk late into the night.

“How can I impress this girl?” he asks equally frustrated with his failed attempts at catching her attention. I am
sitting with a priest who wants to have something more than friendship with the head priest’s daughter. I am paying
half the attention.

“Try not to interact with her for the next five days. It will work itself out”, I say looking up at him.

“You should meet Anahita. She is Arnavaz’s best friend. You two will get along”.

There is sarcasm in his voice laced with lashing out. Knowing he is venting I see no reason to aggravate him further.
The name enters my consciousness like a simple, pure strain of music. Anahita — Wonder who she is? I file away
the name in my memory and laugh.

A year later around the same time, I get a call from the temple priest asking if I would be coming this year for
prayers to Pune. I already have a job now and can’t take ten days off from it to go there even though the money is
much better.

“I am sorry but won’t be able to make it this year”. I make it an end of discussion rather than a negotiation.

Two weeks after the phone call, I am calling the same number back. The job ended yesterday and fifteen of us have
been let go. It was not expected.

“Do you still want me to come this year?” I ask, my voice slightly lower with trepidation. I am not expecting a
positive outcome.

“We are always in need of priests here. You are welcome”, the head priest says without a hint of anger that I had
anticipated.
“See you next month then”

We are back to arranging flowers in the prayer hall tonight. It’s a busy night and there are nine of us with roses in
our hands, each taking up one row and trying to remember to put five in each vase -- — each of different colors.

The head priest’s daughter is the only girl amongst us boys, but today is different. I see a girl in the corner, her back
towards me. She is wearing a brown Indian dress, her head covered in a blue scarf as is the custom in the Parsi
temple.

Curious to see who she is, I slowly inch my way towards her as I talk to the others around me.

“Have you met this lady on the floor just yet? She comes to visit us only one day every year” It’s Hormaz, my
cousin from the other side as he sees me watching this girl.

She looks up at him and then follows his glance in my direction. A smile bursts upon her face. It not just covers her
entire face, but lights up her eyes — and mine, without me being entirely sure why.

“Hi, I am Anahita,” she says.

Take the bus ride to Pune. Pick the right auto driver. Turn left. Have the old lady forcibly take you to the other fire
temple instead of the one you landed at. Have the priest there be a family acquaintance. Meet his daughter. Lose a
job. Come back another year. Be there on the same day and at the same time.

What I did know is that this was a huge, blinking neon sign I couldn’t ignore or dismiss. All these seemingly
disconnected bits formed a pattern, invisible to see.

Do this, a gentle voice seemed to be saying. Now, this. And now that. All of which had led me to be standing next to
this awesomeness of a girl I call Ana: my wife, my friend, my guide, my eternal love, and pretty much the architect
of the person I would become, for the years to come.
Hypocrite (09.11.1995)

A man feeling rudderless after losing a girl to someone else, someone richer, a far better version of him.

Loser. Coward. Wimp.

Unemployed - he couldn’t seem to find a job. Months later he'd been unemployed. He tried, but hey - It just wasn't
working out.

Lazy. Unmotivated. Excuses.

Couples arguing through walls, one saying terrible things, shouting, spewing venom while the other has completely
shut down.

Unhealthy. Just leave. Why do people stay in these relationships? Fools.

Overweight people. Sitting, eating unhealthily, watching TV, or reading a book.

You wonder why you are fat. Just stop eating. Glutton.

I saw these people. I judged these people.

And later, I became one of these people.

And I stayed one of these for the longest while.

As I have moved on from these, I collect in my little hand fold, a gem of a lesson -

If I am going to judge from the high ground, I would best be ready to defend it.

A few laps around the track of time and life will quickly turn you into someone you would never acknowledge to
others, or even to yourself:

A hypocrite.
The Bully (03.05.1988)

It happens on the playground when you are, 8 to 9 years old.

There is a bully who roams on this school playground.

And you guessed it - you are his favorite plaything.

He is the walking embodiment of every weakness and insecurity you have:

Laziness, fear of not being good enough, smart enough, strong enough.

He is not your stereotypical, punch him back and he runs away bully.

He’s the real deal. A big, fat evil boy who is looking for a fight.

He is looking for a fight. And he will gladly fight you without consequence.

Every day, he comes and rubs your face in the sand. He’s bigger than you. Stronger than you.

And he can certainly kick your nuts out.

Every day, in the same 15-minute window, he comes over and humiliates you in front of your classmates.

He calls you names. Punches you in the stomach. Slams you on the ground.

“Loser...” He says and slaps you across the head.

“Fight me, you moron.” Slaps you across the head.

And shoves you to the ground.

Your classmates just watch.

Each bullying session embodies a defeat you experience in your life.

Every rejection. Every failure. Each missed goal, every missed opportunity.

You remember each of these. You feel shame in them.

The bullying continues for weeks.

One day, it starts again as usual.

You see him approaching. The classmates turn around and look at you.

The bully gets in your face. He pushes you.

He pushes you again.

He says, “Pussy. A wimpy little pussy.”

He pushes you again.

At that time, out of completely nowhere, something in you is triggered.

You take a swing at him.

He blocks it.

A flurry of swinging arms and punches unfolds. A dirt cloud shoots up as you fight back against the bigger boy.

It is a full-on brawl with everyone watching. Fists swinging, haymakers flying.

BANG.

Suddenly everything goes black just after you see those bright electric blue flashes.

It stays black for a while and you are as disoriented as you will ever be.

At some point later, you open your eyes. You are laying on your back in the dirt.

Stars are swimming in your vision. You see the sky above you.

You were knocked out.

Your friend is standing over you.

He is smiling.

“Good job man!”

But…

But how did you do a good job?

You just lost the fight. You got knocked out. Knocked out in front of everyone.

Well. Yes, you lost, technically. You got knocked out.

You won in the bigger picture.

Your tormenter also walked away with a black eye. A busted lip. A bloody nose.

Enough damage for him to not bother with you anymore.

You won some respect from your classmates for standing up to the bigger boy.

More importantly, you preserved your self-respect.

The next time you fight, you will not be shocked at how it feels when that haymaker makes that brutal contact with
your face.

You already know.

That contact will disorient you a little less each time and if you keep getting punched enough - At some point it will
flare a ferocity in you that will just make you lethal when punched.

In the meanwhile, for the good books and theoretical rhetoric, you will have something too.

Whatever life throws at you, whatever the impossible situation, wherever the odds of achieving success seem
remote:

You will say to yourself, “I might lose at this. But I’m not going down without a fight.”

You’ll probably do a lot better than you’d imagined.

And even if it doesn’t work out, you’ll save yourself the pain of regret.

You’ll know that you didn’t wimp out, roll over and die.

That is how you will learn to fight - Not in the controlled atmosphere of the gyms or martial arts classes with mouth
guards and knee pads on with defined rules of engagement.

But on the street, behind that schoolyard, under those thick old banyan trees, in the dirt with bare knuckles and
unknown adversaries...

Something that you will need for years to come.

Before you finally decide to give it all up when you come face to face with another powerful adversary:

Your mind.
The Empty Spaces (09.22.2016)
I don’t think I can “control” my ego, but I think
it’s important that I am aware of it.

I ran into a friend a few days ago and was so

very happy to see him.

We usually hug each other tightly but this time

he seemed to be someplace else.

I briefly wondered if he might be irked at me. I

ran through my mind what had taken place the
last time I saw him.

I couldn't think of anything. It irritated me to no

end trying to understand what was wrong with
us.

I found out this morning that when I saw him, he was dealing with a family emergency.

He had been indeed somewhere else, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.

There was a story I inadvertently fabricated; and then there was what was going on.

Between my story and his, there was a gap.

What is that?

What is that space that lies between the assumptions that we make and what is happening?

It's dangerous, that space.

It is the sprout from which breeds most misunderstandings.

It separates us from every one of our relationships,

Even the one we have with reality.

What would it take to narrow that space, to someday obliterate it forever?

I am still grappling with that, but deep down I seem to know what the answer might be...

Two little words & five little alphabets have conjured up this entire reality.

My Ego.
Kaleidoscope (04.14.2020)

I am just starting my middle-aged years and already my mind is a kaleidoscope. Years vanish. Months collapse and
days fall inside each other. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards – A lot of playing cards, some new and
some old. It seems all to be in perfect order until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the entire thing apart,
skyward. Sometimes, I just sit and imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring in the sky like a flock of geese.

An advertisement comes on the TV and now I am sitting in my Andheri flat in the middle of the room in my gray
shorts while my grandmother holds the weaving spindle as she sits cross-legged on the sofa and smiles down at me.
I am at a crowded party in Portsmouth looking at Crystal for the first time. I am standing at her grave.

I am eating an entire samosa myself for the first time perched on a wall behind my school. I am having dinner at an
expensive restaurant in downtown Toronto drinking a 500$ bottle of wine. I am standing in front of the cupboard
mirror hearing the song from the 1990 hit Aashiqui. I am a boy standing in the corner all by myself watching them
take away my dead sister on a small metal thatch.

I am laughing and telling them a story about how I got through college and then the phone rings. They never call me
this late unless…I understand something terrible has happened with a thud in my heart. The car, the plane, the cab,
and the ride back home. The test results are ominous. I am wheeling my father down the corridor. We are in a
swimming pool in Los Angeles late at night talking.

I take a deep breath and breathe in the smell of my new car as I weave it slowed down in traffic. I push the door
open hard and I see her there – hanging. Her legs are the first thing I see and the only thing I remember. We are
having lunch at a buffet in downtown Chelsea. The taste of lime with the spice of Chicken-65 fighting for their
legacy in my mouth.

I am walking down the snow-filled road in my leather shoes trying to get to the office in a snowstorm. My feet are
numb with cold. It’s late evening on Friday and I am sitting on a mat waiting for Ana to bring her pot of chicken
biryani. I am hungry eating a day-old banana as I write down the amount of money left with me and calculate the
number of days that it should last before the month ends.

The Kaleidoscope flashes by faster and faster until each of those cards just blend into each other. Everything is just
a blur.

Pick a card, any card.

Masks (02.26.2019)

I
“ have a couple of friends who often post photos on social media. I think the most striking thing about them is their
beauty – the dazzle in their smile, the glint in their eye, their light.

She and I are close, and she tells me she feels empty.

Her relationship is a shell, a front, a movie set, a façade.

It’s not real.

She doesn’t know why she stays; she tells me.

She doesn’t know why day after day she comes home to what to both of them feels like a hollow life.

Which is true?

What she says, or what I see?

It’s not just that I can’t know if my friends are happy or not.

It’s that he does not know what his wife feels, and she doesn't know what he is going through.

It’s that they can’t even identify feelings inside themselves, much less in each other.

You can never know what goes on in the life of others.

You hope you can even barely tell what’s going on in yours.
Optimization (03.04.2019)

As an onboarding gift, the company gave all employees a fitness water bottle embossed with its logo in white
against a black background: fit workers were happy workers. I kept the bottle on the desk for a week, tracking my
coworkers as they adopted the water bottle carrying it around from meeting to meeting. I, on the other hand, was
calibrating my breath in a new step of meditation, regulating its intake, until I realized I was on the brink of a
breathing disorder.

My team was a group of overachievers. Highly intelligent and motivated individuals being bred in an ecosystem
whose fetish for optimization culture and productivity knew no boundaries — They understood things before I did,
they were focused and good communicators who articulated their opinions clearly. They grouped to start a new
exercise and even though I wanted to, it was just too expensive for me. The exercise videos, the supplements, and
the diet recommendations – they all came at a price, and although I felt left out, I couldn’t come to spend the money
just yet. I could see how these offered a sense of progress and momentum, measurable self-betterment.
Leaderboards and fitness apps encouraged community through competition. Quantification was a vector of control.

Self-improvement appealed to me, too. I could stand to exercise more often and be more mindful of the things I ate.
I wanted to be more open and thoughtful, more attentive, and available to family, friends, Ana. I wanted to stop
hiding discomfort, ignorance, and confusion behind humor. I wanted someone to laugh at my jokes and tell me I was
well-adjusted. I wanted to better understand my own desires, but what I wanted more often than anything was to find
a purpose and understand the reasons for my existence. But nonmedical monitoring of heart rate variability, sleep
latency, glucose levels, ketones—none of this was self-knowledge. It was just metadata.

The endgame looked like it was the same for everyone: Self-growth, optimized performance, and efficiency. Scale
above all. At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics,
in which quants and developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A
world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to
the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the trance music and cooking with excessive oil;
slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Surfing the internet sitting in the restroom or taking long showers with
scalding water. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their spouses; watching people stare
out the window at the sunset or photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase chicken
dumplings for my elder one in Chinatown, or just walking with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Reading a
newspaper in the library while also watching the attractive woman sitting on the other side. Filling out forms. Phone
calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked old books with musty smells
bought from goodwill for 25 cents. Engaging with completely random strangers. I liked grocery shopping: perusing
the produce; watching everyone grab a fat grape in the bulk aisle.

Cleaning, walking, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable.
Sometimes things did not work out according to my schedule. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were
luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the
very least, they made me feel human.

The fetishized life without optimization: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs?
A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not my prize.

It wasn’t the first time my manager had initiated this conversation. It was always well-intentioned, but the questions
only made me confused and sometimes bristle. He wanted to understand my career trajectory, the path that would
give me satisfaction and he would work to help me achieve it. I knew deep down this was much needed in the
practical world, but still refused to admit that he might be right.

As a software engineer, my coworker had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know
what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command
three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.

I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skillset was neither unique nor in high
demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since my college years, and quitting without a plan
was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my résumé. Sabbaticals were a novel
concept, and one I could not fathom.

My manager treated me in the way you treat someone at the very beginning of a relationship: Gently. He still
believed I was the sort of person who would have a career path drawn out, have goals and aspirations. Someone who
he could depend on to get things done, someone righteous, moral. Someone who valued himself. I empathized with
his disappointment. I wanted to be that person, too.

Unwinding over diet coke and potato chips one evening, a senior partner sat beside me at one of the office kitchen
tables.

“You’ve been with us for some years now,” he said. “I ask everyone the same thing. Has this last year been the
longest or the shortest year of your life?”

“Longest”, I said. It was knee-jerk, sincere. His eyes narrowed, and he half laughed. At the end of the table, an HR
manager visibly eavesdropped.

“It’s a trick question,” the partner said.

“The right answer is both.”

The Third Option (09.14.2018)

Life is very different in Portsmouth.

Though we are only a two-hour drive from the city, it might as well have been a five-hour flight. Friends
occasionally come to visit, and I could practically see the thought bubbles escaping from their heads as they walk
from their car to our front porch. Do they have neighbors? Does Jenny have anyone to play with? Where do they
buy food?

It isn’t nearly as isolated as that, though we don’t know the people on our street. I see them nearly every day through
the windshield of my car, but this is the country, not the suburbs of a place down south. No one greeted us with a
homemade apple pie when we moved in. People tend to keep to themselves.

I do have nicknames for my neighbors: the girl walking her dog; the old couple walking; the one who doesn’t wave.
In place of facts, I invent a myriad variety of stories.

The girl walking her dog is a college graduate still looking for a job; the old couple walking is doing so on doctor’s
orders for the sake of the husband’s health; the one who doesn’t wave is the grown son of a white supremacist gang.

Jenny began preschool when we settled in, at a small school about ten minutes from our house. Each morning I
drive past a horse barn with horses grazing on fresh grass, drive along a rutted dirt road, then pull into the parking
lot.
Even when she was small, I used to hold Jenny’s hand as we walk through the glass doors into school, hug her good-
bye at her classroom door like every other parent in the place before heading to work. Once she is settled in her
classroom, I try—this is the only word for it—I try to escape.

Escape - Unlike many of the other parents, I don’t want to hang out at Jenny’s school. I don’t want to avail myself of
the volunteering opportunities: the book fair, the auction. You couldn’t have paid me to stay for the swim meet
season or the parent-teacher meets.

To be honest, I am confused by my response to the school community. Don’t I want to be part of a community?
Don’t I love my child and want the best for her?

Of course, I do—so why am I making the quick dash back to my car, keeping my head down, avoiding eye contact?

As I think, I slowly start to piece things together – More like a self-therapy session, a self-exploratory exercise.

As she grew up and I still ducked past the other parents congregated in small groups, I felt isolated, though of
course, I was responsible for my isolation. Certainly, I was still shivering in the shadow of Jenny’s illness. It was so
sudden, and I have not digested the news just yet, there were so few good outcomes—I had trouble trusting that it
was not a dream.

The visit to the ER that year was something that refused to go away so easily.

“You could have easily lost her if you had ignored her symptoms of acute anemia for a couple more days” – The
doctor in the ER had delivered his wisdom, so nonchalantly.

Those words ring in my ears often. I keep checking her nails and her skin tone for paleness. I keep asking her to
stand on the scale worrying about a couple of pounds of weight loss, yet still laughing about it with her so she
doesn’t worry too much. I end up writing back to her doctor the next day – A letter written in a matter-of-fact tone
yet laced with worry. Often, I misdiagnose but I don’t relent.

I had read stories on the Internet about remissions and also relapses. As days go by, I held my breath, waiting,
girding myself, preparing for the worst, and always thinking - what if?

What if she has a bad inflammation this time?

Has it spread to more than her colon?

Is it Crohn’s disease and not UC?

What if I let my guard down?

What if something goes wrong?

We had left India, yes—but we had brought the past with us. Parenthood, after all these years, was still new for me
—and I had so far known it without stomach-lurching fear. Not anymore.

As I surreptitiously watched the parents, I envied their innocence. One of them told me that she had given birth to
her youngest in the local hospital, and it was exactly like a hotel.

“They bring you a smoothie afterward,” she said.

But that hospital doesn’t even have a pediatric emergency, I thought. What if there had been an emergency?
I had begun to feel—and it was a bitter bitter feeling—that the world could be divided into two kinds of people:
Those with an awareness of life’s inherent fragility and randomness, and those who believed they were exempt –
That nothing wrong could happen to them and nothing did.

Parenthood had created an even wider gulf between these two categories. I was firmly on the shore of fragility and
randomness, and I could barely make out the exempt people gliding across on the other side. They seemed like a
different species to me.

To be honest, I resented them. They were having such a good life, almost like a fairy tale. I had it too at some point
before it was taken away.

One day as I was sitting under a blooming tree in the fall, all by myself in a half phase of meditation, I had an
epiphany.

I had so far not known that there was a third way of being.

Life was unpredictable, yes. A speeding car, a slip of tire on the ice with a ravine below, a ringing phone, and
suddenly everything changes forever.

To deny that is to deny life—but to be consumed by it is also to deny life differently in itself.

The third way—inaccessible to me as I slunk down the halls of Jenny’s school —had to do with holding this
paradox lightly in one’s own hands.

To believe: It is true, the speeding car, the slip on the ice, the ringing phone.

It is true, and yet here I am listening to my girl laugh as we walk down the corridor.

Here I am hugging her. Watching her smile and tell me stories. To indulge in her innocence, however fleeting it
might be.

Here we are—together in this -

Our only moment.

The Summer of 2000 (06.04.2000)

Depending on whom you ask, it was either the inflection point, the apex, or the beginning of the end for Silicon
Valley’s stock market—what cynics had called a bubble, optimists called it the future. It was a year of new
optimism: the era of unlimited’ s, no limits, no bad ideas. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity. It was
the dawn of the era of the unicorns: startups valued, by their investors, at over a billion dollars. Hovercraft cars were
considered inevitable. Everything was moving to the web. A website selling pet toys—a dog walking website that
disrupted neighborhood twelve-year-old’s—raised twenty million. An app for coupon-discounting enabled an untold
number of bored and curious housewives to pay for services they never knew they needed, and for a while people
were buying anti-wrinkle creams, taking pole dancing lessons, and bleaching their assholes, just because they could
do it at a half the price on a coupon flashing on your laptop.

Not that I was aware of any of this—that I was paying any attention at all. I didn’t even own a laptop. Having just
arrived from India some months ago, my time was well spent getting acclaimed to the clean air, being awed with the
24x7 water availability, or the ability to return things in stores and get a full refund. I had just turned twenty-five and
was living on the edge of Fremont with 5 roommates I hardly knew, in an apartment so devoid of any kind of
furniture it felt like someone was about to move in tomorrow. I had a fragile but agreeable life: a job as a software
developer at a small real estate startup in downtown San Francisco; a smattering of people whom I was slightly
acquainted - People on whom I exercised my social anxiety, primarily by avoiding them.

But the corners seemed to be coming up. The wheels were coming off. I had in my anxiety to make a lot of money
quickly started to day-trade. Every morning armed with a list of stocks that I had picked out last evening based on
some intense studying of charts, I would fire up my office desktop every morning praying that my yesterday’s buys
were going up. My job was slowly running its course as the startup was bleeding money all over the floor, and after
three months, the binding resolve of attempting to learn to write code had finally worn thin.

On the whole, the tech industry was a distant and abstract concern. That fall, companies like Sun Microsystems,
Avaya, and Cisco, which together employed some ten thousand people and whose combined value pushed past two
billion dollars. Two-billion-dollars: the power and money were unfathomable to me.
Later, once I had settled into my life in California, I would learn that the year I spent watching girls dance in clubs
with people from the software industry, moaning about our impossible futures, was the same many of my new
friends, coworkers, and acquaintances swiftly and quietly made their first millions. While some of these people were
starting companies or embarking on two-year, self-imposed sabbaticals in their mid-twenties, I was sitting at a
narrow desk outside of my boss’s office, trying to write an application in C++ and trying to determine my value
using my annual salary—increased, the previous month, from fifty-nine thousand dollars to sixty—as a unit of
measurement. What was my value? Seven times as much as our new office sofa; two hundred times the customized
stationery.

While my future peers were hiring wealth advisers and going on vacations to Hawaii or taking a sabbatical to pursue
self-actualization, I was cleaning the carpet next to my bed in my rental apartment with my hands, watching a cute
girl in the club smoking, walking up the mountain near Fremont causeway all by myself calculating how much
money I had lost in the stock market last night, figuring out ways to make it all back and all-in-all just staving off a
thrumming sense of dread.

It was a year of promise, an era of excess, a time of optimism, forward-leaning, and hope—

In some other city, in some different place, in someone else’s life.

Butter Chicken (07.18.1993)

“ Y
ou can’t turn down food, even when you’re not hungry, can you?” she asks. The words are laced with judgment,
mirth, and some criticism.

“Yeah. You’re right” I respond but shut down immediately after. It’s a sensitive topic and it’s hard to explain the
reasons to her, even to myself. I am sure she knows some, but she probably would never completely understand.

We head back to our respective hostel rooms after an evening walk in town. Sangamner in the evening is laced with
crowds from colleges everywhere.

As we leave the downtown area after eating some street food, we meet up with my friend Pratap who mentions that
many of the temples close to us were open tomorrow night for a festival and would be serving free food.

We both gleefully agree that freeloading would be a fine way to go, even though it would be post-dinner, and we
make plans to go tomorrow night before parting ways.

Looking out of the window in the bus late home, she is trying to hold my hand while I am already somewhere far
away, back in time to the cold November night almost a year ago.

Our relationship that has barely seen its infancy is coming to a slow grinding end. While one is doing everything to
save it, the other is finding every way to bring it to an end.
November in Sangamner is typically cold and quiet, in the winter at times the town is covered by a thick layer of fog
and the rancid smell of sugarcane being fermented from the factories across town.

As we study for the upcoming exams, I have another problem to deal with. The joint where I have my usual dinner
is closed for renovation for the next one week. Having already pre-paid for the month, I barely have anything left on
me. 200 rupees is all I get for the entire month.

They will compensate for it next month once they open but for now, I have nowhere to eat. It’s just over mid-month
and seven more days seem too far away.

My pride prevents me from asking my roommates lest they think little of me, so that’s not an option either.

The last meal was almost 48 hours ago.

Late into the night, my roommates decide to head to the roadside dhaba for some late-night food fest. It’s a weekend
so there won’t be classes tomorrow morning.

We walk through the old graveyard in the night, the shortest way to reach the dhaba on the highway. Khaats (beds
made with woven ropes) are laid out as we settle in for a long-spirited night.

I am in my t-shirt and shorts with old slippers. It’s standard attire post-college hours. The elegant shirts and jeans are
reserved for the hours when they are needed. A friend orders the first round of beers and I drink slowly from one.
It’s paid for. I am for once not checking my wallet to see if I can afford it.

“What are you planning to eat Bawa?”, one of them asks after a couple of rounds of beers are taken in.

There is a spicy butter chicken on the menu for 75 rupees that I absolutely love to have but it’s just way beyond my
budget. Even the simple rice and curry seems out of limits at this time.

“I just had some before. Stuffed, man”, I say jovially as I sip on a dark beer bottle that has gone empty an hour ago.

My roommates order three bowls of butter chicken and the tray comes out sizzling. A glorious dish of chicken
pieces marinated in yogurt, cumin, ginger, and garlic, oven-roasted and cooked in a sinful, creamy butter and tomato
sauce such that the smell permeates the entire air around me and every pore inside me.

I stick to nursing my empty bottle promising myself that someday I would have enough to buy a whole bowl for
myself. It just won’t be tonight.

As the group slowly gets drunk, the pace and volume of conversation pick up. There’s talk about the upcoming
exams, the trip to Goa and of course, the girls.

A piece of chicken suddenly gets dropped and falls into the mud. I look at it longingly for a second and then move
back to the conversation.

The conversation meanders as we sit there talking about upcoming travel back home, what we have going on in our
lives, how difficult relationships are, who the hottest chick is in the hostel, how fast time goes by and how we need
to make an effort to get together like this more often.

I look at that piece of chicken fearing that a drunk leg would stomp it into the ground. Picking it up I leave it on the
side of the table. Nobody notices. The conversations go on.
It’s almost 1.30 AM and even the stray dogs have gone quiet. The only noise is the passing of sugarcane-loaded
trucks on the highway and the laughter of drunken friends.

As we get up to start heading back to the hostel, I look at the table one final time. Just bones and empty dishes ……
and that dust encrusted piece of chicken on the side of the table.

The siren call of that left-over fat juicy square piece calls me.

“And you know how much you want me,” it says.

I swiftly pick it up, dip it in the glass of water and drop it into my mouth, all in a single sweep. The drunk ones don’t
notice it. They are busy balancing each other walking back home.

As I stand there chewing voraciously, crumbs of dust intermingled, I look up to see Sarabjit Singh the owner of the
dhaba watching me from the cash register. A pained disapproving look crosses his face as he beckons me close with
the wave of his hand. I am not sure if I did something wrong or should I run for it. The 60-year-old Sardar will be
easy to outrun, I think.

“Would you guys like to take some left-over butter chicken from the kitchen? It’s going to go waste”, he says as he
continues to count out the cash from the till refusing all eye contact.

I nod my head and he barks out an order for a bowl to be made. There are no leftovers. The ferocious-looking Sikh
with the red turban and permanent scowl is just a kind man at heart.

Minutes later as the waiter brings in a bowl loaded with the best food on the planet I eat, quickly at first and then
slow down as the hunger pangs subside. The parathas (bread) keep coming from the kitchen under the watchful eye
of its long-bearded Sikh owner.

As I lick up the last remnants from the bowl and wash my hands, I suddenly feel very awkward. Now that the
desperation of hunger has subsided, I feel ashamed facing him. I don’t know what to say or how to thank him.

I stand there rooted, and he sees my dilemma.

“Changa di?” (Was it good?), he asks in Punjabi.

I don’t reply. Just end up looking at my dust-ridden feet, for the longest time. Few have shown me kindness as he
had, without any ado and I keep waiting to find the right words, to thank him.

I want to ask him if I can work for him to pay it off or if there’s some other way.

“Shukria chacha (Thank you uncle)”, is all I manage to say before turning around.

“Wahe guru Kisi ho bhuka Nahi sulata” (God doesn’t let anyone sleep hungry), he says simply, pointing at the
outsize frame of the Sikh prophet behind his counter, the frame surrounded by multi-colored lights.

My belly is full, but my mind is in a daze. I wonder what it feels like to be on his side, feeding a stranger, someone
who needs to be fed.

I wonder how he understood the battle I was fighting of which he knew nothing about.

This single deed changes my perspective. I suddenly understand the power of a kind act - far greater than any
preaching would teach me. To feed and to be fed.

I turn around and walk. It’s a dark night and the moon has hidden behind the clouds. The stars in the sky shine
through.
Sikhs have become my favorite people and will remain so for my entire life.

As I slowly drudge back in that cold night through the graveyard, I find my roommates sitting on an old grave
smoking some beedis.

“Bawa, where have you been, you moron?”, they ask in slurring speeches. They have not even missed me, those
drunk bastards!

Grinning stupidly, I join them sitting between the two of them as I lay my back against a headstone on the grave and
place my hands on the drunken shoulders steadying them.

Time to sneak back into the hostel before the warden’s shift changes at 2 AM.

After a week the dining hall opens up back again and things go back to normal. I never end up going back to that
dhaba across the highway, lest I come across its kind Sikh owner again. I do not want him to think I came back for a
freebie again and I know I cannot afford his wares.

But from that day on, I notice a change in my demeanor. Something inside me has moved, realigned.

Weeks later when I go into town and I have some money in my pocket, I see an old man sitting on the corner
begging. I have seen him many times before, a fixture in that corner of the street.

We are four friends in the group and I suddenly break away for a bit to buy a vada pav (Indian Burger).

As I bring him the food, I don’t just toss it in his begging bowl and walk away. Instead, I bend down and look him in
the eye.

Cataracts in both have made them smoky but I can see the helplessness.

“Will you like to eat some food baba?”, I ask gently. He nods in acquiesce.

As I hand him the packet, I suddenly fish into my pocket and fork out a 5 rupee note. It seems excessive for my
budget, but I will be fine.

He seems surprised, yet takes it touching it to both eyes as a mark of respect. Then he does something unique – He
puts a hand over my head, blesses me, and smiles. I have never seen him smile before.

I walk back and find my friends who have wandered away joining them in their discussions about the latest affair
going on in college, the secret tucked within me as I am filled with a new unbound joy of curious intensity, yet
completely unknown. This seems to have become a new way in my life.

And so, I feed - whoever I find, whenever I can, even those who do not need to be fed. Homeless guys, my kids,
even my coworkers. I pick up candy from the office kitchen and distribute it to random desks, thus in my head -
slaying hunger, one act at a time.

And, so I eat - whatever I find, whenever I can, wherever I can. Any free food that I can lay my hands on. Fresh,
semi-old, ancient, up the shelf, on the ground - it rarely matters.

What if I don’t find enough to eat tomorrow? What if they closed the dining halls again?

Z, you are no longer in that college. Those years have passed long by. Your bank account in US dollars, the way it is
now can feed you butter chicken pots in India, for the rest of your life to come.
Even after years of good food and no upheavals of the starvation kind, my constant hunger has lessened from a
compulsion to an eccentricity or quirk, but it refuses to be killed -

By either sustenance or logic.

Gratitude & Losses (12.29.2016)

As I prepare to sleep each night, I walk around in each room in my 987 square ft apartment looking up at the tall
ceilings, my hands sometimes joined in prayer.

Not that it takes longer, but I do. Every single night.

I don’t know why I do that. I don’t recall when I started to do that either.

I believe I want to thank someone for the good day that I had, to express my immense gratitude to the universe.

It's not a learned act. Nothing even remotely close to anything religious.

I just feel so deeply about it.

My dreams are vivid and clear and real, as real as my waking life.

Most often they are filled with angst and overwhelming, debris I didn’t properly work through while I was awake.

Less often, my dreams are good, especially on days when I have meditated deeply.

Sometimes I dream I can fly, but I can never properly control my power. I fly too low, or can’t fly at will, so the
dream starts out feeling wonderful and then becomes a bit hairy.

At times I am running. Fast, hard, away from something or someone but I don’t know who or why.

Other times I laugh. It’s so funny that I can’t stop laughing and my laughter wakes me up. It’s pure splendor to wake
up smiling.
In my very best dreams, I sense and touch love - A love that is much, much bigger than myself.

I feel this incredibly expansive sensation in my chest, like where have you been all my life — this is everything —

I feel rinsed with sparkling rose water and I swear I can smell the nectar of heaven —

and when I wake up, I know she's gone and impossible to retrieve.

The sense of loss makes me gasp, gasp before I’m fully awake, and it hurts so much.

It’s not until I get up and get in the shower that I realize that it was not a dream.

I will never find you again.

and you were so very real for those few years we walked together and this pain sure is, but still….

Feeling that then was worth what I’m feeling now.

Morality (04.16.2009)

“ Do you think I am cheating on him Z?”, she asks in a moment of introspection.

I am sitting drinking wine in a hotel room in Melbourne, 8000 miles away from home with Wendy, a colleague of
mine who is already slightly tipsy from the intakes of the evening at the hotel bar where we are staying.

Wendy sits high in the ranks of the food chain and has expended a lot of energy and time to get there.

Most consider her intimidating and she can come off that way after years of trying to make her mark in a man’s
world.

She is telling me about her marriage.

How her spouse is emotionally unavailable, that he doesn’t listen to what she has to say, how she was lonely for
years without talking to anyone, how they tried therapy and it did not work, how they decided to have kids thinking
it would fix things, but it didn’t.

As the bottle of wine goes lighter, she crosses another threshold telling me about a wonderful man that she met not
too long ago. How he completes her sentences and the fact that it was instant chemistry.

She tells me that she resisted for the longest time before deciding between morality and the dark caverns of
loneliness.
The caverns won out.

She talks about her marriage in the past sense. As if someone has passed away and we are both attending a wake.

The moment of trespass is usually small, almost unnoticeable. Whether it's returning a flirtatious text or holding eye
contact a moment too long or maybe going to a coffee shop you shouldn't be at. Wendy has crossed that threshold a
long time ago.

It seems doubtful, then, that she believes the marriage would recover from what it has been through.

She was more likely dealing with a painful truth the only way she knows how—by ignoring it.

She talks about the new man. She has never been happier in her life before. It’s like she is free.

However, I can see the darting conflict in her eyes. There is a sadness in knowing what she is doing and the fact that
it might hurt someone she deeply loved, even if it’s not today.

Alcohol does that to you, especially when you are vulnerable. It is not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is.

I wonder how she will feel about this tomorrow morning. Will she even remember?

She is looking back at me to see if I can offer her any advice, or even just judgment.

I don’t know of any way I can...

Everyone is different.

For some people, commitment feels like a prison.

For others, it feels like they are finally flying high.

Some people cannot imagine life with only one partner.

Others want one person to love. Multiple partners feel like too much to manage.
There is no should. There is no everyone.

What do you want? What works for you?

Find it.

Do that.
The Veil (02.16.2019)

“ A
re you doing ok in there?”, I asked trying to sound as normal as I could. However, my voice did not even sound
normal even to me. I could detect that slight over-pitch when I was stressed or concerned or just plain worried.

It was almost 2.30 AM and I was hanging outside the restroom while my daughter was inside – For a while now.
The UC diagnosis last year crept in while we least expected it. A simple colonoscopy and our lives were changed
forever. It was just last week when Jenny had complained about being fatigued, tired, even walking from one room
to the other. As an Indian parent, we were taught to teach our kids the strength of perseverance and so I sent her off
to school with words of motivation and a false sense of invincibility.

That night, sitting outside her ER room in Portsmouth Regional Hospital, I had played that scenario in my head over
and over.

“You brought her just in time. She was probably a couple of hours away from organ failure”, the words from the ER
head reverberated as I watched 5 different people go in and out of her room ignoring me.

“We will have to transfer her to Dartmouth Children hospital (CHAD). We don’t have the facilitates to treat her out
here”. I resisted them for the longest while not understanding the gravity of the situation. Finally, at 2.00 AM with
snow falling all over, I drove my car as fast as I could trying to keep up behind the racing ambulance heading north
as it cast red, blue, and white shadows in the falling snow.

While we were living in Portsmouth, I craved a non-vegetarian meal every Friday night. My favorite was a recipe
for Biryani that Ana made once a month. Also high on the list was Chinese fried rice: An Indianized version replete
with hot chilies. I wasn’t concerned about calories or fat content. Only with flavor, texture, satisfaction. I drank a
small glass of cheap brandy reserved only for those Friday nights – Our versions of rare red wine usually reserved
for special occasions, dipped my fork to find pieces of well-done crusty chicken between layers of flavored rice.
Cleaned our plates. Ate dessert. But those were carefree days when our biggest worry was deciding when the exact
dates to head to India in the summer.

Now here I was sitting in a chair that doubled as my bed. Hours after Jenny was transferred to CHAD she was
stabilized and put on a heavy dose of Prednisone; a powerful immune system suppressor that was also used for
cancer patients. A couple of bags of iron supplement infusion had brought her out of anemia for now and the color
had returned to her cheeks. Even as a teenager she was well aware of her prognosis and engaged the amused doctors
or the confused residents in long discussions about available treatments.

During the days in the hospital, I had begun to work on my phone as I sat next to her in bed. She had spent one week
when she was ill under observation in the pediatric intensive care unit at CHAD with a concerned gastroenterologist
hovering around her every two hours. The ward was filled with very sick kids, most of whom lived there. Two girls
were awaiting heart transplants; the older one had been in the hospital for nearly a year. A nine-year-old boy lived
along with his stuffed animals inside an isolation tent with tubes coming out of his stomach as his parents sat
outside. The halls and doors of the floor were decorated with the children’s art projects: watercolors of rainbows,
stick-figure drawings of families. Some of the rooms were equipped with video monitors so that the children could
communicate with their parents at home.

While Jenny dozed, I had wandered the halls, talking with some of the kids and sometimes when I dared, even with
their parents. I wandered outside the hospital in the February snow, my motions resembling a zombie – Animated,
deliberate, yet devoid of any mental connection. I went to the local Walmart to get her a comb to brush her hair or
get myself two of those dollar menu chicken sandwiches from Burger King. I brushed her hair twice a day as she
taught me to braid her hair and as a proud father, I even showed it off to a couple of nurses who were amused – A
spec of brightness in their usual dreary days.

As we had left the hospital driving back from Dartmouth after a six-day sojourn, the car had found its way among
those mountains heading back south, as the darkness around was brightened by an occasional truck passing by, it
suddenly hit me – All of it, just simultaneously. My vision blurred while my hands held the steering wheel tighter
until my knuckles turned white. I finally released my right hand and patted her head. She tilted her head slightly
towards me watching my face for a bit, silent as the car raced through back home.

“Transparency clause?”, she said before I could even understand what it meant. As an Indian parent to a fiercely
independent girl, we always had a more adversarial relationship – My advice and life lessons met with piercing
questions and logic. But the last week had changed us both. That authority, anger, adversity was all gone. It had
melted, vaporized, and instead filled with a veil of dread.

“Yes”, I said as I held her hand tightly. We would always be open, talk about things – Anything. No topic was taboo
anymore. Over the months, I would get an insight into a brilliant and sensitive girl as we would talk about anything
and everything – Poop, mensuration cycles, relationships, bachelorette endings, the agony of living with a chronic
disease for life.

But during the months that followed, I often found myself thinking about those children. Eventually—after Jenny
was well again and was traveling to India during the summer —I called the hospital social worker with whom I built
a good rapport and got an invitation to visit the children and their parents over the weekends to help out as a
volunteer. I started spending all my weekends at the hospital without telling my family about it. I wore a special
volunteer identification tag—though everyone on the unit knew I was a parent of a sick kid once here—and made
my way in and out of the children’s rooms. I sat in on their tutoring sessions, hovered in their doorways as the
doctors made their rounds.
The two heart-transplant girls had become close. The twelve-year-old took me aside one day. Her long dark hair
streamed in waves down the back of her pink bathrobe. I tried to braid her hair but failed miserably. She just
laughed.

“It’s hard to live here in the hospital, but you know what?” she told me.

“It would feel so good to just take a walk outside in this summer heat”, she said looking out of the window
wistfully.

There on the floor was the invisible veil that separated the healthy from the sick. It was impossible to be in that
hospital ward full of children and push thoughts of Jenny from my mind. I remembered the way that very same veil
had settled over us, like the sheerest netting, just some months earlier. On the ride home from Portsmouth circle, I
always felt a bit uncomfortable as I neared the lane that goes to the Portsmouth hospital, the large “H” by the side of
the road that meant nothing to us before, now made my heart go-to stone. We would make so many visits over the
years. The cars surrounding us were filled with lucky people going about their daily business. They were thinking
about what movies to watch tonight, their shopping list, or an annoying thing their spouse said last night. They had
no idea how good they had it.

And we—we had crossed over to a place where only one thing mattered. My entire perspective, the way I reacted
with the world, had been changed in an instant that night as I drove behind the ambulance flashing its red, white, and
blue lights in the snow. I now saw Jenny in the face of every child on that floor. I saw Ana and myself in the stooped
shoulders of each parent pacing the halls. We had come so close to devastation. We had been hung by our feet over
an abyss—and then pulled back. Our veil had lifted for now—but I knew the hidden fact, that the veil hovers,
always. It can descend on anyone, at any time. The way—if it is a way out—is to know this, but not let it stop you.

The nurses at CHAD were some of the most exhausted nurses I had ever seen. Their patients didn’t just come and
go, as they would in any other intensive care unit. They came and stayed, these children, with their malformed livers
and kidneys and hearts. They stayed and—through the daily act of care, the cleaning and disinfecting and flushing of
bedpans and stents and intravenous lines—the nurses came to love them. Those nurses knew the odds: More than
half of those children wouldn’t make it. The clock was always ticking. Donor organs wouldn’t arrive in time. A code
blue could be paged in anytime. But still—knowing what they knew—they didn’t hold back. They opened
themselves up to the possibility that their hearts would be broken again and again.

One morning, a few weeks into the volunteering, I took the two-hour journey as I did every Saturday morning that
summer. I walked up to the CHAD lobby. The guard knew me by now and waved me through. But I couldn’t get
into the elevator to the fourth floor, couldn’t press the button. I sat on the small sofa by the side and waited. I felt
like I might come apart— my legs refusing to move. I waited in the lobby for a while—that same lobby that I had
walked through heading to the receptionist as I asked which floor Jenny had been taken to. I was hoping it was
temporary, but the feeling didn’t pass. I turned around sat back in the car and drove, the entire two hours just a
minor blur in my head except for the memory of rolling down the window to throw away the hospital badge around
exit 32.

I called the social worker and told her that I couldn’t come in because I was sick—I just couldn’t do it but was too
embarrassed to say it either. These were families who had it so much worse than we ever did, even in our darkest
hour. But I had no professional distance. Even with my volunteer badge on, coming in from the outside, I wasn’t an
outsider. I couldn’t simply come and go. Each time I left the floor and re-entered the land of the lucky, my inner
voice asked me: Why them and not us? Why such terrible tragedies? Why is it that children should suffer? What had
they done wrong?

Months later, I texted one of the nurses on the floor to ask about the heart transplant girls. The twelve-year-old had
received a heart and died during surgery. The ten-year-old, alone in the hospital without her friend, was still waiting.
And so, I continued to clean or cook. I bought industrial cleaners in bright cheery colors from the dollar store:
Lemon flavored detergent, orange cleaning liquid, soft cleaning pads. They stacked up in the kitchen under the sink,
some in my restroom drawer. Every time I was worried, I silently vacuumed, washed, scrubbed, and cleaned
everything around the house as if that act would make a difference. Organizing my things gave me, for a moment, an
illusion of control.

I cooked pots of rice and daal. Ana and I gained eight pounds between us. The wafting scent of daal traveled around
the apartment bringing Jenny out from her room.

“Group Hug!!!”,

She called out and we all assembled in the middle of the apartment hugging each other – Me, Ana, Becky my
younger one, and Jenny, our glue. The four of us held each other in a tight circle, in an embrace that is beyond
proportions.

All the while, far above our Portsmouth apartment, the veil floated in the sky.
Smoke Signs (07.19.2015)

I was packing up the car for my trip to India when I heard the sound of my phone go off. The distinct sound of
Facebook receiving a message. It was the sound of news.

I was storing my chocolates and perishables, the last-minute stuff that I planned to take back to India for the family.
The flight left in four hours. As I looked at my cell phone scrolling through that Facebook message, I recall seeing
my face in the mirror across the wall. It was not the face of concern or someone stricken with worry, yet there was a
distinct sense of disturbance – Like a rock thrown in a calm green pond that was still for years.

Even then, this time I looked triumphant, probably slightly surprised.

“Crystal just sent a request to be added on Facebook,” I thought.

I saw her name on the top of the list of my newest additions.

Crystal Jim Fisher. There she was. I felt a strange and instant comfort.

She did know about me. She remembered.

And she was reaching out.

As I piled into my packed-to-the-gills car and began the drive down to the Portsmouth bus station, I kept my phone
in my lap, refreshing Facebook, again and again, to see if perhaps she had thought better of it and pulled it back.

But no, there she continued to be. My thumb hovered over her picture, a red-haired smiling face that I so well knew
yet had forgotten for all of those ten long years.

It took two days for me to friend her back. I was afraid of seeming too jumpy, too eager—though of course, I was
both. I wanted to know how she was, apprehensive if she had stayed sober and hopeful that things had worked out
for her from the last time we met – almost 10 years ago, close to the same date.

Finally, early one morning, as I sat in the sun-drenched bedroom in Bombay, long after the jet lag had passed, I
touched accept on my phone’s screen.

I saw it—a vision—two friends who had long ignored each other’s existence, sending the most modern version of a
smoke signal, each from their own islands, each hoping it will be seen by the other side.

I see you.

I see you, too.

Death (04.02.2001)

Climbing UP the hill in Fremont, CA on a slightly curved road on a lovely spring morning the sky was
extraordinarily blue, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was warm, not too hot.

It felt nice to be warm and the leaves were shining, and sparkle was in the air. It was an extraordinarily beautiful
morning. The high mountain was up there, impenetrable and the hills below were green and lovely.

As you walked along quietly, without much thought, one saw a dead leaf, yellow and bright red, a leaf from the
autumn. How beautiful that leaf was, so simple in its death, so lively, full of the beauty and vitality of the whole tree
and the summer.

Strange that it had not withered.

Looking at it more closely, one saw all the veins and the stem and the shape of that leaf. The leaf was all the tree.

Why do human beings die so miserably, so unhappy, with a disease of old age, senility, body shrunk, ugly?

Why can't they die naturally and beautifully as this leaf? What is wrong with us?

Despite all the doctors, medicines, and technology and all the agony of life, and the pleasures too, why don’t we
seem to be able to die with dignity, simplicity, and with a smile?
Once walking along a lane, one heard behind one a chant, melodious, rhythmic, with the ancient strength of
Sanskrit.

One stopped and looked around. An eldest son, naked to his waist, was carrying a pot with a fire burning in it. He
was holding it in another vessel and behind him were two men carrying the dead father, covered with white cloth,
and they were all chanting.

One knew what that chant was, one almost joined in. They went past and one followed them. They were going down
the road chanting, and the eldest son was in tears. They carried the father to the beach where they had already
collected a great pile of wood and they laid the body on top of that heap of wood and set it on fire.

It was all so natural, so extraordinarily simple: there were no flowers, there was no hearse, there were no black
carriages and black horses. It was all very quiet and utterly dignified.

And one looked at that leaf and a thousand leaves of the tree. The winter brought the leaf from its mother onto that
path and it would presently dry out completely and wither, be gone, carried away by the winds of time and lost.

As we teach our children mathematics, writing, reading, and all the business of acquiring knowledge, they should
also be taught the great dignity of death, not as a morbid, unhappy thing that one has to face eventually, but as
something of daily life - the daily life of looking at the blue sky and the grasshopper on the leaf.

It is part of learning as you grow teeth and have all the discomfort of childish illness. children have an extraordinary
capability of curiosity.

If you see the nature of death, you don't explain that everything dies, dust to dust and so on, but without any fear,
you explain to them gently and make them feel that the living and dying, they are one - not at the end of one's life
after fifty or sixty or ninety years, but that death is like that leaf.

Look at the old men and women, how decrepit, how lost, how unhappy, and how ugly they look.

Is it because they have not understood either the living or the dying?

They have used life, they waste away their life with incessant conflict, collecting, possessing, growing,
accumulating, securing, defending…

We spend our days in such varieties of conflict and unhappiness, with some joy and pleasure drinking, smoking, late
nights and work, work, work. And at the end of one's life, one faces that thing called death and is frightened of it.

One thinks it can always be understood, felt deeply. The child with his curiosity can be helped to understand that
death is not merely the wasting of the body through disease, old age, some unexpected accident but that the ending
of every day is also the ending of oneself every day.

Maybe there is no resurrection, maybe that is dogmatic.

Everything on earth, on this beautiful earth, lives, dies, comes into being, and withers away.

To grasp this whole movement of life requires intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, of books but the
intelligence of love and compassion with all its sensitivity.

One is very certain that if the educator understands the significance of death and the dignity of it, the extraordinary
simplicity of dying - If he understands not intellectually, but deeply, then within that, he may be able to convey it to
the child.
If all human beings who have lived before us, past generations upon generations still lived on this earth how terrible
would it be. The beginning is never the same shade of ending.

And one would like to help – no, that's the wrong word.

One would like in education to bring death into some kind of reality, actuality, not of someone else dying but of
each one of us, however young or old, having inevitably to face that thing.

It is not a sad state of affairs, of tears or loneliness or separation. We kill so easily, not only the animals for one's
food but the vast unnecessary killing for amusement, called sport - killing a deer because this is the season. Killing a
deer is like killing your neighbor.

You kill animals because you have lost touch with nature, with all the living things on earth, you kill in wars for so
many romantic, nationalistic and political ideologies.

In the name of God, you have killed people. Violence and killing go together.

As one looked at that dead leaf with all its beauty and color, maybe one would very deeply comprehend, be aware
of, what one's death would be, not at that very end but the very beginning.

Death isn't some horrific thing, something to be avoided, something to be postponed, but rather something to be with
day in and day out.

And out of that comes an extraordinary sense of immensity.

An ode to the Listeners (05.13.2015)

I am sitting outside having coffee with a colleague who is telling me about something from his
day.

The weather is starting to get much better and spring is finally here. There is a nip in the air but it feels good to be
finally outside.

He talks about how proud he is of his toddler’s intellectual skills and meanders to the people that work for him and
the usual office politics of it all.

I am paying attention but barely so. It’s a predictable conversation and predictability is sometimes the longest tread.

I pay attention in bursts and respond appropriately, but I am not fully there. I am slightly worried about my mom’s
health, about a couple of positions that I am holding in the portfolio…. about many things that mostly relate to,
well… me.

The conversation is cut short as we both have to rush to a meeting, and I am semi-thankful for it.

In the next half an hour, the tables are turned on me. I am in this meeting where it’s my turn to present.

As I walk half a dozen heads through some numbers and charts, I am at the same time taking their temperature.

Some are looking at the charts with glazed eyes while others are already forming a question in their head and are
barely holding their tongue.
Those are the two ends of the spectrum.

The rest fall in the middle.

After the meeting, I reflect on myself and my tendency to have an internal conversation even when the presenter is
talking.

I tend to tune them out and am rather concerned with my questions or the better ideas that I have instead.

It gets so bad that once an irritated colleague who also doubled up as a good friend had written down on a small
scrap of paper –

“Count to five and then talk…”.

That yellow scrap of lined paper has survived many years inside my wallet, but the tendency to interrupt verbally or
otherwise or listen to someone has gotten no better with time.

I define a good listener by all the things they are not doing.

Good listeners have no agenda.

They are propelled by nothing.

They have no intentions.

They are not thinking about what to say next.

They are not trying to figure out how to coax, convince or present their case.

They are not trying to fix it or thinking about a solution.

They are not mixing in their feelings or providing opinions.

They are as scarce as the ugly hen's teeth.

Good listeners are just open.

They are inviting you to speak up. They are a subtle boost for you when you are struggling to make yourself heard.

There is a sense of compassion instead of the struggle to asset power or superiority over the speaker.

Sometimes they ask questions, not to guide you somewhere, but to better understand what your thought process is.

This is how good listeners grant you the greatest gift of all.

The gift of feeling understood…

The Call (05.22.2013)

The walk from Huntington bank back to the hotel is less than a mile.
I am on a week-long consulting trip in Columbus Ohio and the weather is finally starting to behave. The walk is
short. The crowd has a life of its own, the vibrant clothes and makeup shimmer in the evening light and the people
move like enchanting shoals of fish. There is chatter between sellers and buyers, old friends catching up, new friends
being made.

The number is unknown, and I almost decide to ignore it but then I notice the 843-area code. There is only one
person that I know from there and I have not got that call in almost ten years now.

"Brown Bittttttttttch…...!!”, the voice is squeaky, almost tinny, yet the recognition is almost instant. There is only
one person on this planet who greets me by that name.

“White whoreeeeeeeeeee…!”, I blurt out loudly without a second thought, our customary names for each other, semi
greeting, semi acknowledgment of the thread of informality that still runs deep, after all this time. This is one of
those old friends that greets me with racial abuse and yet it’s the nicest thing I have heard all week.

A couple of heads jerk around towards me with disgust and I look down and walk faster, my face barely concealing
the joy. It’s been almost 10 years. Crystal. Jim. Fisher, long disappeared into the annals of time, had finally
resurfaced.

We talk about days long past and I ask if she ever visits Portsmouth. I know she does and every time she does, I get
a message to come to visit her, every time from different numbers, numbers that I never saved. Yet every year I get
it, without any prejudice or a question as to why I have been ignoring her. She never asks why, and I never care to
explain either.

Not until today...

“Z, can you come to , to visit me sometime?”. There is a pause, a hesitation, a moment of unvarnished vulnerability.
It’s different this time. She would never ask. Too proud for that.

“I have been terribly lonely down here. I could use someone to talk to...”

I start to find an excuse, but something stops me. Maybe it’s the tone of the voice that’s different from the years past
or maybe I am just curious. I want to know. Something holds me back though. I am not ready to see her even though
it’s been a while.

“I am flying back home tomorrow. Maybe some other time?”. The voice on the other end masks the disappointment
well. We talk about it here and there and I go through with it. We speak about random things and I stay on long
enough so as not to be rude or hurt her feelings. Then I go back to the hotel, curl up in a ball and suck my thumb.

As I sleep that night, dissatisfaction gnaws at me. I toss and turn as the long night slowly drags on. Slightly groggy I
muddle through some of the consulting sessions with the bank staff the next morning.

Thankfully, I have built up enough of goodwill that they probably either don’t notice the lack of sharpness or they
do and let it slide.

At 3.00 PM, I am already at the airport waiting in line to check-in. The flight to Boston does not leave until the next
couple of hours. The American Airlines terminal is extra busy today as I cool my heels in line for the next half an
hour.

I check my phone a couple of times, looking at the number from the evening call yesterday. I lock the phone and I
open it again as the line slowly progresses. Finally, I press green.

“Hey Z!!…”, the voice is as warm as ever. The southern warmth and hospitality never fade even after the most
obvious rejection of not just yesterday, but over many years. However, if you know some people well and have a
sharp ear for things not said, you know that formality is a downgrade. I know she is hurt but I would never see that.

A rescheduled flight is not a big deal in my line of work. That’s what a platinum status is for. I have nothing much
to do all weekend. My family is out in India.

“What are you doing today evening?”

“Making the spiciest chicken Jambalaya in all of Myrtle Beach. There is a bottle of Malibu coconut rum with your
name written all over it…”. She already knows.

I laugh. There are no questions, just a simple acceptance of things, the way they are. The twinkle in the voice is back
though. There is the old Crystal lurking somewhere down there even after all the toll that life has taken.

“See you in a couple of hours C…”

“See you, brown bitch”.

Yeah…Brown bitch is back.

Yachts & Nails (06.21.2010)

I am invited to one of the yearly parties thrown by the investment bank that I currently consult for in downtown
Toronto.

It's a huge event, lavishly thrown, and at the end of it, a selected bunch of us are invited the next day to sail the yacht
owned by the managing director of the bank. I know him well having sat on many long meetings with him and find
him to be a pretty agreeable chap.

On the day of the event, we all meet at the pier where the vessel is docked. As the boat leaves the dock, we all help
ourselves to the generous spread of food and drinks.

It is a fine, sunny day, and there is a nice, warm breeze blowing.

During the trip, we all take a turn steering the boat. It is splendid sailing weather and couldn’t have been a more
perfect day.

“It’s a beautiful boat. You must love it,” one of my coworkers remarks with admiration.
“Yeah, it’s nice,” the director says, as he shrugs with indifference,

“But I want to get a 100-footer someday”, he says with a confident laugh looking over at the sunset.

The day before, Jaime, the office assistant, had walked into work after her lunch break with a dreamy smile on her
face.

“What’s up, Jaime?” I prodded teasingly.

“My boyfriend got me a manicure. I just love manicures Z,” Jaime says, holding out her hands proudly to show me
her newly manicured nails.

She then proceeds to throw her arms up and hugs me while still keeping her nails at bay.

Jaime wore that dreamy smile for the rest of the day, and I wear one too just thinking about her.

...

Two simple incidents in two days and I find myself learning a small lesson on life.

Maybe one should accept the fact that happiness in life is not something I can find externally. It is not determined by
how much money I have or who I am.

It cannot be found on a yacht . . . Equally not in bigger yachts, in self-help seminars, sitting cross-legged on
California mountaintops, in newly minted cars, or Ivy League educations.

Happiness seems like is a state of eccentricity that just bubbles up from within. Like an oil gusher that refuses that
stay underground. Whether I am happy or unhappy depends on me and the lenses through which I see the world.

It’s not a difficult thing to rationalize this. Internalizing this is a completely different endeavor.

I stand there on the upper deck of that 40-footer running through Lake Ontario, soaking the sun, surrounded by
millionaires, drinking champagne from artistic flute glasses, wondering who I was......

and who I have lately become.

Racist (07.14.2009)

A man approached me today asking if I knew where a certain street was.

He was what’s called here in South Africa “colored” meaning of mixed ancestry—indigenous Khoisan people and
European settlers. Dressed in a reflective jacket and overalls, he was slightly grubby, shabby, and sweaty. At first, I
thought he wanted money and I hurried to my car, lowering my gaze to avoid him. But he just wanted directions.

“Sorry,” I said, after taking a look at the paper he handed me, “I don’t know where this is.”

And as I drove away, it occurred to me that I could have used my phone to find the place. Or inquire at the shop
around the corner. Or even taken him with me in my car until we found the street. Driving down the road later it
occurred to me that had he been a nicely dressed, fair-skinned individual of higher standing, I would have probably
done so. With this guy, I just didn’t bother.

Sometimes, I forget to stop for non-white people at the crosswalk. It’s funny because they don’t expect me to stop,
either. How do I know? They’re always surprised when I end up stopping. They wave their hands at me as if to say,
“No, you go.”

But I insist, waving back, “Please, after you.”

If it’s a well-dressed white person? I’ll stop before I even have time to reflect. It’s an in-built automatic reaction
within me.

A Zimbabwean lady comes and cleans my hotel room when I am living in Toronto. She’s a real blessing. Always in
good spirits. Loves to talk about her life and always has a kind word for everyone. A real upbeat, look-at-the-bright-
side kind of person.

The hotel is also a real blessing for her. She says she’s never had an employer who’s treated her so well, so kindly.
Sometimes, she even cries when she talks about that. I don’t know what she’s been through with other employers.
When I was in the US, I had a white woman come and clean my hotel room every day. I always felt very
uncomfortable when she was around. Like she shouldn’t be the one doing the cleaning.

Whenever I go to see a highly trained professional—a doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc—I hope he or she will be
white. I’m comforted by the skin tone. I don’t want anyone non-white. I assume someone non-white won’t be as
capable, thoughtful, thorough. Intelligent.

I’m racist in more ways than are comfortable for me to accept. It’s not easy for me to live with it. I don’t care too
much about the woke culture that has enveloped us these days. I laugh and joke about a lot of non-appropriate things
with my brothers from different countries, but somehow this is different. I understand that I subtly discriminate
against specific people with my innately biased mindset.

But recently I do see it happen within me every time it does.

The seeing is the acceptance.

Acceptance is healing.

Healing is the change.

Playback (02.19.2016)

Ana and I were at dinner with a couple of our older friends.

They were in their 70’s now with grown-up kids. Unlike most people with disconnected age groups, we get along
well. They are good people and possibly good friends of ours. The guy, Rustom was someone I’ve known since I
moved to Cleveland. With my father gone and few relatives left, these ties to my few remaining friends have
become increasingly important to me. This guy was at my younger daughter’s birthday. He had bought clothes for
her and gifts that we sincerely appreciated. I knew him for a while now and he was probably the only one who I was
comfortable talking to as we had common interests in finance. We were familiar with each other’s kids, situations,
and lives.

Dinner was at a restaurant in Cleveland, a hushed place with artistically arranged food and dimly lit lighting, just
enough to make us look slightly more flattering. We were grown-ups now—there was no shadow of a doubt there.
We at least pretended like we were adults, had adult lives. He had two young children, I had two. It was a pleasant
setting meant for benign conversations.

The four of us were talking about our kids when the subject turned to memory. Why do we remember some of the
very specific things we do? Great pain carves its psychological path. But why some of the completely random,
ordinary moments?

“I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, watching my mother make me sev, a vermicelli dish from the Persian
household,” he said. He looked puzzled for a minute, reaching back. For a second I feared if he was having a mini-
stroke.
“She must have made me sev hundreds of times. But I remember that one particular time. The slightly charred yet
sweet scent of it”

I knew what all of us were thinking. What would our kids remember? The oldest among them—Jenifer—was nine.
What ordinary moments had imprinted themselves on her at this point? And what about the painful ones? Ana and I
never fought, especially in front of kids, but there had been an argument or two over the years that she had
witnessed. Would that be what she took away from our peaceful, simplistic family life? Her parents scrunchy-faced
and hissing at each other in hushed tones? I hoped not. Lord, I hoped not. But then who knew?

I always tried to create a daily sense of consistency and habit in our household, two types of glue that I felt would
make the kids feel secure. Well, it had been in ours at least when I was growing up even though we did not have
much to fend for but there was always this sense of security and consistency that we depended upon, almost took it
for granted. So I organized little traditions around benign times. On birthdays, we bought little cakes from Market
Basket, looking especially for those on sale. We ordered pizzas sometimes and I drove down to the local dominos to
get them, piping hot and ready just so I could save on the tip we had to give if they were instead delivered.

On our table, I kept a book of Buddhist wisdom at times borrowed from the library, open to a different page each
day. Some nights I would recite a story of the Buddha or along those lines, soak a bit in the little snippet of wisdom
and look at the accompanying photograph. The flying red and white katas (flags) of Tibet. The monk meditating in
the hidden valley, his face quiet and peaceful. Had any of it been absorbed by them? Would Becky be sitting in a
restaurant with friends someday when she was old enough to need reading glasses to study the menu, and remember
a completely random event from her childhood?

My father yelled at me because I didn’t clean my room. He made me feel guilty at times that I wasn’t doing enough.
My mother made me a chicken dish for school lunch.

Who knew what would stick? It was all in there somewhere, conscious and unconscious. Which of it finally stuck,
what came up to the surface—and why?

“I feel no connection to the kid I was,” his wife suddenly said. I had never heard her say anything like this before.
“I’m a completely different person.”

I understood feeling like a completely different person. I had been a very late bloomer, and when I thought back to
my teenage self, my twenty-something self, I had a nagging thought – In all my life, childhood, adolescence, and
teenager or after, I never had anyone who I could call a friend. I had acquaintances, even people with who I was
close, used to laugh, gossip, or share, but there was always a part of me that held me back. Something that told me to
gladly share, but then keep a part of you for yourself.

But no friends? I looked at my wife sitting across the table and I felt a sense of shame. She was the closest I would
have to someone who I would label as a confidant, but even then, there were things I would never tell her either. It
was just who I was, the way I was built. Could she see that in me? Was she—surely there must be—a satisfaction of
knowing every intimate detail about your partner? Was sharing everything a precursor for friendship? Had I
interpreted too strict a definition for what friendship was all about? At that moment, sitting at that table, I felt a sense
of seeping discomfort, sadness actually – I wish there was someone I could call a friend, unburden, confide, and yet
not feel a sense of unloading onto someone – My burden becoming theirs.

I had a few memories of my childhood, and my adolescence was a blur. My life came into focus for me around the
time I left for the USA. But still, I knew that each part of me—the lost adolescent fat kid, the seething angry young
guy, the conflicted son, the grown man still trying to sort it all out—is linked one to the next, like a fragile chain of
spider webs connected.

But no, just no friends. Completely different person. I could see that it would be advantageous, maybe even
preferable, to give up or forget pieces of the past—all the uncomfortable, unexplainable, embarrassing pieces of
your past, just so your life could be remembered as one endless stream of cute memorable events.

But deep inside me, I knew better. I had experienced my memory as something of a living entity, a palpable
presence in my entity. I have had nights when I slept that I had felt my past unfurl inside me as if it had a mind of its
own. These memories – Layers upon layers of them are always there, waiting for just the right moment to emerge.

The cooking of a fresh batch of sev and its sweet scent wafting. An overheard argument that lingers long after it’s
done. A pair of legs hanging from the ceiling. The red and white katas of Tibet flying around.
.
A mix of epiphanies, perhaps, but then nothing is ever missing.

It’s just hidden from view.

Return to Bombay (08.04.2006)

One afternoon, before Ana and her kids, have joined me in Bombay; I am walking on the road leading to the Strand
bookstore when I see a small family walk by.

A mother with wild and ragged hair, walking with a year-old baby boy, fast asleep on her shoulder and leading by
the hand another boy, maybe four or five, who is rubbing his eyes with the fist of his free hand. He is walking the
way children walk when they have been forced to walk for a long time, legs jerking outward, head nodding in a
circle, to beat the monotony. They are all barefoot.

The mother says something gentle to the older boy who is still clutching her hand. I walk past them but then I almost
have to stop. I stand and watch. They come up to a stall on the sidewalk and, as I expect her to, the mother holds out
her hand.

The stall owner doesn’t acknowledge them. I automatically find myself opening my wallet. I look for a ten, and then
take out a fifty instead, and walk up to them fast, almost too fast, my mind raging.

I thrust the fifty into her hand and walk away quickly without looking back until I get to the air-conditioned
bookstore, and then I stand in a corner and stare blankly ahead. The identification with my past and my own family
is pretty strong—a mother with two young kids and in that vein, I start constructing a past and a future for them.

Probably they would have walked like that all day long, barefoot in the heat. A hundred times a day the boys would
have seen their mother hold out her hand to beg. A hundred people would be watched by those clear young eyes as
these strangers curse their mother, tell her to move on, or throw some change at her, and still, she would carry them
on her shoulders when they were tired.

Sometimes she might put them down in the dirt, and then they would eat a little rice or sleep where they were, tired
but all the wearier from the hopelessness of the long stretch of life lies ahead of them.

All-day long I feel ashamed of spending money. Everything I spend that day becomes a multiple of that 50-rupee
note.

Within twenty minutes of my giving money to the mother, I have spent six times as much on books.

The pizza I order in the evening is two of those fifties.

The rent I will be paying per month on my flat will be two hundred times that fifty.

What had my giving them a fifty changed?

For me, it almost meant nothing: pocket change, less than a Boston subway token.

I haven’t yet learned to take the brightly colored money seriously. It would probably be a whole day’s earnings for
the mother.

Perhaps she will take her boys and with her sudden good fortune buy them a toy from the arcades under the Fort’s
arches.

Perhaps she will buy the medicine she hasn’t been able to afford for the younger child’s cough or perhaps she will
take the money and give it to her man, who will buy six more bottles of country liquor and that is the obscenity here
-

Our lives have two entirely separate systems of currency.

I am still new in the country. It has not hit me till now, and I feel a bit exhausted.

I call Ana in Boston and ask her if the kids are well, feeling an immediate need to be close to my family. I am still
reacting to the city as a foreigner. I remember what a French friend had told me about her mother, a social worker in
Paris. The first time she came to India, she stepped outside the airport with her bags to have a horde of street
children come up to her, babies being carried by only slightly older ones. Overcome by their destitution, their youth,
their innocence, she opened up both her bags on the sidewalk and started handing out gifts. Within minutes her bags
were picked clean. Thus unburdened, she stood up and walked forth into India.

The previous evening, I had come home from the Library Bar after a small party of billionaires, people richer than
any I’d ever met in New York. In the daytime, I had been walking around the slums of Bandra, scenes of complete
deprivation.

As I wake up now in this flat overlooking the sea, the children of Andheri have long since been up in their shanties.

Maybe they are working at construction sites, holding on their heads baskets of bricks weighing half as much as
themselves or maybe they are running, fetching tea, washing vessels, servicing the desires of men.

This, too, is a kind of childhood.

Favorite Things (03.22.2012)

I am in the Marylebone suburb of London sitting alone for dinner at the table at the famous Pakistani restaurant
called Lahore.

She walks up and sits at the table just next to mine. We are barely five feet apart.

The waiter sets before me an order of Biryani, a concoction of marinated meat and fried rice with caramelized
onions on the top. Just the way I like it.

I notice her looking at the dish.

"It looks great, doesn't it?"

"It sure does,".

"What’s that thing placed at the top?", she says pointing to the caramelized onions.

"I don't know. Why don't you try one and tell me?", I am laughing.

She thinks I am kidding.

"I can't eat from your dinner,” she says incredulously.

"Sure, you can,” …. “Honestly, I'm happy to share."

She smiles, moves her hand, and puts her fork in the air questioningly looking for my approval.

I nod.

She takes a bite, then another and soon we are sharing plates and laughing.

We talk about the ingredients in the biryani. I admit that it’s something that I had never eaten when I was young, but
I can afford it now. She tells me she is of Iranian descent and how her parents used to have a similar dish when she
was a child.

We talk about what she does for a living and why we both happened to be sitting in that restaurant on the same day
at the same time. She and her friend had gone somewhere else, but it was too crowded, so they left and ended up
here before her friend got a call and had to go.

We speak about the differences between our cultures and find out that we aren’t that different even though we are
brought up thousands of miles apart and end up another thousand away from what we call - Home.

We giggle conspiratorially and decide to tell each other how old we are and then we laugh about how we should
both add a couple of years to our numbers which then delves into a deeper discussion as to why as humans we end
up doing that, even though we don’t have an agenda.

Towards the end of the conversation, we talked about relationships, told each other things about ourselves, and on
being asked, I do tell her that I am married.

She nods understandingly and asks to see a picture of my wife and kids. I tell her that I don’t have any and that I
never keep one in my wallet.

“Me too”, she says softly, and it takes a couple of seconds before I understand the implications of her words.

She ends up talking to me about their life, the inherent complications, and how the connection between them, frayed
as it may be, still exists.

“There was no friend today…. I have been walking the suburbs tonight to clear my head after a fight we had”, she
says suddenly without a prompt as if she wants to get it out.

I pat her hand silently, in slight sympathy…

She doesn’t flinch, just looks at me and smiles, a bit sadly.

The waiter has cleared the tables and it’s getting late into the night.

"Wow," she says, lightening up the mood at the table.

"What I just told you is not exactly a secret, but I don't think I've ever told anyone either."

"Why do you think you told me?"

"Because," she says, her head slightly bent towards me as she draws me closer. I can smell her perfume now.

"Strangers are not tangled up in your life. Sometimes it's easier to talk to someone you don't know than to someone
you've known for years."

Strangers, and interesting conversations.

These are the two of my favorite things.
Chains (12.14.2015)

" What is it that you want to achieve in life?", they ask with immense curiosity.
"What are your dreams?”,

I am questioned in forums and seminars, one after the other. Asked by my friends, my peers, and sometimes even
my children.

I am always inherently ashamed when I get asked these questions.

Ashamed, because I have no appropriate answer that can satisfy them.

Ashamed because my answers are radically opposite of what the appropriate answers should be.

Ashamed that I cannot explain to them that I have tasted the nectar of emptiness.

That I have peered into the abyss, once maybe twice even if it was just for a few moments.

Instead of achieving something in life, I want to do the exact opposite.

To figuratively downsize.

To shed the burdens and labels that I have been carrying around.

Why accumulate more chains around my ankles when I can barely walk when my dream is to instead dive into the
empty abyss of mindlessness?
Those formulas that were learned in my childhood.

Those social cues on what makes me as a guy slightly more attractive to the opposite sex.

The ability to successfully mask what I am feeling inside, be it happiness or otherwise.

I want to drop it all.

Don't you want to get a promotion?

No. If you promote me to be a manager, I'll go find another job. I just don't want to be responsible for managing
people, in fact managing anything significant.

Don't you want to help hundreds, maybe thousands by dreaming big instead of your pathetic attempts at feeding one
or two random people? Why limit your vast potential?

No. The commercialization of empathy doesn't work for me. I want to stop trying to get somewhere and instead look
in their eyes and talk to them, even if it is for a few minutes a day.

Don't you want to be a good effective leader?

No. I don’t want to lead anyone, period.

The answer cannot be and should not be negative as long as I want to exist in this society, and yet,

Why do I want to answer it that way?

Such a loser, unambitious, coward. You have no goals at all. You don't want to better yourself. That's such a lame
attitude in life.

"Don't you dare call me that! I'll f***ing rip your head off".

And there it is...

Someday, I'll be able to shed the biggest burden of them all.

My ego, that still gets deeply offended at every small slight - Perceived or otherwise.
The Proposal (02.28.1997)

" Do you want to be...more than friends?"

She asks while we are sitting on the floor cross-legged in her house. Her mother is baking bread and the distinct
smell permeates the entire place.

I look down at the floor and back at her. Her eyes are gentle and kind. She is not demanding an answer. There is
almost a hesitancy in the question and almost no expectation of a response.

She is the kindest person I know. Nobody has taken care of me as she has. Nobody has put thought into buying a gift
for my birthday. Her mother is almost like my own, a decent and gentle lady who has brought up her girl with a light
touch of sensibility.

The smell of fried egg rolls waft through the air and I am really hungry. It’s almost month end and I have no money
left to buy breakfast and haven’t eaten during the entire day. The promise of a couple of those unearthly delicacies
sounds just about right. If this is what is in store if I acquaint, I am all for it.

The decision is made. I look up and nod …even smile a bit.

"Yes", I say for good measure lest I be misinterpreted …and just like that, we are in a relationship.

There is no splendor of a ring. No ambiance or dinner before the big reveal of a proposal. No friends congratulating.

The simplicity of it all is almost laughable. For such a momentous decision, I am amazingly poised.
It’s almost as if the decision is taken by the universe on my behalf.

"Did I just make a mistake or is this a great beginning?", the thought crosses over and is gone in a second, as soon as
she breaks into a big smile.

I so really like this girl.

A decision that I would have spent days and nights vexing over is taken on my behalf with astounding simplicity
and clarity.

I don’t know the answer to it yet, but my limited intelligence does realize that it's a pivotal moment in my life.

I look at my clock and etch the time down to the seconds in my brain as I always do when I feel like there’s
something big happening.

February 28th, 1997. 06.47.33 pm.

The Enemy behind the Walls (06.22.2019)

“ But..., you don’t look sick…?”

I kept saying to her as she described her symptoms to me. A myriad of maladies, which did not make sense.

Crystal, my friend was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in her mid-twenties. She was extremely
beautiful, intelligent, and high functioning for many years, but the illness ate at her until she eventually could no
longer handle the stresses of her life.

In a few instances when my friend told someone she met that she was disabled, they commented that she looked
fine.

I laughed when she told me she was on disability and that she could no longer work. I thought about the welfare
leeches.

Unlike other disabilities, you couldn’t obviously “see” her illness. She wasn’t in a wheelchair. Her limbs were all
sound, and she was physically in great health. People often looked at her as if she was faking an illness.

As a result, my friend rarely told anyone she was disabled.

“Why can’t you look at the glass half full?”

“Pull yourself together.”

“Why are you harping on things?”

“You’ll feel better if you get out of bed and get some fresh air.”

These are just a few of the things people have said to my friend Crystal over the years. People including myself.

People understand migraines and flu. They understand when you have lost a limb or have cancer. People bring
chicken soup and rally around people with physical illnesses.

But those with mental illnesses are often met with disbelief and a sense that the illness is not a real illness, but
something that is being caused by a bad temperament.

If you just tried a bit harder, everything would be just ok.

Over the years, she lost touch with many friends as she learned to hide away from the world while she sank into the
dark clouds of depression or began a new cycle of mania that lasted days, if not weeks.

Few saw the disease that ate away at the brilliant girl who held dual degrees in art and economics. The silent thief
that stole away my amazing friend who was once so full of life.

Strangers, acquaintances, and even friends never saw what I had seen glimpses of.

They didn’t see when she wouldn’t sleep for days on end from stress and mania.

“Z, I feel like I am falling into a dark hole…. Someone is coming for me”, she kept repeating as she rocked back-
and-forth in between bouts of anger.

She could not understand what was happening to her. How could she? The mind, the mechanism that records,
registers, analyses, concludes, and understands the world around you, in itself has been compromised.

They didn’t see her pacing back and forth, sick with worry as she replayed past conversations and encounters.

They didn’t see the wild look in her eyes when mania took over or as she created a shrine for her passed away
boyfriend or wrote on the walls or recorded “weird” Facebook posts all night.

One barely could hold back when she is an unaware moment punched me hard enough to create an hour-long
nosebleed.

They didn’t see the desolate vessel in the shape of that amazing girl lying on the couch for days on end, staring
blankly into space.

They didn’t see the inner turmoil that ravaged her and the nights when she prayed to blink out of existence in her
sleep.

What people need to understand is that mental illness is a real illness.

But beyond that, it is a terribly lonely illness.

A bipolar person can do no more to curb their outbursts or control how they feel or act during a depressive or manic
episode than a person with a terrible stomach infection can curb their need to throw up.

A person with mental illness cannot shrug off their mental illness any more than a person with a broken leg can
mend their leg through sheer willpower.

Understand …. or at least make a genuine attempt to., but please don’t fake it. Even in their devastated state, they
will know, and this will destroy them more.

Don’t dare to even make a fake attempt at understanding them or what they go through.

Just don’t.

I say it because I tried that, and I was one of them.

I watched her go from a stunningly beautiful girl who could hold the entire room captive, someone who had 4-5
local cops show up daily to ask for her attention, a girl who could talk art and economics with equal fluency and yet
outdrink you under the table….to the hollow shell that you would barely recognize when nobody visited her
anymore at her small room in Charleston, WV.

I brought her soup daily from work and when she stopped opening the door, leaving it on the footsteps.

I could never understand the turmoil that waged in her head as her mind, her most powerful ally turned against her.

I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to deal with it. She was not my priority. I had a lovely happy family to tend
to.

I stopped taking her calls and put her number on the ignore list for 10 long years going without contact just because
she asked for hundred dollars to buy Oxy so she could knock herself out when it got too much and offered herself to
me in exchange for it when I declined to give her the money.

I walked out of her house on that balmy summer night in August 2005 and never looked back.

For 10 long years, I never cared. Just the good memories. Everything else, I erased. Sanitized.

Didn’t even remember her except for a couple of good stories on how we drank warm beer at 2 am sitting on a
lifeguard stand at Hampton beach many years ago or how we walked in the rain while people ran for shelters or how
we curated music albums to pick the best songs.

But when the going got tough, I ran. Ran back to the family and never looked back at my friend or how she was
doing.

It probably wouldn’t have taken much. Just a quick phone call. Her father said she always kept asking for Z – Her
brown b*tch as she called me affectionately. Even when under the throes of deep mania.

He just didn’t know who Z was or that we had met for precisely three months in the summer of 2005.
“I wish I knew where you were or how I could contact you”, the little thin man said looking back into her room
filled with handmade glowing stars stuck everywhere…

I held him and cried.

I cried not for her, but for his forgiveness. Nothing hurts a parent more than a child. I understand that pain now.

A tad bit too late though among the scheme of things….

She passed away on January 23rd, 2019.

The coroner ruled it a suicide.

Know that the next time you meet someone with a mental illness, that what they need is respect, acceptance, and
support, not judgment or advice on how to “fix” it or worse - Your ghosting.

And no matter how much they appear to be pushing people away or hiding from the world, treat the person the same
way as you would, a person with any other illness.

Offer a hug, sympathy, and some kind words, if any – And if you can, a little bit of your time...

Even if you don’t know it, it might have gone a long way to provide some normalcy in their emotionally ravaged
and extremely lonely world as they single-handedly attempt to battle their protector turned foe….

Their mind.
Ramona (09.12.1994)

As Ramona sees me coming into the club with my friends, her face lights up.
We walk easily past the burly guards and velvet paneled oak doors into the VIP room, armed with the magic key of
her name. She whispers to the waiter, and seats are cleared for us while everyone else is kept standing.

Ramona has the songs I like playing for me, and she dances to them, letting go of many thousands of rupees that
other men are offering her to dance for them.

All the assembled businessmen, sheiks, and tourists crane their necks to see who this dignitary is for whom the
reserved signs are taken off the best tables.

I wonder what she is looking for when doing this favor. In love as in war, as Ramona knows so well, the most potent
weapon you have in your man’s ear.

Ramona had been explaining the difference between sex, love, and friendship to Priya when we were sitting for
breakfast at the dhaba on Nasik highway.

“What is sex? Sex is nothing. What you need is someone who will be there for you all night, whose breathing you
can hear when you get up in the middle of the night, who you can still see in your bed in the morning. A person with
whom you can have a relationship that lasts more than six hours, a friend you can have for life. I have only one
friend, this guy, she says pointing at me. It’s pure friendship. There is no love in it.”

“What about Raj?”, someone asks.

“That began in friendship, but then love came in. It’s strange.”

She is talking about love as if it were a pollutant that destroyed the purity of something, she took to be eternal.

I am explaining all this to a friend, a poet.

“Ramona is a specialist in making men fall in love with her. I have been following her life for a while now.
Since January I’ve been meeting her or speaking to her on the phone almost every single day.”

“Oh, so she’s succeeded.”

“In what?” I ask before I realize the inherent implication.

“Every person wants me,” Ramona had said. People in Nasik think I want her too, and when they see how I am
received at the club, they infer that she has probably given in to my wants.

I know how spicy she likes her food or how sweet she likes her coffee or what type of underwear she likes to wear. I
know how she likes to make love or when she is sad, when she is suicidal when she is exuberant.

What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?

“There is one person who knows my entire life,” Ramona tells Priya pointing towards me with her fork.

“I’ve told him every little detail.”

She reveals it to me, in large and small chunks, till her life is transferred from Ramona to me.

I wonder what the consequences of this transfer will be on her and in turn, on me?

At some point, the Ramona that I’m writing in these pages will become more real, more alluring, than the Ramona
that is flesh and blood.

It would come as a surprise to her when she realizes that what I am looking at, is a girl beyond her, much bigger
than herself, in the mirror beyond her, and it is that Ramona that I am getting to spin and twirl under the confetti of
my words.

The more I write, the faster my Ramona dances.

Comparisons (05.28.2004)

B
“ e careful what you surround yourself with because you become what you surround yourself with”, he says with a
slightly mystical frown.

I was sitting in a two-day retreat when I heard these words for the first time, probably the only time. I heard them,
ignored them, and went back to the endless loop of thoughts that was playing in my mind. Some story that was not
relevant yet occupied my entire attention and grief at that point in time.

Later as I was driving back home after the retreat ended, I suddenly remembered those words again. They were like
tulips buried in the snow — Having slept through the winter, they had resurfaced in my conscience. I was starting to
see how true those turned out to be. If I had talked to my coworker, he was in there. If I had received an email from
a friend, she was in there. If we had been at a dinner party the night before, the guests were sitting in there, each
lined up in his own place speaking, without interruption.

What was cluttering my mind when I wasn’t noticing? Sometimes, particularly while driving, I would realize with
an abrupt start that I had driven many miles without the slightest bit of awareness. The outside world was a blur. My
eyes were watching the road but I was not there. I was lost in some story — usually, a story that hadn’t even begun.
Over time, I began to wonder whether these stories had anything in common.

During my retreat in California, forced inward by the silence, I found some vague sense of clarity. I began to notice
that no matter where my mind traveled, it all came down to this: it kept comparing. “How am I doing?”, it constantly
asked. Am I down or am I up today? How do people perceive me? Does she fancy me? Does he think I’m smart? I
cared — I saw this — with a sense of sickening horror in a single instant of realization. It was depressing, in fact, to
realize how much of my mental chatter involved either shoring myself up or tearing myself down. How am I doing?
— The constant stock market of emotions being traded over the counter of time, changing hands swiftly.
The awareness that I was always comparing myself to the external world was hard to tolerate, particularly in that
sense of silence. I began to wonder if other people did this too? I looked around the meditation hall at the other
participants. The girl with the straight blonde hair who looked more like a model than a yogin — she probably didn’t
compare herself to other people. What about the young guy in the front row, wearing the gray sweater? It would
never have crossed his mind. As I took stock of the room, I suddenly realized with a start that I was comparing, even
about comparing.

As I sat back in a meditation session, I started to think. This time the thoughts turned towards my friends. I
considered them the perfect couple. I admired their dynamic and basked in their energy when we went out together:
they seemed to be so in love, genuinely interested in each other’s lives, a great team, deeply considerate of each
other. It was so touching to witness those gentle, discreet moments of true consideration. The sweater he would take
off to cover her shoulders when she shivered, the water she poured for him when he was busy talking.

I always considered my own relationship as a very placid one. Not too many up’s or down’s with all the credit for
that going to my better half. Time has given us perspective. Happiness, we’ve learned, changes everything, even if
you have to lose everything first. And love, especially late-life love, leaves room for adaptation as I have learned, for
crafting an intentional life, for friendship and equality in a partnership that doesn’t often exist in bonds formed out
of young love or a stereotypical idea of how life should supposedly be. It’s a kind of happiness that isn’t the hard
work that people claim relationships are supposed to be, and it isn’t made up of thrills or highs and lows. It’s a quiet
kind of contentment that arises from a relationship in which two people are at peace with one another.

Some years later, as I caught up with that couple, I found out about their divorce and the circumstances behind their
decision to split up. It reminded me that we don’t know what happens in the lives of others. That we often hold up
our own lives against something that is in fact a mirage. That a lot of what we perceive is not real.

None of this is ever a surprise.

What is a surprise is that this is something I already knew and kept forgetting — Probably because my mind refused
to stop comparing. My life against theirs. Their lives against mine — An endless feedback loop that came up with
surprisingly different results every time depending on our circumstances.

“The far enemy of peace is envy,” said Anya as she translated.

“And the near-enemy is comparing.”

My ears pricked up. The near-enemy of peace was comparing? I hadn’t paid much attention to the sense of peace in
my head. I felt joy for other people — easily reveling in the happiness and success of others. So I hadn’t really paid
much attention to this newfound thought. I figured I had it down.

“It’s painful and unskillful to compare,” Anya said, “no matter what conclusion we draw. Comparing creates
agitation in the mind.”

I felt the old monk’s words permeate through my being in that very instant. There was the lesson and the
internalizing of the lesson all at once happening as I sat there on the hard floor. The comparison itself was the root of
many of my maladies. Whether I was up, or down, or sideways was incidental to the very act of comparison —
against some unaware soul.

I understood this to be true. As I walked through the sequence of events, I realized how I felt when I compared
myself to someone else — whatever the result, even when I came out looking slightly better. It was diminishing,
slightly sickening.

Lost in a story? — Come back, come back, I urge myself these days.

Where were my feet? I ask, suddenly stopping mid-walk.

Ah, right there. Beneath me on the ground.

Where was my breath? I stop mid-sentence checking myself suddenly.

It had filled every pore of my lungs, whether or not I paid attention.

Where are you? The universe asks me from time to time.

Held in this grain of sand — The present moment of eternity.

The Unknown (09.28.1981)

I find myself envious of something which I think, which I feel, to be true, which I would like to have, but it has
always eluded me, it has always gone beyond my grasp.

I have come, as I have often come, to this realization that past experiences of joy cannot be eternally replicated. If
only I could experience it once again, then that very memory will nourish me.

The inexplicable lack of understanding of what death means.

We are a family of six, my parents, me, and my two sisters along with my grandmother. My younger sister is just 9
months old. She is much fairer than us, almost regal in demeanor while we look more like the usual darker shade of
brown.

One day she fell sick, but we did not worry too much. All the kids in Bombay are sick much of the time. It is the bad
air, the bad water, the bad food—and the country still has 1 billion people.

One billion thin, often sickly, but alive people, some of them magnificently alive.

It is almost 7.30 in the morning. I am still sleepy-eyed as my grandmother wakes me up.

Her first words are “Anu passed away last night. We have to go to the funeral”.
For a second, I don’t relate to it as my sister. She cannot be my sister. Nothing bad happens to me, or her, or our
family.

I get up rubbing my eyes, not understanding the words or probably refusing to understand them.

We get ready and my grandmother takes us through the crowds in the bus and then the train and finally a long uphill
trek, to the towers of silence – the burial ground for us Parsis.

I see her little body laid out on a cold stone slab, my mom cried out, my dad trying to act brave.

The only serene one was my grandmother. She has an aura of peace and I want to be close to that, be enveloped by
that.

She holds us close, but we are children, and we want to go play.

As the priests chant prayers for an hour, I play catch-and-go with my other younger sister. Two young souls not yet
scarred by death and the enormity of its implications.

It’s a long life and there will be enough time for that.

The prayers are finally over, and two men lift her tiny body on a thatched metal carrier on each shoulder. My sister
suddenly stops playing and runs towards the iron carrier as people hold her back.

My mother suddenly starts to wail, and we stop playing to watch as the carriers go away in the distance, climbing
the stairs rapidly towards the small open door at the top of the hill. They will lay down the body on the other side for
the vultures to devour.

Those large birds are already circling over, and we are suddenly scared. Even in all the sorrow and suffering, there is
a dignity of compassion. What’s gone is already gone. What’s left can still be useful, if not to us then to someone
else.

The screaming and crying that follows haunt me to this day -- primal screams and cries that echo the ones in my
heart. Many moments in life have caused pain later but this leaves a footprint that’s deep and lasting.

We come home tired and it’s late, but mostly drained out. I lay down on the bed next to the vacant space where my
little sister used to sleep, where I used to get up in the middle of the night and tuck her in properly as a big brother
should or listen to her light breathing, this little ball of innocence and she would sometimes get up and smile at me
silently in the silence of the night or when sometime she would roll over in her sleep and drop a leg over my belly
and a hand on my chest. The little hands that clutched my shirt, even in sleep.

I remember all of that and even at this young age I suddenly understand something with profound clarity. She will
never be back. That space will always be empty now and I don’t know how to mitigate that. I turn away from that
side of the bed, tuck myself into a ball and cry silently into the covers, staying quiet to make sure nobody wakes up.

From early childhood, one has picked up an unteachable trait –

Share your smiles, always hide your tears.

Death has always been there waiting, watching; you couldn’t escape it, even though it was worshipped. There were
so many beliefs, so many hopes, and so many doctors but it was always there, in every house, in every hut; wherever
you lived it was there, with disease or with health.
I walk down one day to meet the white-haired saint who sits under the tree in my local village.

He sits there every day, silent and sometimes in meditation and at other times smiling at people passing by. Some
throw him coins as they pass by. Some scowl at him calling him crazy.

He is in equanimity with all of them. He thanks everyone who gives him food saying - “May the giver of this food
be blessed and always be happy”.

I walk up to him from time to time and sit with him although I am not sure why I do that.

“So, baba, what is death then?” I ask once with part annoyance, part curiosity.

He smiles kindly and contemplates an age-appropriate answer.

“As a boy, you must have followed a small stream gurgling along a narrow little valley, the waters running faster
and faster, and have thrown something in it – A piece of stick, a rock, a paper boat maybe and followed it, down a
slope, over a little mound, through a little crevasse – followed it until it went over the waterfall and disappeared.
This disappearance, my son, is death”.

I pretend to understand but I don’t get anything.

“Are you afraid of death?” he asks amusingly.

The contrast to the subject and his expression could not have been more opposites.

“I think I am. But how do I not be afraid of death?” I ask.

He smiles.

“We all do. I am too. But we don’t have to be. Don’t underestimate the power of death but also don’t be afraid.
Death is just another thought. If you can know that and keep it in your heart when you die, that would be excellent”,
he says looking far ahead in the distance.

Is it possible to put an end to all that? – which means dying every day so that there may be a renewal tomorrow? It is
only then that one knows death while living.

The intake of each breath and the exhale of it - Each lit by the awareness of the cycle of breathing.

Only in that dying, in that coming to an end, putting an end to continuity, is their renewal, that creation which is
eternal.

If you hear it, if you allow it, if you open your doors to it, it is pure fire. It will burn all that is dark in you, all that is
old in you.

It is risky to allow fire into your being—rather than opening the doors, your instinct is to immediately close all the
doors.

Don’t die tomorrow, but today at this moment and every moment after, to everything that you have known. Then
there is no fear which is the shadow of death.

Then you will see that life is not one thing and death another; the ending is essentially the beginning. Then the mind
is beyond time; fear is time, thought breeds it.

With the death of the past, the experiences, the memories, the new and the old traditions, the mind is made new and
there is the unknown,
The not measurable...
The Cashier (12.28.2005)

I am working for the last two months at the local BJ's store this year as a part-time cashier or doing odd-end jobs.
It’s the holiday season and part-time labor is in much demand.

I am doing this just so I can experience how it feels like to be there. I don’t need the money, but I do want the
experience. Just not sure why, yet. My family is in India this year and I am all alone so I figure I might as well get
out and make some spare cash.

In my day job, I work as a Banking Analyst talking to the upper echelons of the banking industry. At 4.45 PM, I get
out of work and drive the two-mile distance to the store, don a bright red B. J’s vest and punch in just at the stroke of
5.00.

Nobody knows what I do for a living and I usually keep to myself as do most others. My supervisor is a big-sized
lady, slightly abrupt but overall gets her work done efficiently.

I am trying to learn the tricks of the trade. Being a cashier sounds so easy. Scan, scan, scan, ring the register. No
wonder they get paid so less. There is nothing mentally challenging to do here.

Until I find myself on the other end of that till. Then all hell breaks loose.

I can’t find the right codes. I don’t know how to manually open the cash register. I can’t keep all my credit card
receipts straight.
Every night when I am done my register is always short a good 6-10$ causing my fat supervisor lady to erupt in
bursts of consciousness to a point where sometimes I just reach into my pocket, dig out a 10, and drop it in, just to
avoid it.

It’s a couple of days before Christmas and as I am about to wrap up a 6 AM to 1 PM shift when I see the fat lady
roll in towards me.

“You are working the next shift too. I am short two people. You and Amanda can cover it”.

It’s not a suggestion or an ask. She knows we will unless we want to get fired. We are the ultimate of expendables.

I look at Amanda on the next register. She is around 22, skinny, and looks slightly older than she probably is. She
nods her head and starts to head back to her register again and I do too. The Amazonian supervisor satisfied, turns
and heads back to her perch.

I see Amanda dial her phone and speak to someone. Being so close, I consciously eavesdrop on the conversation.

“Will you take care of the girls? I should be back by 11.00”.

There is some back and forth, a negotiation and she finally puts down her cell and flips on the register to open as
customers start to pour back onto her counter. It’s close to Christmas and everyone wants to get their shopping done.

I am standing outside the store during the 6 PM break as I watch the crowds go by. She comes out too, wiping her
hands on her apron, and sits down at a distance. We smile and acknowledge each other, and she gets up and comes
down a little closer.

“I hope you didn’t have to go somewhere tonight. I am sorry if your plans were a bit scattered”, she says.

I don’t understand why she is sorry or the fact that she is even concerned. The store sets the schedules, but her
concern touches me.

We talk about her family and her two daughters.

“Twins - Emma and Jenna”, she says with glowing happiness just for a second. It’s the first time I have seen her
smile and she looks younger, much younger than her years have made her be.

The father bailed after she got pregnant at 17 and she has never seen him after. She thinks he is probably in South
Dakota working for an oil rig making good money, but she has never seen a penny.

Her mother takes care of the girls and her aging father who is still working at 63 provides. She goes to college part-
time and wants to become a nurse, but it’s hard balancing the kids, a job, and a rigid schedule of the community
college.

“What are they getting for Christmas this year?”, I ask changing topics.

A look of darkness crosses her face and I see it clearly before she smiles again.

“They are so different you know?. Emma wants that new laughing Barbie and Jenna has no idea what she wants.
She does love to ride a bike and has asked Santa for one. I need to find time to get one and teach her”, she smiles.

We both laugh and then look at the clock above our heads. It’s almost time to head back in.
As we start to walk back, I ask her a question that’s been on my mind since we met.

“Do you ever get tired?”, I ask hesitantly. She nods and smiles.

“I wish I would get a day off, just for myself. I love to read, especially those Tom Clancy ones, you know?”

I do. Not a fan of those or fiction for that matter but I do.

I feel sorry for her. She is just 22, an age when she should be on a college campus discussing the finer points of her
budding career, or out clubbing with her friends, or discussing matters of heartbreak with her current boyfriend.

Instead, here she is, with me - Behind the back of a box store, in a dead-end job, tired to the bone, wondering how
she is going to provide for her two daughters.

Why does it have to be this way? I ask myself.

There is no answer.

As the shift comes to an end, I sign out to go buy some last-minute groceries. As I walk through the aisles, I see her
in the produce aisle looking intently at the prices of a couple of items, the math running in her head at terrifying
speed.

I hear my name called on the store announcement and head to the front desk. The big-sized supervisor is not so
assertive this time. She seems, almost ...timid.

“We are letting you go tonight Z. If we need you again, we will let you know.”, she says, a bit hesitant, trying to
gauge my reaction.

I am happy. The work has taken its toll and my back hurts every night I go home. Being let go is the best thing that
has happened to me this month. I can sleep in late on Christmas morning.

She hands me the monthly paycheck. It’s $652, all in cash, including the overtime. Hard, back-breaking work, all
day at times has earned me less than what I make in three days at a desk browsing the internet or throwing platitudes
on a conference call. If life was skewed, there was no example better than this.

I walk out to my car and see Amanda in the empty parking lot standing beside her car as she is calling someone on
her phone.

“Everything ok with you?”, I ask.

She nods, still on call, but as I turn back to head towards my car, she calls back.

“Z, can you drop me home? My car won’t work, and I need to be back with the kids before 11.00”.

“Sure. Come on up”.

She holds her little plastic bag of groceries in her lap as we drive. It contains some small food items. A small can of
2% milk sits between her legs on the floor.
As we get to her apartment, I see her mother already waiting outside, ready to leave. The girls have not slept yet and
have come out holding her hand. Two little five-year old’s, identical, almost except one has much shorter hair than
the other.

“We need to identify them somehow. This is the best way”, she says laughingly when I point that out.

As I drive back home, I call Ana and we talk about the girls. Amanda’s family with a strong resemblance to mine
has struck a chord within me. We talk about the gifts tomorrow night that Ana plans to put under the tree. A new
white dress, a new pair of shoes, and a doll from their uncle, Ana’s brother.

I think about Amanda and her girls and what they would be getting for Christmas. I remember her looking intently at
the prices in the aisle and our conversation about what her girls wanted as gifts.

I spend the night in bed tossing and turning. Sleep seems to elude me. I have a feeling I know what I want to do, but
I need to wait up for it.

The next day after office as everyone starts to head out, I start to drive back home too. It’s Christmas eve and the
stores will close in early, at least most of them. While we think it’s a good thing, having worked there, I now realize
that it just means less money for those on hourly wages.

I think of what Amanda would be doing tonight with her kids. Maybe she will take them to the local ice cream store.
Maybe she will put them in bed early and crack open that Tom Clancy book, finally glad she found some time for
herself.

Close to my house is a 24-hour super Walmart and I turn lanes to drive in. I walk around the aisles until I find the
things that I am looking for. It takes me a while, but with some determination and with the kindness of a clerk
working there, I find exactly the things I am looking for.

Loading up the trunk, I start to drive in the opposite direction to my home. It’s getting dark and starting to snow as I
reach back to the apartment that I had visited yesterday.

1302, I had written down on a small scrap of paper as I reached the familiar territory. I see Amanda’s head through
the window and the light of the TV flickering in the background.

I take two turns as I bring in the square boxes and then roll in the small bike and the helmet to her entrance. As if on
an impulse, I return back to the car and take out the white BJ’s envelope and count the cash.

$652.

Money has never felt so important in my life as it feels at this moment, every single dollar. Sitting in the car, I write
her a small Christmas greeting, stuff the envelope between the gift boxes, and press the buzzer for 1302.

“Hello?”, the familiar voice comes up on the intercom.

I hesitate for a second. Then my apparent discomfort at these situations takes over.

“Delivery”, I try to sound as official as I can.

Turning around I walk, fast. The introvert in me is desperately trying to avoid a situation.
As I sit in my car some distance away with the lights off, I see her walking down. She stands at the door with her
girls just behind, holding the two sides of her nightdress peering intently. Then I see two little hands shoot up into
the air and a whoop of delight rings out into that dead silent snowy night.

I smile as I realize that would be Jena, the cycling enthusiast. I want to walk out and hug them tight, as I would my
own girls, but I know this is for the better.

I watch them slowly head back to their apartment. The girls carry the plastic bags with small square boxes wrapped
in the shiny paper while Amanda lifts the small bike as Jena turns the wheels with one hand, faster and faster.

The snow starts to fall at a heavy pace and the world is white and beautiful, if only for a second. I put my car into
drive and start to pull away slowly.

Christmas for me has come early.

The Vows (12.16.2000)

“I am sorry I couldn't help overlook it”, she says as she looks at me with misty eyes.

We are sitting in the BART - The notoriously unreliable train that ferries weary souls from the damp and cold
downtown San Francisco to its lush hill-laden suburbs.

I look at the piece of paper, the pen in my hand, and then back at her again, slightly incredulous, not at the fact that
she invaded my privacy by reading it, but by the fact that the crazy scribbles tugged at her emotionally.

"When is the big day?", she asks.

"May, next year. It's a bit away". My answers are clipped and short. The smile is forced.

"She's a very lucky girl", she says as we part - The doors opening on Fremont, the final stop as everyone spills out
into the warm sunlight of the evening.

I hold the piece of paper in my hand as I walk, neatly folding it into four. Then another four as it reduces in size.
Tighter.

I see an open drain, toss the square into it and walk. It's just words anyway.

I am afraid people will see me as straying my own kind:

another story about a man incomplete without a girl and her transformative love.

But I hope you understand:

I don't want your eggs, your ring, your arms around me, your security, your warmth.

I don't want to come home and complain about work to you.

I don't want you to drive when we go long distances or throw your arm across my chest when you break for a deer.

I don't want to wake up next to you and tell you about the dream that I had or ask you to scratch my back.

I don't want to become frustrated that we have nothing to talk about anymore or to sleep next to you and not have
your strands of hair falling on my face tickling me.

I don't want to ever have to imagine the end of your imagination, my imagination.

These things are fine in their own way - Really, I mean it.

But what I really want from you, and what you can expect from me, is to have my name scratched on your heart and
yours on mine.

So, when we die, if they cut us open, they will know someone lived there inside us - Me in you and you in me.

Whatever that might mean…...

The Flickering Star (07.28.2013)

” M
aybe it will be okay”, I tell her as I hold her hand. Her palms are clammy and cold, and I detect a faint shiver
running through her. Barely noticeable.

Shawna and I were close friends and had worked together for more than three years now. We had traveled places
together for work, stayed in cramped hotels, and shared many a drink late into the evening. She was a quiet gentle
girl probably around my age, I presumed. She always wore a small pendant with a cross around her neck and her
skirts were always longer than they needed to be which is why it was a surprise when one day she casually, in
between a coffee break, suddenly took the conversation to something else.

“Can I tell you something if you can keep it to yourself?” she says, her voice laced with a slight tinge of trepidation.

“I am eight weeks along”, she mentions even before I could nod. She just wanted to get it out there. I smile and give
her a big hug followed by the usual standard exclamations of post news joy. I am not quite sure why she shared it
with me, but I am excited and happy for her.
Days later when things are quiet and we are catching up on the patio outside at a company-sponsored lunch, I slowly
dig in for details. She discovered that she was pregnant the summer after her mother died. She had been trying with
her boyfriend of three years—or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they hadn’t been not trying. She was
pushing thirty-seven. Well, thirty-seven and a half. Half years had become important in matters of midlife fertility.
She was squeaking in right under the wire. Blessedly avoiding the nightmare, she had seen so many of her friends go
through: the doctors, tests, labs, drugs, invasive procedures so often ending in heartbreak. She had been through
enough.

She tells me about her brother John’s illness, her mother’s death. The last few years had been rough. Didn’t she
deserve a break? Even though words like deserve really aren’t part of my psychological makeup, still I wonder if
there was a little bit of reverse hubris. A feeling that now—now things would be easier for her. I mean, God doesn’t
give us more than we can handle. And everything happens for a reason. Right?

Her pregnancy felt destiné à être — “meant to be.” There seemed a slight poetic symmetry to it: the end of one life,
the beginning of another.

“You’re in for a ride”, I tell her laughing and regale her with my limited experiences handling kids. She knew what I
meant. As a fourth of the six children, she understood the feeling of a filled-up house, a house bursting with the
noisy ambiance of children.

“There is a silence in my house that seems to almost bite me at times”, she had laughed one time looking wistfully at
her two young nephews playing in the garden. She had been single for so long, and now she was going to be the
mother of a child. The empty seat at her table would be filled. Her ambivalence and fear had vanished. She seemed
deeply, powerfully happy. She talks to me about her call to her obstetrician, about taking prenatal vitamins, and the
upcoming appointment to see her in about a month. It seemed so right that I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

Two weeks later as we sit outside on a balmy summer afternoon, she is telling me about her boyfriend who refused
to be part of her life anymore. Things were bad long ago and it finally came down to a point where he had slapped
her. She had to call the cops and he had packed up and moved out to another state for good.

“Who is coming to the appointment next week?” I awkwardly ask her. It’s a sensitive question and I am aware of the
cultural implications of asking probingly personal questions.

I wait for her answer as she stares at me. I am comprehending a politely formal answer, a brush-off, a rebuke for
invading someone’s personal circle.

“Nobody”, she says simply staring ahead of me, into space.

At thirteen weeks, Shawna and I drive downtown to see the doctor. It is a beautiful, cloudless morning. Her arms are
folded in her lap as she sits in the doctor’s office, looking through well-worn issues of Fit Pregnancy and Child. I
linger just behind her as she has her blood pressure measured, her weight. We joke with the nurses and make sure
they know we are not a couple.

“He has two already and doesn’t need a third”, she says laughingly to her doctor as she raises an eyebrow looking at
me standing behind her. I try to step outside giving them some privacy, but a nurse comes running back outside into
the reception even before I pick up the magazine.
“She wants you to be there”. I walk back in.

“Come, sit here. I want you to listen when it happens”, she says laughing.

I feel no worry, no pang of apprehension. Was it the summer joy? I watch as she lays on the examining table and
waits.

There are times in my life when all I can remember are people’s faces. I remember my grandmother’s face the
moment that she woke me up to tell me my sister was dead; the slight flicker in the neurosurgeon’s eyes when he
gave us the news that my aunt had a brain tumor; the tremor of hesitation as Ana told me my father was gone; and in
that obstetrician’s office, when she waited for just a small second as she softly mentioned that she was trying to find
the heartbeat.

As she lay on the table, the wand of the sonogram pressed to her lower belly, I watched Shawna’s face. She seemed
to have heard the doctor’s voice, there was a pause before it registered, and then that soft, caved-in expression—a
magnitude of vulnerability—came over her.

“I’m sorry,” she turns to me and says as if apologizing for making me go through a wasted trip.

“Isn’t it possible that it’s still too early?” I ask, turning back to the doctor.

“I’m going to send her for a higher-resolution sonogram.”

That afternoon as we drive to a bigger hospital in midtown Manchester, a machine at another doctor’s office detects
the faintest of heartbeats. I see it on the screen, flickering like a distant star. Shawna looks at it and smiles for the
smallest second – The tight-winded smile of someone who knows about a won battle and lost wars.

Bed rest for a week is suggested. Bed rest, and then she’d go back in for another look.

“Maybe it will be okay,” I tell her as we drive back to Portsmouth. “Maybe you miscalculated and you’re not as far
along as you thought.” My words sound as if they are forced, pulled out from somewhere where they need to be kept
buried.

She is silent looking outside as the exits pass by. I remember the sleeves of her summer dress flapping in the wind.
Her face, caught in a bright angle of sunlight, is soft and vulnerable.

She holds out a hand and grips mine –tightly, just looking for some comfort – A touch of humanity.

The hollows of my eyes burn. I feel like I had hit up against the hard edge of something. I knew I was trying to
comfort her—to comfort myself too —but I also knew that it was over.

That faint, flickering star on the sonogram was burning out.

People Pleaser (06.28.2012)

“ Will you be able to get that done by today evening?”

I look at the clock. It’s 2.30 PM and it’s my daughter’s birthday today. We are supposed to go out for dinner, and
they would be expecting me.

Instead, I am here 300 miles away in NYC hoping to get out in time to take the 5.00 PM Delta shuttle out of
LaGuardia, one of the worst airports to fly out on a Friday evening.

I want to say no but instead, I find myself saying - “Sure. That’s ok. You’ll have it soon.”

That’s me. The people pleaser. The one who internally thinks NO but externally nods a resounding YES.

Someday, I will learn to say no without feeling like I offended someone. Just not today.

Later in the evening when things have settled down, I finally get on the 7 PM flight. It’s a slow flight and the
commuter crowd has already left.

As the servers pass on the drinks, I close my eyes wondering if I will make it in before the kids go to sleep.
Somewhere within me, a feeling keeps stirring...as if I did something wrong, to someone - to my daughter, to Ana -
To myself.

Trying to please people even when I know I have other responsibilities, feels just exhausting and a good recipe for
losing my way. It appears to be one thing when really, it’s another.

It’s guaranteed to make me suffer because it can’t be done. As a people pleaser, I'm constantly trying to make others
happy.
I am intelligent enough not to be fooled by how considerate that sounds. It’s a trap I set for myself.

People-pleasing is not altruistic.

A people pleaser like me aims to make others happy in exchange for being liked or approved of.

As such, it does not come from a place of magnanimity and selflessness. It comes from a place of manipulation.

When I’m people-pleasing, what I’m doing is attempting to control the emotions of others.

Making everyone happy cannot be done. Different people want different things. Even the same people want
different things.

It’s so absorbing and time-consuming to chase how to make others happy that it erases me.

I lose my personality, preferences, and identity in the futile pursuit of getting approval from people I cannot control
or predict and who are paying attention to themselves and not to me.

I end up losing the affection and respect of people that matter most - My family.

Then I wonder why I feel lost, why I don’t know what I want, and if anyone likes me.

What do I want? What can I do to like myself? How do I make myself happy? Maybe I am the only person who can
do that for me but I don’t know how to fix it.

It’s ingrained in my DNA and I wonder what in my childhood made me turn out this way.

Getting no answers, I order another scotch, bang it down and nod absentmindedly to my neighbor who is telling me
about the latest M&A that went down.

Late at night, I jump up the flight of stairs knocking on the door. Ana opens it and I give her a big hug. It feels good
to be back home, but the feeling of guilt lingers in the background.

Looking behind her, I see Jenny in her pajamas holding her soft toy. She has not slept yet, but her eyes are telling a
different story.

She smiles and extends her arms, still holding the toy. I let out a sigh of relief as I look at the clock.

11.45 PM.

“Happy Birthday Jelly” ...

Happiness (04.29.2017)

" D
o you know he was a high-powered attorney in his past life?", my friend James says as he gestures towards the
guy who is kneeling on the treadmill ahead, cleaning it up.

I just know him as Rob. He is the manager of my neighborhood gym, a planet fitness among the thousand others
littering the landscape.

He is seen around as I hit the gym - usually over the weekend, silent and smiling, cleaning the sweat off the floors,
taking out the trash, managing the desk - Almost blended into the purple furniture wearing his purple t-shirt and a
small ponytail which I take as a mark of rebellion against the formally suited world.

We cross paths once in a while and one late evening I find him sitting outside on an empty paint drum looking at the
orange-red sky.

"It’s gonna be a beautiful evening", I stop and summon my social alter ego. My curiosity about people and their
lives sometimes overcomes my anti-social self.

"Nothing like it my friend. Nothing like it", he says as he takes a deep drag on his Juul.

I look at his face but it is surrounded by a cloud of thick white smoke as I find an empty spot across the sill and park
myself and we talk.

I get to know much more about him that day.

He makes ~$65K per year. It isn’t terrible money. You can certainly live on that. But it isn’t great money in the US.
His salary isn’t specifically what interests me the most although as a shameless Indian I ask and amazingly enough,
he answers - without much prejudice, like it's just another statistic - almost like his shoe size.

He was indeed a big-time lawyer close by in Vermont. He had a fancy degree and a job making huge money. He did
it for 15 years. He had the respect of his peers, the fear of his opposition.

He was fully capable of continuing his relentless march as a litigator.

"What got you to quit?", I ask, incredulity written all over my face.
"I had a stroke at 41”, he looks up at me and then at his left hand. I suddenly notice the slight bend, the loss of
control. I wonder how I missed it before.

“I just realized one day as I got up, Nah - this isn’t the right life.”

He walked away on that very day. Never went back. Not even to pick up his stuff from the office.

He just chose a low-stress job, managing this local gym. He cut down on his expenses and at the end of the day
came up to be the same.

There was no Porsche 911, Carrera, anymore. His Toyota Corolla got him back and forth from home just as fine.

He sold his semi mortgaged penthouse in the city and put that in an equity fund that earns him a decent interest.

When the end of the day rolls around, he goes home, and work doesn’t chase him. He is free to indulge the rest of
his life.

I see him every time while I sign into my gym. He is always in good spirits. Relaxed. Not troubled by some unseen
threat that looms on his calendar.

The people around us, tell us that they just want to “be happy”, but at the same time, they are pushing this
maximization mindset: maximize grades, maximize salary, maximize learning, maximize the reputation, go, go, go.

You see plenty of people that maximize. You see plenty of people who don’t.

But how often do you see people who maximize and then walk away?

Who goes from introducing themselves as “Senior Counsel at some white-collar law firm” to answering calls,
“Hello, Planet Fitness! How can I help you?”

It’s surprisingly rare. It’s hard to kiss the ring of ambition for so long and then drop it.

He’s a bit of a novelty in my life.

On my bad days, I envision what it would be like to be him.

That one guy who stepped through the paradox of happiness and ambition.

And although I suspect I don’t have the guts to do what he did - walk away, I have a surprising amount of respect for
a guy who is capable of so much yet aspires to need so little.

He did it in his way.

And he’s amazingly happy for it.

Does anything else really matter?

Soup (09.12.2013)

I am making soup.
My first step is to chop up a huge pile of vegetables.

Before I consider this soup “ready” I will strain it. There will be no trace of some of the things I used to make it
delicious, such as the papery skin of an onion, the brown ends of a carrot, the tough, fibrous broccoli stems.

But all of these things will contribute to the flavor of the final soup.

I am not at all bothered by the notion of oblivion.

Someday there will be no trace of me.

But I believe that with my actions, however small, I leave something behind that contributes to the taste of what I’ll
call the - Final cosmic soup.

Maybe, just maybe…... everything I do matters.

Presence (07.12.2004)

Very early Friday morning, long before dawn, Amber was back at her desk. The girls were sleeping, she hoped.
Her routine was to call the city hospitals and emergency rooms searching for someone not yet identified, to see if a
voice might pick up the line instead of the automated bots. She hoped that someone would take the information,
deliver the miracle that she thought was slowly slipping away – To hear the doctor or nurse rush back, semi out of
breath yet ecstatic, and to exclaim, Yes, Yes he’s here. He fits that description. He answers to that name. He’s yours.
He’s alive. He’s found.

Getting someone to answer the phone was nearly impossible no matter how many times she dialed, yet she did. She
understood the equation – That she was one of the many thousands making those calls, in desperation, from living
rooms and kitchens, offices, and basements without any geographical constraints.

I had known Amber for just a few months having worked in New York and for a while we were commuting
strangers on the same train until we realized that we worked in the same building on adjacent floors. She was around
30 but looked older for her age. She carried a jute bag on her shoulders, her hair tied in a loose ponytail. I had met
her husband and played with her girls at times, but did not know that she had lost a brother during the 9/11 attacks.
Today’s the first time I had visited her house, a small brownstone in Queen’s. It was sparse yet warm, everything
neatly in place, a lamp casting lights and shadows just around me. Her husband Jack is still at work and the kids are
playing outside as she keeps a watchful eye on them from the window. I am sitting across the chair from her having
just finished a glass of diet coke and a sandwich that she had made in the kitchen.

She starts to tell me how she even began to call late especially around the hours on either side of midnight and all
through the dawn. She would call from the room downstairs so as not to disturb the girls and to let Jack find any
traces that he could. It was nearly four days since the attacks.

She had stood up from her desk chair to stretch and walk around the room for a few paces, to get away from the
monotonous buzz of the receiver, to gather some energy for the next call.

That’s when she felt him in the room.

“His presence”, she said.

It was more than a vision. There was an energy there, a vital field reaching out to her. She wanted to turn around
from the desk and look behind her, towards the dark left corner of the room, but she couldn’t. To turn and look
would be, in her mind, a lack of faith in him – A betrayal. The house was otherwise still and the lights were dim.
She’d had visions before. This was different. It was not a clear sight, it was a connection, a communication.

“I just knew it was Brad”, she said. “I knew”.

She didn’t hesitate or startle. She said she spoke directly to the space in front of her.

“Brad,” she said his name. She waited, but not long. She wanted to acknowledge him. She said the first words that
from inside her.

“Thank you.”. She wanted him to know what this gave her, what that moment contained. She had the phone message
he’d left, she could hear the voice and perhaps already knew how she would play it in her head, to hold the sound of
him near. The feeling in the room now was different, a force more than a sound.

“If you can do that,” she said, referring to the energy and the feeling, to the connection, “I know you ‘re okay, but
you’re not here anymore.”

It was around 3 AM. She continued to look straight ahead, as she turned hers back now to the presence.

“It’s time to go now Brad”, she said.

She stood for several long moments as the presence receded from the room, leaving her alone in the silence of the
house, the hair at the back of her neck standing in attention.

She had made a decision, a silent step.

Looking at the phone, she closed the directory from which she was dialing and turned away.

“That’s when I gave up looking”, she said to me, her eyes dark hollows behind the dimly lit lamp.
“Because I knew at that moment that he was gone”.
Canceled Plans (11.29.2010)

I am so relieved when plans are canceled.

So, what I do next?

I return to my empty apartment, sit on the couch, and watch a movie or read a book.

Nothing to do. Nowhere to be. I’m just going to sit here in this room by myself.

I find my soft blanket, curl up somewhere warm and read. Hopefully, it will be raining heavily outside.

I find solace and pleasure in books.

Sometimes I have a burst of inspiration and I sit down and write.

At times I decide to meditate.

Sometimes I take a scissor and murder those wily nose hairs, one inglorious bastard at a time or my younger ones
will give me a facial. It’s an amusement for them to see their father’s face caked in pink goo and they giggle like
evil clowns.

By the time I am ready to socialize, I will be smooth-skinned, nicely cologned, and lustrous.

I putter around the house. Setting things in order on the outside puts things in their place on my inside.

Nature helps me so very much. I go on a hike or walk somewhere where I can see green or water. For periods, I
focus on my breath so that my thoughts can settle down.
I sit on the grass and look at the sky under the warm afternoon sun. I like watching clouds go by.

I window shop or head to the nearest Goodwill or Salvation Army store. I take a stroll and look at the second-hand
shirts that look brand new.

I loiter in my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and sit on the couch on a sunny corner by the window and flip
through coffee table books. I read nonfiction exclusively, painting their lives like my own.

Occasionally, I splurge. I go have a meal by myself, always a buffet that’s less than 8$. I love eating alone. I sit at a
small table by a window and read the NY Times and eat, so very slowly.

Sometimes I will sit, and people watch. I take notes in my head.

I ride a COAST bus. I like the movement and the vignettes that take place right in front of me. Stories of lives
unfolding in front of me.

I write. People ask me how I have time to write so much.

How can I not? I love this time with me.

You might think there is something wrong with me, maybe?

I don't.

I am just an introvert.

Social interaction exhausts me, and this is how I recover.

The Gift (09.22.2008)

National City Bank is one of the oldest institutions in the country standing strong since 1847.

I have worked in their mortgage banking unit in their Cleveland office for the last couple of years, a stone’s throw
away from where I live.

Every morning I walk 15 steps out of my apartment office, cross the road and enter my office. It has never been this
good. I have great neighbors, the kids are thriving and for once I have this feeling called stability, a feeling of
belonging – Like I am meant to be here, put down roots, buy a house and start a family.

However, this is not a typical day.

The day is quiet, sunny and people outside are going about their business. National City on the other hand is agog
with rumors and whispers. There is talk about takeover, merger, or even going under. They have made some really
bad bets on mortgages in the last year and the due has come home.

Who will be retained and who will be let go?

Being a contractor, I know I am the most vulnerable to these cuts and I am mentally prepared or at least I think I am.
It’s like you are in a room surrounded by bombs dropping all around the house, gunfire, and yet all is quiet in that
room. It is your space, and you feel a bit safe as the frequency of those booms go down and the rattle of the gunfire
is no longer frequent and just when you think it’s going to be fine, there’s a loud knock on the door and you know
what it means.

I sit there thinking of these scenarios when I see Dean’s number flash on the phone. I know it’s time and he has
asked me to come to see him. He sounds almost apologetic, but he has to do what he has to. I want to wrap this up
over the phone but then there’s a little dance to these things that one has to go through.

As I walk into his office, I notice him slouched in his seat. He seems a touch sad, but also fearful. He is usually very
confident.

Not today.

Maybe it’s the act of firing people that have got to him. It shreds your soul one little piece at a time. I have seen it
and I have done it and I do not want to do it to anyone. That’s why I am no longer managing people.
No matter what you say to yourself at the end of the day and the excuses are many – It’s best for him too. He was
not performing well and dragging the team down or to save the company you have to do it, none of those reasons
make sense once you are back home enjoying a nice dinner, a glass of scotch and you think about that person who
just went home to his family having lost a shred of dignity, his livelihood.

Maybe I just don’t say anything as I do with Dean.

I let him go through the motions as I do mine. He is just doing his job.

I try not to feel any animosity there.

Later in the evening as I walk home, I have cleared my desk. I see people going out with big cardboard boxes filled
with belongings from years of existence. Potted plants, paperwork, and even a coffee grinder. I walk home clutching
a 3” Buddha statue that I was given by someone who said it would bring me good luck and I notice Todd loading the
last carton in his car.

Todd has been here all of 24 years right in this building on this floor.

“It’s going to be ok my friend,” he says almost as if consoling himself instead of me.

“Yeah. I hope so too.”, I nod not sure what else to say.

“I’ll miss you Z man. It’s been a good run”.

Yeah, he is one of those who call me the Z man.

I have a moment of weakness and I extend my hand for a handshake.

Instead, he pulls me in for a bear hug. He is 6 2” and the most offensive player on the trading floor. People fear him
and get out of his way when he is coming towards you, but somehow, he has ended up with a soft corner for me, or
maybe he is just vulnerable in his moment of weakness. Maybe because I never confronted him to bear the brunt or
maybe he never saw me as a threat to his career.

I would never know. I don’t want to know but I feel sorry for this man and his situation.

It’s the deep Midwest, he is in the end years of his career.

Where will he go, how will he take care of his family, what does a loss of a job held all these years does to one’s
manhood?

In that second, my issues over the situation are overridden by the concern that I have for this guy. He seems to be
beaten, almost defeated.

“I want you to have this.”

I pull out the statue from my pocket and hold my hands together as it's meant to be offered. Palms joined, extended
upwards out to be picked up. As the Buddha said, the taker is doing the giver a favor of generating good karma by
his act of accepting the gift.

He smiles. He knows this as we have shared this story over late-night bottles of Malibu Coconut Rum at his place on
game day cookouts.

“Thanks, man. I will always keep this with me. If I find something, you’ll be the first one that I will call ok?”
And so it’s done. I walk out of that gate just as I had walked in years ago.

Empty-handed, hands in pocket. I feel good about it, about everything.

I will find a new job soon. Hopefully, it will be close by in Cleveland and we won’t have to move out. I’ll start
applying from tomorrow. I make a mental list of people to call, the recruiters, old contacts, friends, and even cold
call strangers.

When work is involved there is no shame. It will be alright after all.

As I cross the street to enter the Islander apartments, I see two small earthworms wriggle their way on the road.
They could be crushed by the next set of feet or the next tread of tires.

I look around to find a leaf off a tree, slowly pick the two worms off the pavement, and put them on the grass where
they wriggle off quickly, shocked and annoyed at the intrusion. It’s an old habit.

They are probably having a bad day, just like I am. There’s no reason why one of us shouldn’t catch a break.

Walking home, I see Ana sitting on the balcony on the second floor watching her girls ride their bikes below with
their friends. Mom is in the kitchen making something delicious. It’s all sunny and quiet. A perfect day to sit outside
without any worries in this world.

I climb through the stairs, two at a time. I am hungry and mom is waiting.

We have no idea of the storm of 2008 that’s coming. Blissfully unaware, oblivious to the destruction that’s just
around the next corner.

Having gone through this, we would never be the same again.

Rituals (03.09.2018)

Each day, when I took the two pillows from the bed and threw them down on the floor to sit on them for
meditation, closed the bedroom door, let the emails come in instead of attending to them, sat still instead of reacting
to whatever was going on in my mind - I was attempting exactly that: a return to the questions.

Some days are harder than others. At times, I am convinced that I have made a huge mistake, delving this intensely
into spiritual matters. Maybe I was becoming one of those earnest, humorless people that folks listen to quietly and
then snicker once they go away? Who did I think I was, anyway? I was an Analyst at my job. If I was good at
anything, it was at making things up – Diagrams, words, meetings, conversations, designs. Acts of fiction—
following the line of words, as Frank Herbert once put it—Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and
ambiguous. I keep moving in small increments, both forward and back. With each incremental step, I have no
certainty that there would be a floor underneath me to sustain my next footstep.

However, there are those rare occasions when I felt something else. Something slightly different. It was a quiet sense
of settling, not of presence, but oneness. There was no difference between me and them—nothing separating me
from the invisible ether that conjured up everything around me. I could be sitting in my car on a traffic light looking
out at a blade of grass growing on the pavement and suddenly that grass was me – I was nodding in the wind, feeling
it as my head nodded back & forth in sync with the blade of grass, until the irritated person behind honked louder
than usual. When this happened, it did not feel significant. There were no hallelujahs, no exploding lights, or violins.
No realization of the following ecstasy surrounding it. There was no aha moment. It was just a very quiet sense of
knowing. The words accompanying this knowledge did not strike me as revealing. They did not strike me as
anything at all, but rather, emerged from a place beyond my self, beyond self-consciousness.

Everything I had done so far – The violence of the youth days, the things that I had seen, the people that I met, the
missed opportunities, they had led me here—and while there wasn’t a bad place at all, it also somehow wasn’t
enough. There was some critical piece deep inside me that was missing, and in the quiet of the meditations or the
prayers, I had an opportunity to figure out what, exactly, that missing piece was.

Speaking about prayers - I had always liked the idea of prayer as something private and fluid. I thought of the
Jashan ceremonies of my youth where two priests clad in white flowing robes came to pray at your house. The
women in their new outfits, the men squirming uncomfortably. The children playing outside as the adults tried to act
solemnly. After the prayers, we the kids waited anxiously for the sweet dishes to be doled out. A routine so precise,
it almost bordered on theatrical.

But maybe there was a good reason for the routine—for repeating the same gestures, the same words, again and
again. The standing prayers before my father sat down to pray in that room, the familiar action was a meditative one,
a preparation for prayer. Could he have gotten there without it? When I throw my pillows down on the ground to sit
in meditation and place my palms over each other in a lotus mudra, I may be being too uptight as I follow the
routine steps, but I am also performing a ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place within me—a place in
which I might come upon something wordless and profound if I didn’t try too hard.

Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer.

But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

The Empty Spaces (09.22.2016)

I don’t think I can control my ego, but I think it’s important that I am at least aware of it.
I ran into a friend a few days ago and was so very happy to see her.

We usually hug each other tight, but this time she seemed to be someplace else.

I briefly wondered if she might be irked at me. I ran through my mind what had taken place the last time I saw her.

I couldn't think of anything. It irritated me to no end trying to understand what was wrong with us.

I found out this morning that when I saw her, she was dealing with a family emergency.

She had been indeed somewhere else, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.

There was a story I inadvertently fabricated; and then there was what was going on.

Between my story and hers, there was a gap.

What is that?

What is that space that lies between the assumptions that we make and what is happening?

It's dangerous, that space. It is the root from which breeds most misunderstandings.

It separates us from every one of our relationships, even the ones we have with reality.

What would it take to narrow that space, to someday obliterate it forever?

I am still grappling with that, but deep down I seem to know what the answer might be...

Three little alphabets create this entire reality.

My Ego.
Passengers (12.29.2017)

Last week I was commuting from my workplace on the daily commuter bus. A lady sits across from me. She is
dressed in a black knee-length dress; a dash of red frillings adds a nice touch to the ends. She settles down and looks
eager to chat. It’s Christmas weekend and there is nobody on the bottom floor of the double-decker.

‘Hi, I am Whitney’, she introduces herself with a southern flair.

I learn that she is 33, recently married, and is a practicing psychologist. Her husband is a businessman and travels
internationally so she complains about the lack of time together although she tries to arrange her schedule around
when he is here.

We talk about a variety of topics including the mind, our thoughts on morality and mortality, and the people we
meet.

It’s a fascinating conversation and I can see she is probing, trying to ascertain, to separate the real me from the
presentation.

As we arrive and she is getting off the bus, she turns to me and without any preamble, says “I have met many
people, but you seem to bend the space around you. There is an aura of peace and love that surrounds you….”

She hesitates for a bit, then shakes my hands and turns around to leave.

The words surprise me, not just the verbiage, but also their delivery - clinical, like a diagnosis, rather than flirtatious
- and the fact that they aren’t followed up by anything. It wasn’t a line to ask anyone out or get me to do something.
It was simply…said.
This stranger just gently handed me these words and then walked away, with her good shoes and her Friday edition
of the Wall Street Journal.

I never met the woman again and we never attempt to exchange contact information. We both probably realize that
the fragility of time is what makes it precious.

I have been given words before, but they are never similarly delivered - generously and with no agenda pending.

I was not sure exactly what they meant,

but I thought they were beautiful.

The Local Trains (02.19.1997)

The manager of Bombay’s suburban railway system was recently asked when the system would improve to a point
where it could carry its 6 million daily passengers in comfort.

“Not in my lifetime,” he answered.

Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it
curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover’s embrace was never so close.

Asad bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloging numberless
communal flare-ups and riots, seeing firsthand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from
Bhagalpur, in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident
where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid. Asad, of all people, has seen
humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about the human race.

“Not at all,” he responded. “Look at the hands from the trains.”

If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform,
you can run-up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding
outward from the train like petals.

As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of
the open doorway.

The rest is up to you. You will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to
lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks.
However, take a second to consider what has happened. Your fellow passengers already packed tighter than cattle,
their shirts drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain empathy
for you, they know that your boss might fire you or cut down your pay if you miss this train, they will make space
where none exists, to take one more person along with them.

And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim
or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning on a train
from the north or whether you’re from Bombay, Bihar or Boston.

All they know is that you’re trying to get to someplace to earn your slice of gold for the day, and that’s enough.

“Come on board”, they say.

“We’ll adjust”.
Enough (09.22.2014)

It's never big enough. Or new enough. Or cool enough.

It's easy for others to have more, better things, or something you don’t yet have, so you are always comparing
yourself to people around you and feeling the pangs over what you might be lacking.

This, instead of paying attention to what you already have.

It is the optimal recipe for unhappiness.

The bounties of life that you have already, are limitless.

What happens if you are always comparing what you have against what others have?

Instead of the sense that you are lucky and that you have everything you need, you invite envy, greed, jealousy, a
sense that nothing is fair. That nothing is working out in your favor.

You begin to measure yourself and others by things.

Everything feels incomplete.

There is always someone who has more money, is more successful, is smarter, is younger, and is stronger, even
luckier sometimes.

You keep looking to collect things on the outside and are left with a hollow inside.
The designations, the recognitions, the power to control the fate of other men, the latest gadget cars, the home
projects every weekend or the children studying in top-rated schools…

You end up with a four-bedroom house full of belongings you don’t need, a body tired enough trying to maintain
them, and a soul that feels starved precisely because of that and yet doesn’t understand why.

I mean, …why…?

If I already have everything?

Mortality (12.11.2019)

Panic, a sensation like ice-cold ball bearings beneath bare feet, stung every extremity. My mother, my thin but
feisty mother, sat curled on the chair in the hospital corner praying. My sister is hiding in another room. My aunt—
ironically— I didn’t remember what she was doing. Something. Somewhere. And yet she was the one.

The one who had cancer.

These glimpses of memory swim upstream to my consciousness now, of all times, as I am lying on my right side in
the endoscopy suite. My gown flops open at the back. A vent nearby ruffles the fabric and goosebumps my behind.

Silently and stealthily, the creamy-white anesthetic pours into my veins, infiltrates my mind, and lights up my
dreams.

I am having a colonoscopy. My first colonoscopy, in my early forties, just a couple of years shy of the age my aunt
was when she was diagnosed with a tumor the size of a bulging grapefruit. When she was given six months, maybe a
year, to live. They said the tumor had been there a decade or more already. Her grandmother died from cancer at the
age of thirty-six; I have more than ten years on her. But today is not about her, or me. Today is about who is coming
next, my children whose survival and wellbeing I worry about as long as my aunt remains in that recurring corner of
my peripheral vision, gasping…

I awake curled in a fetal position similar to her own. I turn on my back, straighten my thoughts, and to my
simultaneous repulsion and amusement, let loose with a protracted, scentless fart. Curtains surround the bed, and I
am sure I catch them flaying outward with the gust. I cannot tell who is standing around to witness it, but ah well, it
is out there now in the universe.
Then I wait and wait, to hear from the doctor.

Oddly enough, this moment of perched anonymity descends on me more as regret than dread. I am not frightened of
what news the doctor may tell me. Anything that he has seen has been there for years, after all. I have been living
with it, sharing my blood and my food and my oxygen with it, for years. It is less a home invader tripping the alarm
than a silent, malignant cellmate squatting over a toilet without a stall.

But this body is a prison of my own making. I know the banality of evil. I have seen it more times in my life than
most.

The curtains squeak on their tracks and the gastroenterologist flashes color photographs of my faintly orange,
glistening smooth intestinal depths. He is delighted, it seems, as much by the cleanliness of my colon as my bill of
health. But I remain disquieted.

If my life experience has taught me nothing else, it is that peace is not the absence of war. There will be another day.

Hiding in bunkers, beyond the muscles and the cells, my body coolly preserves the secrets of my destruction.

The fuse of my mortality.

Last day (03.29.2000)

It is said that you start to notice things more clearly when you know you are looking at them during the final
moments. Lying on a deathbed brings more clarity than a hundred years of existence. You suddenly start to see the
value in those people who you think you would leave behind.

The sky looks a little brighter, the trees a bit greener and even the things that you found irksome for all the years of
your existence suddenly start to take a new shape, wrapped in the cotton wool of affection.

It was 3.00 PM on March 27th, 2000 when it started to dawn that these were the final moments of the day when I
would no longer be in my dad’s home country anymore. The flight to Detroit was leaving in less than 10 hours and
the sudden urge to do a lot of different things took over.

I decide to take a bus ride down to the train station where the surge of crowds would make one forget how isolated
you would be or to drink a mango lassi diluted with water directly from the drainage behind the stall for one last
time. It dawned on me that I hadn't even stepped foot into the US and was already starting to demean the ways of
existence here.

The bus rumbles up and I climb in, hanging by the door holding the iron bar. The soothing almost enveloping crush
of the crowds, the stale sweat followed by a slice of fresh air. Everything suddenly starts to feel a lot better, familiar
and soothing, almost like a mother's womb.

Walking down on the road across the station, I notice the familiar face of the old Muslim lady who sits there with
her saree outstretched, a silent universal sign of begging for money from people who did not have the time to even
look down towards her.

Poverty comes with its own set of rules and consequences. You suddenly become invisible to people.
With no money and a middle-class background, I understood that to some extent. The people with their cars who
sneered at you, the watchman who refused to let you into the company to give your resume to HR because your
clothes, although washed clean, were slightly faded, just a bit worn out.

Walking to a nearby tea stall, I get a cup of tea for her along with some biscuits as was the ritual. She smiled a
toothless smile when she saw me coming. Her teeth were long gone, prioritized amongst the other things where
resources were more crucial.

"When will you go home tonight," I ask, pointing to the almost empty bowl next to her.

She had already spent 3 hours here and barely collected an equivalent of 25 cents.

"Not sure yet baba(son). Raju baba passed away last night so I need to collect some money for his cremation
tomorrow."

She says this with complete serenity, a matter of fact that the poor are used to. To them, death is not an alien visitor.
It’s something they live with every day as they cut through the thick traffic during the day, or sleep on rat-infested
open streets at night.

I sit there feeling the almost physical weight of grief. I knew her son. We had laughed and shared a cup of tea many
times when he used to come to pick up his mother. A strong well-built guy, who could not find a job even though he
wanted to because he was an alcoholic, but so are most other poor here in the city.

I had asked him once - "Why do you drink?"

As staid was my inquiry, his response was almost as violent.

"Saab, when you pull a handcart with 100 kilos of bricks on it for 15 hours a day, at the end of it, you need the daru
to make yourself feel numb from the pain so you can sleep at night”, he had said as he tenderly held his frail
mother's hand guiding her through the crowd, protecting her with his big physical frame on the metro station taking
her back home.

Now her support was gone, struck overnight by a lethal malarial fever that consumed him, like countless others in
this city. Nameless, faceless, unrecognized blurs identified only by the tears of the loved ones they left behind.

I fish into the pocket and take out some money followed by another addition and then some more. She nods her head
in refusal.

“I can’t take this son. You give me tea and biscuits and some time. That for me is enough. You are like my son too
and parents don’t look for money from their children”.

“Of course, I am your son. I give money to my ma too. You can certainly take it”

She thinks for a moment nodding, smiles and takes the money touching it to her eyes as a mark of respect for it’s
worth. Sometimes the poorest of us have the most nuanced understanding of money and time, but all the more for
the relationships and its worth.

That's almost all the money I have. In six hours, this brightly colored money that was so precious to me will
probably be just colored paper. Given from one who is almost penniless to the other who is even more so, the futility
of the act is obvious in itself. We are all empty in some sense. The degree of emptiness ends up defining our self-
worth.

I sit there on the footpath and talk to her among the throngs of millions passing by, oblivious. We laugh as we
remember the good times and some not as well. How Raju ate 20 samosas with 5 lassis as a bet before throwing up
or how he came home late at night drunk and slept in someone else’s hut.
She laughs easily remembering the old times, a slice of a moment in which she forgets her burdens and the onerous
task of burying her son ahead of her. Someone said it right that most of us are lucky enough to go before our
children and then there are some unfortunate few who have to see their child go before them.

Later in the evening I carefully hold her frail hand and take her to the metro train on her way home, her acting son
for this little slice of time. As I see her from the window of her train car pulling away, smiling and holding her palm
up, a sign of blessing or affection, I hold myself in check as I walk away, aware of the implication that she is
ignorant to the fact that like her son, this newly incepted son barely hours into existence would also be deserting her
tonight. Maybe some of us are just fated to watch the ones we love drift away in a turbulent sea that we deem as
existence.

It’s getting late and for the first time in my life, I decided to take a cab going home. I know that these remaining
rupees would be worthless to me anyway after tonight, so I indulge a little. The taxi driver carrying me back home
has a little shrine of Saibaba, the famed Hindu saint enclosed in an illuminated arch, next to a verse from the Koran
in Arabic script.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing, as I’m about to leave the cab.

“This?” he asks, touching the arch. He thinks I want to ask about the colored lights.

“That.” I point to the Arabic text.

“This is Muslim.”

“And you have Saibaba also?”

“Yes, Saab (sir). Aren’t they all reflections of the same entity?”

The old man with the skull cap isn’t looking for an answer.

He already knows.

Having turned the cab around he waves his hand.

I cannot stop smiling.

There is still hope.

Expectations (01.14.2016)

One thing. I have one thing.

You and I get into an argument.

We face off because I was expecting you to do something, and you did not.

This expectation - was it an agreement or just something I assumed was going to happen?

What do I need to work on?

Our communication, or on me?

You do something that makes me highly irritated.

Where does this irritation come from?

Is this your behavior or something that’s already boiling inside me?

Who do I need to work on - us, or me?
In response to my dilemma, time has taught me a simple solution to this question.

I might need to learn to make this elusive distinction.

Where is the true source of the problem?

Am I certain it’s not me…?

The Eunuch (07.12.1998)

“Keep that with you and make sure you don’t lose it.”

She says with a slight gentleness in her voice. He says with a slight gentleness in his voice. I am not entirely sure
which gender connotation was appropriate. I still don’t.

I am on the Virar fast train during the evening rush hour, possibly the most crowded of the local trains in Bombay.
Standing on the side of the door, I hold the pole with one hand while the other rests beside me. Once I settle into that
position, there is no turning back. The dense crush of the crowds ensures that I will not be able to move – At least
until Bandra.

The train stops at Grant Road, and for the ignorant, it is the ideal destination for local brothels and happens to have a
very flamboyant red-light area in Mumbai. Speaking from experience, not many women get off on this stop.

But on this day, a few women get on. Not women, however, but a couple of transgenders. They are more notably
called chhakas or hijras in India. A tight-knit community, they stay in groups and board the trains in groups of ones
or twos begging for money. They are usually very aggressive and would not hesitate to touch you, tease you, shame
you – Anything to make sure you want to get rid of them quickly, even if it means parting with a couple of bucks.

The houses operate a bit like street gangs — they fight over territory for begging and prostitution and settle disputes
among themselves, sometimes violently, in the shadows of train stations and slums. Most live and spend their years
in small, airless shanties with the smell of feces wafting through cracks in the walls.
As they make their way through the crowd, the first thing I hear someone shout out - ‘Oh my God, the hijras are
here.’” Then there is a nervous pause, then laughter. They bless each person and in turn expect them to give them
some cash. It is usually considered a tradition when giving blessings or gift money with a 1-rupee coin.

As the hijras spread out on the train and walk through the flock of the regular commuters to beg for money, I see one
of them dressed in a very bright pink saree and flowers in the head approach in my direction.

The two of them standing beside me are trying hard to avoid them. The eunuch places a hand over their head and
then extends the same hand in the gesture of asking for money. The men look left, right, downwards – Anywhere but
towards the eunuch. Semi ashamed.

It’s the day that I have got my salary and I feel – extravagant, but just slightly. I fish into my wallet to take out a
one-rupee coin and then on an impulse, take out a ten-rupee note instead. Giving just a tenner is considered
inauspicious in my circles – Usually, it’s in multiples- eleven, twenty-one, fifty-one, a hundred and one. As I fish in
my pocket for a one-rupee coin, I pick out a two-rupee coin instead. Whatever, I think. This is better than just the
ten.

He sees me fishing into my wallet and slows down waits. As I close my wallet, I feel a hand on my head and I
extend the money which he takes with immense gratitude, touching the money to both eyes before putting it in his
blouse.

As I turn back towards the door, I feel someone pat my shoulder.

I look back at him and he has a one-rupee coin that he is holding under his teeth as he adjusts his blouse and saree.

He places the coin in my hand and says with some degree of confidence and unknown authority – “Keep that with
you and make sure you don’t lose it.”

I thank him for that gift. It’s just a one-rupee coin. You probably cannot even buy some candy with it but this is not
a transaction. Instead, this is a connection – From one human being to the other, both have their own set of
unfortunate circumstances, both have their compulsions, a stomach to feed and an ego to bear and between us is a
one-rupee coin that connects us, that transcends the realms of money and differences, gender and acquaintances.

Bandra station is fast approaching and the crowd is getting antsy to alight. Bodies are aligned, inquiries are made of
the person ahead of you – “Are you going to get down at Bandra”. If the answer is yes, the body behind you aligns
itself to your position, trusting you to ensure his or her getting down on the station. God forbid if you are standing
close to the door and are not planning to get down. A series of curses ensure you are told to get behind. If you are
not getting down, you have no right to take up that space. There are unwritten rules about a Bombay train – Rules
that one is expected to know, understand, assimilate and adhere to.

As I stand back, I hear a shuffle behind me, and then the sound of a tight resounding slap rings through the train. As
I turn around, I see the eunuch tucking in the corner of his saree with one hand while holding the collar of a twelve-
year-old boy with another. His other hand is holding my wallet.

It doesn’t take me long to realize what has just happened. The pickpockets usually hold off until the train is about to
stop. Sensing his opportunity, the teenaged boy who is selling snacks on the train had made his move. However, he
could not get through the eunuch who after years on the same commuter line is probably aware of the location of a
single roach that rides this train. He knew.

As the crowd turns towards the terrified boy, he senses imminent danger. Bombay crowds are notorious for beating
up pickpockets. Every passerby gets to kick them, punch them until they are a heap of bloodied mass, lucky enough
if a passing cop dares to take them.
“I will f*** anyone up if they touch him”, the eunuch growls and the crowds take a step back. The accountant, the
software engineer, the geek – They find their strength in numbers. As singular entities, they are just what they are -
Cowardly.

He lets go of the boy as the train stops at Bandra. The mood suddenly shifts, and everyone gets back to alighting the
train, shifting positions, or grabbing an empty seat. The boy is quickly forgotten.

“You need to be careful. Thank God I was there!”, he turns towards me and says with a sudden gentleness that belies
his previous ferocity.

I didn’t have very many words for him and all I could say was, “Yes! Thank God you were there.”

As the train starts back up, he turns around and gets off as I see the pink apparition grow smaller into the distance.

I will never see him again.

But I keep that 1-rupee coin close –

With me as a reminder that it just takes a single rupee to get to know a golden soul.

Shortly afterward, I notice the following advertisement in the SERVICES section of the classified ads in a Bombay
paper:

“Outstanding Dues??? Take It Easy!! Now Available with UNIQUE RECOVERIES: A Trained Group of Educated
Eunuchs Who ensure Speedy Recovery from defaulters. Inquiries invited from individuals, banks, corporate sector”.

A Matunga East address is given, and a phone number.

On a whim sitting in the office the next day I call.

It has already been disconnected.

Udvada (05.22.1988)

When I was a kid my parents used to take us to Udvada, a small sleepy village in the heart of Gujrat where my
father was born. The two-story house close to the beach was majestic - much, much larger than the 457 sq. foot of
urban space that I grew up in. It has a beautiful backyard where flowers grow in abundance and there are trees laden
with papaya, mangoes, and other delicacies.

We would run around the house, hide in innate corners, and imagine ghosts and spirits are lurking in the attic - A
dark damp place we never used to dare climb up to.

Every afternoon my mother would lay out the banana leaves in which we had our lunch - A simple affair of daal,
rice, and if we were feeling a bit adventurous some mango chutney. They would send us kids out to get mangoes
from the nearby trees and we would never raid our own but always the neighborhood tree which had the biggest of
those green delights hanging oh so low from their branches - Just beyond our reach.

We would throw stones, sticks, even our footwear in an attempt to get them down before the owners found out, and
if you were not quick enough you would find the cranky old lady from the neighborhood standing on the doorstep of
her house screaming obscenities at the 12-year old’s in ways only a Parsi lady could.

The post-lunch routine would always be standard - Waiting on the porch for the ice cream man to show up. You
would wait and wait and wait and just when you were about to give up and go back into the house, you would hear
the tolling of the bicycle bell, an indication of his arrival as we would gather around him, part eager, part guilty -
Eager because we were kids and loved the ice cream, guilty because we knew our parents who could barely afford
those scoops would be mentally calculating the tally, but we didn’t care. We were kids and for us, those calculations
would be smaller considerations.

Every evening, as my mother would go to the fire temple to pray, our dad would hold our hand and take us to the
beach close by. As we built sandcastles my dad would watch us in amusement before my mother got back and they
would go on a walk as we followed them at a distance.

As the sun sets, we don our little velvet caps - Red for me and white for my younger sister before we head to the fire
temple ourselves. Built-in 1742 it’s the only place in the world that has a continuous fire burning for those years. It
has no electricity, so the entire temple is lit by small oil lamps. The servants would pull down the ropes lowering the
glass domes from the high ceilings, place a lamp inside and pull the dome back up on the levered rope. We walk
around quietly, very quietly, our feet’s wanting to dance, to stomp but we are afraid of incurring the wrath of the 85-
year-old head priest dressed in a white flowing gown, sitting on his high chair watching us like a hawk as he
rummaged his fingers through his flowing white beard.

Late at night after a long tiring day of enjoyment, I and my sister or one of our cousins if they came visiting would
carry out the mattresses holding the two corners or at times just dragging them, one at a time on the terrace. The
night would be slightly cold, the howls of local stray dogs heard from the distance. Sleeping at night on that damp,
slightly cold night in mid-summer, I would count the stars and hear the elders talk as we drifted away into oblivion
until woken up at early dawn by falling dew drops as we pick up our blankets and run inside for shelter, our eyes
crusted with sleep, our feet barely keeping pace.

As a child, I always thought that nature happened only when I could lie down, stretch out and exhale across trees
and clear open water. Farms weren't nature, neither were city parks and certainly not those suburban scalps of grass
that the servants of the rich sprayed with chemicals and weekly shaved down to a bristle. When nature got too close
to humans, it seemed to fester with secrets about how we were all one breath away from falling and letting those tree
roots or that stifling network of grass take over. And so, momentarily having the upper hand, we cut it, hemmed it,
powdered it, and buttoned it up.

I hated the shrubs that grew in my grandfather's garden. They oozed onto the sidewalk in a mess of bad omen that
couldn't be swept up and drew clouds of ants. The point at which the walls of the village houses meet the lawns was
unseemingly and would be covered up by those stunted trees. When we looked at a shrub, we would see a wolf in a
zoo, a Lothario in marriage - things made sad and mean in confinement.

Children are desperate for mystery, for a world to stumble into that is bigger than the one they've known.

It wasn't easy growing up in a world so full of people at every corner and their miniature beauties, and the small
patterns they impose on the malleable things around them.

Much is made of the imaginations of children- how fertile, how powerful, how inspiring. Perhaps we're wrong
about them. When we grow up, the world shrinks to the size of our brains, barbed wire of our imaginations fenced
around it, a wall behind which we cannot fathom what the universe looks like, and we must imagine ourselves
delighted by what we have, what we see. We have to work so much harder to imagine the products of our hands and
minds as bearable, to gather enough small strips of beauty to tie into a rope that holds.

The mango tree from across the first floor of my grandfather's house emits that amazing yellow sweetness of the
heavens.

The ice cream canister on the back of the bicycle moving down the lane is lovely.
Rootless (08.12.2003)

Any nostalgia I felt about my childhood is starting to get erased. Given the chance to live again in the territory of
childhood, I am coming to detest it.

Why do I put myself through this?

I was comfortable and happy and praised in Boston; I had two places, one to live and one to work. I have given all
that up for this fool’s errand, looking for silhouettes during the ghost time.

Now I can’t wait to go back, to the place I once longed to get away from Boston.

I miss cold weather, the multicolored leaves in the autumn, and the white people.

I see pictures of blizzards on TV and remember the warmth inside when it’s cold outside and you open the window
just a crack and the air outside slices in like a solid wedge.

The way you sleep at night with a slightly cracked window, letting the cold air in as it cleanses the room – fills it
with a pine-like scent.

How the scent reaches your nostrils, and you take a deep breath.

How you go outside on a bad night and the cold clears your head and makes everything better.

When you leave the place, you will only later call home, you become, rather suddenly, though you might not know
it for quite some time, like a mouse without its fur, the soft shards of its hair flashing its ascent from the bottom to
its shiny polished top.
But the news is not all bad. Though you cannot re-fur yourself, though you cannot go home, you may never know
yourself better than when you are about to float, white on the dark streak of the ocean, straddled in a boat, breathing
like a wild eagle – Ready to soar.

My father once, in my house, exasperated by my relentless demands to be sent back to finish my education in
another high school, shouted at me,

“When you were there, you wanted to come here. Now that you’re here, you want to go back.”

It was when I first realized I had a new nationality:

Citizen of the country of longing.

Quarantine (11.01.2020)

” Go stand in the trash bin for an hour Z”

At my 4th grade school, my history teacher used to make us stand in a tall trash can when we misbehaved. I ended
up there once, and it was so very exciting at first. The rusted metal bin that almost came up to my chest and smelled
of tar offered a change of scenery. It was a break from my usual role as a conscientious student. As I stood there, I
regaled in the attention of my classmates. “Look at me,” I said inwardly, and they did. But within fifteen minutes,
when my classmates’ attention drifted back to the Indo-British wars, I started to panic just a bit. I knew I didn’t
belong in the trash can; I knew I was just being dumped there and it was my teacher’s way to regain control of the
classroom. As I stood there, a feeling of isolation crept over me. When will I go back amongst them? Will they hug
me as a victorious winner, or will they shun me as a trash can junkie? I wondered.

As I look towards my two daughters stuck at home and learning remotely, I cannot help but wonder if they are
feeling a little bit of the same thing, I went through many years ago. Between us, we have two kids in two separate
institutions. Our elder one is in UNH which thankfully still has some balance of in-class and remote ratio whereas
the younger one is an 11th grader who spends roughly six hours a day watching synchronous classes on her
Chromebook. She wanders, bleary-eyed into the kitchen at random times — for breakfast around 10.45 am or for a
four-minute break between two classes. When she is not in a class, she is staring at her laptop balancing it on her
knees as she eats some yogurt while the papers are scattered around her.
Once in a while, from my loft office, I can hear one of my girls answering or asking a question, but mostly what I
hear is just unnerving silence. There is no leave-taking or homecoming, no rhythmic cycle of routine, just the soft
thumping of household work happening perpetually in limbo, especially for my wife. My girls are here, but they are
not here; being taught, but not necessarily learning, seeing people, but not interacting with the rest of humanity.

And they’re the lucky ones — with desks, Wi-Fi, and a fridge stocked with food. They know this, and I cannot thank
my employer who is kind, helpful, and understanding. I know how lucky we are that we can work during these
times.

I pick up Marsha as she is walking on the road one Sunday morning. She is a regular and I have seen her around this
area for a couple of years now. She has two young boys and works at a local dollar store. As we drive, I ask her
curious as to why she is walking in the opposite direction from her usual workplace.

“They laid off a bunch of us a month ago. I am just heading to Dunkin Donuts to pick up a job application,” she says
with obvious dismay. I try to recall all the other hiring lists that I have seen around in the area. She thanks me, but
her mind is somewhere else.

“How are the kids doing,” I ask as we drive. She hesitates for a second but then decides to let me in on the state of
her life. Her husband who was a sub-contractor at the local plumbing joint is laid off too. Their car has broken down
again, the kids need laptops and internet at home which they did not have before and the younger one hasn’t had his
asthma medication in a couple of weeks now. The expenses are just piling up and she is overwhelmed — A tired life
gladiator fighting ten cannibal soldiers at the same time.

We take a detour by a local CVS on the way and pick up her son’s medication. As I swipe my credit card, I extend a
handout and quickly pick up some packs of cookies and chips too. Later, as we reach the Dunkin Donuts, I reach for
my wallet and shove a couple of fifty-dollar bills in her hand. I am ashamed of myself, for being able to work, for
having the things that she doesn’t, for not being able to do more for them, even when I actually could. What would a
couple of fifties do for her? The guilt within is pushing me to do things that my rational mind would usually refuse.
She looks at the money in horror — but only for a second. Her mind is calculating things too, quickly, and money
ultimately wins out.

As she is about to step out of the car, she unfolds her arms in relief pointed in my direction. Her eyes, behind the
mask, are questioning.

“Of course,”, I mumble behind mine, as I lean towards the right to hug her.

It has come to this — that we have to question a basic act of human interaction.

As I drive back home, I think about where we are as a human race these days. For 15 years, I have marked days and
seasons by the rhythms of the middle school bus coming to pick and drop the kids by the side of our house. When
the ice-cream truck pulls into the parking lot during a summer evening, it’s time for me to go to the local gym.
When handprint turkeys appear in the windows, it’s time to take the warm clothes out from their bags. Now the
parking lot is empty, and the windows are dark. I miss the sounds of little kids playing outside and their games.

I miss looking out my bedroom window and watching my kids leave for the day: elder daughter first, her walk
signifying a sense of confidence and leadership; then my younger one, trailing behind her elder sister as they walk
together, their heavy backpacks almost weighing them down. I miss their swim classes, their lunch bags, and the
binders they had on the sofa that I used to bitch about. Their schools, as I know it, have ended for now. I tell myself
we will never take these things for granted again — the hustle of young people going places, the sound of the school
bus engine as it rolls in, my front-row seat on the beautiful mess of normalcy. I’ve learned my lesson.
It’s almost dusk and the sun has set behind the horizon. I walk back into the bedroom, put down two pillows on the
floor, and sit down cross-legged for the evening meditation session.

As I close my eyes, my head is searching for the sounds of children playing in the park just outside the window. The
sounds that I always considered as an irritant during my meditation sessions and tried to tune them out by forcing
my mind back on my breathing. Now as I sit here in the quiet, I realize how our world has changed in the last few
months. Spending time alone in our so-called quarantine has allowed us to see ourselves, to see what color we are,
when we have nothing to blend into.
The Soldier (05.11.2017)

I am running late today.

The Chiropractor’s appointment in downtown Portsmouth is at 9.15 AM and it’s already 8.35 AM.

It’s been raining lightly, and the clouds are overcast portending more rain, a much-needed necessity these days as all
the rivers are running dry. New Hampshire is under a spell of drought for a while now and any rain that we get is
welcome.

I see him on the other side of the road, a frail man of around 70 hunched over lugging a big bag, a laptop bag, and a
plastic bag behind him, almost hunched over. I look at him and have a thought, then I look at the clock on the
dashboard and I turn away and accelerate, joining a hundred others who have seen him and disregarded him. It’s late
and I have to be somewhere.

A mile ahead, as I near the next light, I stop on red and turn on the wipers back again to heavy. The rain is starting to
pour down at a steady clip and I listen to Idenline on the stereo, her voice soothing, the velvet warmth of the car
enveloping and shielding against the downpour and I can’t get the old man out of my sight.

As the lights turn green, I suddenly switch lanes causing the unfortunate one behind to honk loudly as I make a U-
turn. I know what I am doing and unlike a couple of minutes before, now I know what I am doing.

Around the bend, in a haze of showers, I catch a glimpse of him, as I turn my emergency lights on in the middle of
the heavy traffic and hit the corner lane rolling down the windows.

He is up close now and I see that he is not that old, probably 60, but beaten down by the adversities or maybe just
the rain. His nose is dripping, and he is shivering heavily.
I wonder how many of us would just keep driving had we seen him up close. Distance puts a veil of ignominy that
shields us from the realities of life, as we drive by in our cars, soothed by 8 of Herman Kaufman bass stereos,
encased in a leather seat, climate-controlled.

“Hey, can I drop you somewhere”, I yell from the window in the rain that is now a downpour.

He looks up dazed, unsure that anyone would stop for him at this time.

“Your car seat is getting wet sir”. He is drenched from rain head to toe and his concerns are related to the fact that
the rolled down window might spoil the fake leather of my car seat.

“Come on up. I’ll take you”

“You are my hero…My hero…Thank you!! You are my hero today sir” he keeps saying in his deep baritone over
and over as he stands up and I realize he is much taller than I am.

He smiles and still shivers as he starts to put his bags into the trunk. One at a time bent over. I am not sure if it’s the
weight of the bags or just his weakness.

“Sir, if you can drop me at the nearest service credit union bank, I would appreciate it,” he says softly and then nods
looking at me.

I turn the heat onto the max and roll up the windows as we move away merging back into the traffic.

“Where do you come from?” I ask, making conversation. I know where he is coming from. There is a homeless
shelter down the street and every day there is a steady stream of people going down this road, some being taken in,
others evicted after the mandatory 3-day stay.

“US Navy veteran Sir. Vietnam…” he says proudly and then just as suddenly his eyes go wide. I think he is in pain,
but he is looking straight ahead.

“15 months and homeless, 15 months…. Someone stole all my pension benefits, $1,152 all gone. Why do they do
that?” he turns away from me, old and beaten down, yet there is a sense of pride here.

I look straight ahead, and I drive.

“Let’s get a coffee if that’s ok. What would you like?”, I ask

“A small coffee, extra cream, and sugar”.

I roll by the nearest McDonald’s and we get a large coffee and three egg muffin sandwiches. It’s too early for the
burgers so he would have to make do with the egg muffins for now.

He takes the pen from his pocket and scribbles something on the receipt from McDonald’s that I have tossed over in
the coffee mug holder. Maybe he is trying to remember something.

The service credit union is around the corner and I stop inside the parking lot and help him unload his bags. He is in
much better shape than I picked him up.

The bank is open, and he wants to get his account open quickly. He thanks me and then moves ahead as I come back
to open the car door.

“Sir, do you ever know a great mechanic around here?” he suddenly asks without a prompt.
I refuse. In reality, I don’t.

“Well, now you have got one and a damned good one at that too. If you ever need one, let me know and I will be
happy to help you anytime without any money, for all the rest of my life”

I thank him and turn back. He holds me back by my shoulder and my training kicks in as I immediately spin around,
ready for anything.

And then I see him there.

Standing rapt at attention, his legs joined together, his torso straight as an arrow, a soldier’s stand and he gives me
one of the crispest salutes.

“Sir, I will never forget this day for the rest of my life. I never will until the day I die. Someone helped me, someone
helped me today. It’s going to be good now” he nods at himself.

I am clumsy and I don’t know how to react, so I salute him back as best as I can. Someone standing in the parking
lot that day would have seen two very soaked guys saluting each other, a tall old man and a short brown one
standing in the empty parking lot in the pouring rain.

As I move away, I notice two dollars and some change on the seat next to me.

I hit the brakes hard, hoping to turn back and give him the money that he seems to have dropped.

That’s when I notice the receipt.

“Thank you…” it reads in a scribble, but still very legible, and I break out into a smile.

It’s a treasure that one has just landed on, ever so slowly understanding that you are not rich until you have
something money can’t buy.

I gas the car back into the traffic joining the hordes again hoping I don’t see anyone walking again in this rain.

I have to make it with less than 5 minutes to spare.

Senseless Things (09.28.2017)

“You are completely crazy, Dadz”

My elder one Jenifer announces on a lazy Sunday evening as we sit together on the floor giving each other facials as
we discuss the finer points of farting in public with my equally crazy younger daughter Becky.

As I teach the younger one the tricks of how to accomplish that without making it publicly known, Jenifer the more
sensible one sends out a judgment flare while at the same time trying not to crack up in peals of laughter.

She calls out to her mother who refuses to be wrapped in this craziness.

Many years ago, I enrolled in weeklong Phowa meditation training in San Simeon, CA.

I did this with no intention to ever teach or even to be enlightened. I just wanted to take a week off, something that I
had never done before…or after.

When I finished this course and got my training, I came back home, threw away the books and material, and never
heard about it again, but I came home a different man than the one that had left.

Friends often ask why I did all this work if I did not intend to apply it.

I decided that not everywhere I went needed to come with a destination and that the notion of doing things for the
sheer joy they brought me made more life-sense to me.

If I approach everything thinking it all must have a purpose, everything I set out to do becomes more intimidating
than it needs to be. Life makes it harder for me to experience new things.

I want to study what interests me to understand it better, and it doesn’t matter if what I learn is ever “put to use”.
Learning is its reward, and the same holds for everything. Even better is not learning, but just being.
Curiosity reveals new paths that are meant to be explored. I read anything and everything. I try to understand
different perspectives and come away enriched because of it.

I remained in a job for years because the decision to leave seemed terrifying and final. I didn’t walk away until one
day someone told me that if I did, I could return any time.

When we’re all tangled up in one it’s hard to see, but decisions are seldom as big as we make them out to be.

Everything changes anyway.

Years ago, when everyone wanted to go to the USA, I spent time trying to find a job – Just any job. I learned
software programming because it seemed fun and it made a lot of money, I heard.

Now here I am sitting in Boston wondering about the trajectory that life took while some of my more eager friends
are still around in India coming up with different schemes to settle down someplace else. Their ambitions are now
more realistic – A Malaysia, maybe Dubai.

CFA certification is my new thing these days. I spend time on it because I enjoy it and I think it makes me feel a bit
more – Important in some eyes.

So many people ask me where I’m going with it or if I understand the finer points of Portfolio management or
Returns Analysis.

Honestly? I don’t, nor do I care to. I have no answers for either of these questions but can tell you my largely
senseless zest has so far got me to almost 3/4th the way into a prestigious sounding certification.

If I had set out to do that 3 years ago, I would not have been able to do it.

Reading through CFA sounds like play. Studying for a certification sounds a bit daunting.

I talk to a young friend at work who is smart, very well regarded, and extremely intelligent. He tells me he is
disillusioned, is tired of doing the same work every day that doesn’t present him any challenges, and doesn’t
understand where he is going with his career or his life.

He is a serious person and is looking at me for serious answers.

Me – The one who has hour-long discussions with his daughters on the finer art of flatulating in public.

If he knew, he would be disgusted, I would be terribly embarrassed and forget talking about a serious topic, we
would never be friends again.

But, regardless of how seriously we take things, the truth is life is more than anything else - The art of going
nowhere.

Please, take ballet lessons or feel free to discuss the embarrassing things or do even crazier things. Do that at
thirteen, at twenty, at forty, at ninety.

Pee in the shower or heck, pee in the pool secretly, and then laugh about it.

Laugh.

Be light. You don’t have to be so responsible, so heavy, and so serious all the time.

Laughter is so very beautiful and will keep you healthy and feeling slightly younger than you are and connected to
something or someone you love.
More importantly, do more senseless things.

Things that you feel will go nowhere,

accomplish nothing.
Showcases (08.12.2006)

Each person’s life is defined by a single event, which molds and prejudices everything that comes after it and, in
turn, everything that came ahead of it.

For me, it was going to live in America at the age of twenty-five.

It’s not a difficult age at which to change countries. You have quite finished growing up where you were but you’re
never well in your skin in the one you’re moving to. I had absolutely no idea about the country of America; I had
never been there nor did I ever envision myself being there.

When the rich kids in the public school talked about going there as soon as they grew up, my dreams were limited to
getting out of the one-room dingy apartment and buying a place somewhere on the outskirts of Bombay.

I was certainly not of a later generation of my friends, such as Sameer, who at the age of twenty, stepped into JFK
Airport fresh off the plane from Bombay wearing a Yankee baseball cap and with half an American accent already
in place.

I had traveled, in twenty-four hours, between childhood and adulthood, between innocence and knowledge, between
predestination and chaos.

Everything that has happened since, every minute and the following acts—the way I use a fork, the way I make love,
my choice of a profession and a wife—has been shaped by that central event, that fulcrum of time.
It was almost a couple of years since I had been here in America and as a true desi, it was time to go back home to
visit the family, bearing the gifts that proclaimed my dollar-dominated status.

I was carrying the gifts that were requested, almost demanded by the friends and a million relatives who had
bragged to all they knew that they now have a ‘contact’ in America. The gifts were trivial and bought exclusively
from either the salvation army for most relatives and from Dollar Tree for the closest and dearest ones. I knew my
gifts would be welcome.

Whatever their quality, they were “imported” and therefore to be treasured. In our uncle’s one-bedroom house in
Bombay, there used to be a showcase in the living room. It displayed imported objects from Europe and America,
the spoils of my uncle’s friend’s business trips: Matchbox cars, miniature bottles of spirits, a cylinder of long
matches. There was a bottle of Head & Shoulders that my dad claimed for himself although I did get a box of tic
tacs that I preserved for a couple of months before eating it. I also got a lemon-scented Zest soap that I safely tucked
away between my shirts. “I will use it the day I get married” - I remember saying to myself. I was barely growing a
mustache then.

We would use those things with reverence. We used to stare at them in awe. Things we would only get to see once a
year. Things so precious we would kill for them.

In America too when we were settled and considered well to do after a while, we had things that we collected and
revered. The sandalwood incense sticks that were only used on special occasions, the special Jalebis that we got
from a quaint Parsi shop in Marine Lines, or the little fire lamp that I brought in were accessorized by the bulky
voltage adapter. I almost forgot to mention that heavenly smelling Cinthol soap, those green bars in red packaging
that I used once every three months knowing I would run out of it before I went back.

When my seven-year-old daughter wanted to use one, I would give her the American soap. She wasn’t allowed to
open the little case that held some of these goodies. They were too precious; they had to be used carefully.

She spent her time splayed against the plastic door of the container, staring at her heritage...

Like a wasp at a window.

Property (08.19.2012)

He points to the uneven graphite lines with his name on them. He has been buying up property behind his house in
amounts that immediately bespeak loyalty and permanence in a place that can keep fewer than half of its younger
population.

The place sells land only to the rich investors from the lower peninsula, people who are hoping they might cash out
when it turns into a tourist spot in earnest. He is proud to show me his map, proud to come of age in this old-
fashioned American way.

I taste envy like the peel of a grapefruit in the corners of my mouth.

When I was a kid, I used to see the forest behind our house in the village as boundless. I wasn’t an idiot; I could
work out the geography. But I would walk into the forests and the trees would seep into my brain and I would lose
all sense that if I kept walking and walking, eventually I would hit other houses, roads covered with asphalt.

Perhaps that's the way forests refine our vision: we look only as high as the canopy lets us; our periphery is always
framed by long dark trunks.

Don't folktales warn us that there is something dangerous in the woods? Our human powers, our courage falters and
we teeter on the cusp of self-induced vertigo.
We have left the highway and our houses of slaughtered trees and stepped into that which multiplies multiples, and
grows exponentially - Without us.

How can we trust ourselves with a property when it can be had merely for money or desire?

Why are these two together reasons enough for us to be able to take something and do what we will?

Property may be humankind's answer to our disillusionment with relationships.

We find we can't own people. Well, not literally - through love, slavery, or even reproduction. Unshackled, people
are so slippery, like water lodged toads.

What else can we pin down? What else do we have that can give us a sense of belonging, that it belongs to us,
permanently? Great backs of rock, the spine of trees? And why is learning new things the refuge of unsatisfied
people, the newer technologies, the latest trends, all in the name of keeping up to date in one's career path - don’t
become redundant. Keep learning.

What about learning about your spouse, learning about your children, getting to know them better, maybe?

Why at thirty-three years did I want to buy a house, a 3-bedroom house in India, a house I could barely afford, in a
place where I didn't intend to stay very long?
Popsicle (03.01.1985)

I once gave away a quarter. Well, almost.

A quarter may not sound like much, but it was significant to me.

When I was growing up, my family had very little money. I usually never wore hand-me-downs, but my clothing
was always a little too big, made such that they lasted a couple of years of growth. Our family was never wanting
but we stuck to a strict budget, and my sister and I didn’t have an allowance.

I didn’t mind for the most part, but it was sometimes hard when the weather was nice. You see, when the weather
was nice, the ice cream man would come to the school with his ice cream cart.

Once in a long while, dad would let us buy an orange popsicle for my sister and me to share. But it was a rare treat,
and most days, we would just walk by.

Before and after school, the ice cream man would be right outside the school entrance. At lunchtime, when the
weather was fine, the ice cream man would park his cart right next to the school playground. So, every day when
school was in session when the weather was nice, I would see the ice cream man three times a day.

Three times a day, I would watch as other kids bought ice cream at the ice cream cart.

Mid-day recess was the worst.

After lunch, kids would swarm around the ice cream man, and walk around the playground eating their ice cream.

Almost every kid in my class visited the ice cream man regularly, and I would watch as my classmates made their
purchases.
I became familiar with the smells of all the different types of ice cream long before I ever tasted them… Vanilla
chocolate bars, cherry pops, peanut encrusted cones, chocolate-covered bars, Italian Ices. I would breathe in the
sweet aroma of the sticky treats.

One morning when I was still in elementary school, I was chosen along with another boy to be the aide for one of
the first-grade teachers. We helped her tidy her classroom and washed her chalkboard.

After we finished with the chalkboard and had put away the duster, the teacher reached into her purse and gave us
each a shiny quarter.

A whole quarter….

The nine-year-old me knew exactly what I wanted to do with that quarter. I was going to buy a popsicle at
lunchtime.

I was so excited that I could barely concentrate in class for the rest of the morning.

After lunch, I proudly went to the end of the line that had formed in front of the ice cream man. I was elated to be
buying ice cream at lunchtime for the very first time.

As I stood in line, my eyes caught the gaze of Imtiaaz, a Muslim boy in my class. His legs were polio-stricken and
he walked with metal hinges on his legs, a remnant of how polio-infected legs were supported back then.

He was wistfully watching as the kids bought their ice cream. I knew that look all too well.

I thought about it, and I couldn’t recall Imtiaaz ever getting ice cream. I realized that he was just like me.

When I glanced at Imtiaaz again, I saw the reflection of me. A boy who day after day watched his classmates buy
ice cream, never getting to partake himself.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel so happy anymore. As I waited in line, I became excruciatingly aware of Imtiaz's longing
stare.

I tried to shake it off. I had earned my quarter; I deserved my popsicle.

But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that had formed in the pit of my stomach. The idea of getting a popsicle, and
Imtiaaz watching me eat it made me irritated, slightly sad too.

The feeling grew and grew as I got closer and closer to the front of the line until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I made up my mind. I stepped out of the line and walked towards Imtiaaz.

I wish this had gone the way it should have, but I was too young to comprehend any other outcome.

“Why the f*** are you standing up here?” I pushed the crippled boy he staggered a couple of steps behind.

Lost in his longing, Imtiaaz took a second to register that I was talking to him.

“Why?” Imtiaaz asked incredulously, his metal hinged polio feet shuffling slightly outwards.

“Go away before I punch you in the face,” I threatened, as he backed away a couple of steps.

I then headed back to the line, paid the quarter, and bought a cherry popsicle. I watched Imtiaaz slowly limp away
towards the playground.
I tried to savor the popsicle, the cherry red popsicle tinting my lips red as I slowly ate it like none of my other
classmates ever did.

It was the very first time I ate the entire ice cream all by myself.

But for some reason, I didn’t feel like it tasted as well as it did in my head. Actually, it tasted like shit.

The thought that maybe, just maybe I should have let the boy on crutches have it, never left my mind.
Square Boxes (08.22.2020)

Going to work every day wasn’t mandatory, but for a while, I did it from Monday to Thursday even though it was a
two-hour hike each way. The company culture was flexible and HR was filled with decent kind people. However, it
was a pleasure to spend time at the office, in the same way, it would be a pleasure to spend hours in the lobby of a
boutique hotel. There were large monitors, a decent working space, views of the ocean. The kitchen was stocked
with six different types of tea and there would always be a tray of food leftover from some meeting – something that
never failed to send a thrill down my spine, the cheap bastard that I was. There was something to be said about the
impromptu conversations or a coworker IM’ing me if I wanted to head out for a quick afternoon walk or coffee.

Despite the robust amenities and congenital culture, the office was rarely full, and once COVID hit we were all
scattered, like bees flying out of a beehive. Meetings were held over videoconferencing software, and people dialed
in from wherever they happened to be: public transportation, unmade beds, living rooms with dogs napping in the
background. An engineer attended his daily stand-up meeting from the gym and I started to identify everyone by
their background scenery.

I was still shy of displaying myself over video and marveled at how easily most of them have switched over working
from home instead of the office. They all looked professional, well-cultivated backgrounds and video angles, the
lighting seemed almost always perfect. As for me, I started with a laptop on the kitchen dining table and then
switched to the comfort of my small loft. I perched the laptop on the carpet and worked laying on my belly taking
conference calls, mostly on audio.
My manager and I met once a week on a formal catch-up, for half an hour, over videoconference. I prepared for
these meetings by brushing my hair, wearing a shirt, and moving my laptop from the ground to a decent-looking
table with a better background view than my behind. The vase with the lovely-looking money plant moved to the
table just behind me, the cartons of Basmati rice bought from the Indian store last week moved out of view.

“I am guessing you have a day full of meetings today?” Ana asked one morning, watching me position my laptop on
the table so that the clothes drying rack, draped with underwear, was out of frame. Sitting in the formal chair, barely
comfortable, I eye my usual spot on the ground. A couple more hours, I say to myself.

Once the restrictions were relaxed, while my teammates did go back to the office on designated days, it was strange
when we were embodied, disorienting to see everyone from the neck down. Our relationships, fostered in the last
year through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more unwieldy in person than on
Microsoft teams and over video, where conversation spooled along awkwardly.

Sometimes, I just enjoyed the specific intimacy of being anonymous while watching everyone else on video:
everyone breathing, sniffling, chewing gum, forgetting to mute the microphone before clearing their congestion, the
slight grimace when someone else said something passive-aggressive. I liked the banter, the frozen mid-sentence
faces, the surprise of seeing an animal emerging from under a desk. I liked watching everyone watch themselves
while we pretended to watch one another, an act of infinite surveillance. The first ten minutes were almost always
spent correcting the videoconference software, during which I became acquainted with my team’s home interiors,
their color-coded bookcases and wedding photos, their guitars or obscure art. I learned about their hobbies and
partners. I grew fond of their children and pets.

At the start of these meetings, I would log in and lean into my laptop, enjoying the camaraderie and warmth of a
team. For an hour, my loft would fill with laughter and chatter, conversation tripping when the software stalled or
delayed.

When it was done, I would stand up, stretch, put the table and chair back in their spot, tape back over my laptop
camera as I put it back in its spot on the carpet— Adjusting to the silence, alone in my room.
A Self in the Crowd (06.18.2006)

During the festival of Pateti, the Parsi new year, we visit the fire temples around Bombay. The smell of roses and
sandalwood permeates the atmosphere. The red and blue and black caps worn by the Parsi men, the colorful sarees
of the women, and the silver-lined small skull caps of the kids adorn the atmosphere as the familiar language of
greetings and conversation fill the air around me.

I feel myself being at home.

There are many of my cousin’s children too out there, and they adore his new daughter. They are nice to my kids
too, but it is not the same: We are not immediate family. Holding the girl’s hands, I feel the difference keenly. They
watch the praying priests, again from the outside.

“Why do you want to go back to America?”

I ask Becky, as we’re walking back one day from our snack on Parel bridge after she’s picked up a yellow-and-white
champak flower and I’ve shown her how—by folding the petals back and threading them through the stem—she can
make a brooch for her mother; after I’ve shown her the seed pod that makes a good rattle for her if you shake it.

She doesn’t answer for a while.

I ask her again. I bend down to her level and ask her seriously.

“Because my friends there miss me. They say it every time on the phone.”

It’s a good enough reason to go back: because your friends miss you.

It’s the reason I’ve gone back to India, been pulled back, again and again.
Friends are there—not just parents but grandparents, aunts, cousins— and friends also are what little children need,
more than culture, more than country.

So just when we are deciding to finally get a home in India, we prepare to move again—back to Boston.

But it’s all right, because, after a year my question has been answered. You can go home again, and you can also
leave again.

Once more, with confidence, into the world.

Space between us (01.29.2011)

When I was young, I couldn’t wait to grow up.

My family was not poor, and we always had enough to eat, but I had dreams of a better life.

There were many things I longed for. Things that people on TV had, heck even a better TV than the black & white
one with the big knobs. Those things that successful people had.

I always thought that the purpose of life was to get more money so that I never had to worry about it again. When I
looked around, that’s what everyone seemed to be striving for but then we were all lower-middle-class kids aspiring
for something more.

I thought if I were successful, I could get whatever I wanted. And success, in this world, is measured by the things
you possess.

As a bored whimsical teenager, I began a wish list on the back pages of an old unused notebook. A checklist if you
will of my innate desires in some sense.

I would often cheer myself up by adding items to my list and attested that I would achieve those things.

My list started small with the whims of a child’s indulgences and grew bigger as time went on.

One day, I’ll eat butter chicken whenever I want.

One day, I’ll buy Kwality vanilla ice cream whenever I want.

Someday, I will be able to buy the books that I like.

One day, I’ll eat at a restaurant whenever I want, not just once a year.
One day, I’ll not have to make excuses when friends ask me to go out with them.

One day, I’ll own a Honda Civic of my own and it will be impressive.

One day, I’ll sleep in a bigger bed, all by myself – Diagonal if I wanted to.

For many years, I immersed myself in achieving my goals, to accumulate things.

Little by little, I checked the items off my list. Yet the satisfaction of gaining something eluded me.

Years after I first started the list, my wife and I invited a common friend of ours along with his family over for
dinner when we were in Ohio.

We were living in a modest apartment, and we had to move furniture around to make extra room for our colleague,
his wife, and three children. We were a bit gun-shy initially as to how they would all fit in, so we brought in some
chairs from the balcony, pushed the table out a bit.

Nothing too fancy. It was a bit crowded, but nobody seemed to mind.

After dinner, we put on a kid’s movie in the background while we all played games together.

The colleague and his wife were fun and engaging, and the kids had fun tumbling and rolling all over the couch in
our cozy little living room. Everyone seemed to have fun.

It was in all a good time had by all.

A few weeks later, the colleague and his wife returned the gesture and invited us over to their home for lunch.

When we drove up to their house, the first thing we noticed was how gigantic the house was. We have rarely been
inside American homes and this one seemed amazingly beautiful.

When we rang the bell, our colleague greeted us and proceeded to take us through a 20-minute-long tour of his
house, basement, porch, and the lawn behind.

As he led us through rooms after rooms, what struck me most was how every single person in the family had their
rooms and yet in some ways were - alone.

The two older children were each in their rooms on the second floor playing on their own. His wife was in the
kitchen by herself. And their youngest girl, about six years old, was in the basement home theater, watching
cartoons alone.

I discount it as a slight shadow of my envy of not having one, even half as grand as this.

When lunch came around, the family gathered briefly to eat. But as soon as they could, the kids ran off again to be
by themselves. And our colleague, tired out from the grand tour he had given, excused himself and retired into his
study.

That day, while eating lunch in their grand house, everyone appeared bored and indifferent. It was almost as if they
were all odd strangers forced to eat together.
In contrast to the visit to our home, the family didn’t seem interested in talking, laughing, or playing together. They
seemed more interested in getting back to their separate spaces… to their things.

I had an epiphany that day.

It seemed like the pinnacle of life for me was to become financially successful. I thought that successful people got
everything they wanted, including a better life.

But seeing that hollow loneliness of these very good folks, made me realize that maybe I was wrong.

We had thoroughly enjoyed our time together with the colleague and his family in our crowded apartment. But being
in their lavish home amongst all their things didn’t make the quality of our time together any better.

It seemed to make it worse.

I realized that day that ‘things don’t make laughter, conversation, or a better life.

People do. Possessions are damned.

When I look back at my childhood, what floats to the surface are the little moments with my family, not the things
we had or didn’t have.

Grandma’s kind, wrinkled smile as she soothed my worries.

How my father’s eyes crinkled in laughter as he clapped when the Indian cricket team kicked butt.

My sister’s bright laughter as we created makeshift tents in one corner of the house.

All in 437 square feet of packed happiness.

My coffers are teeming with the lovely memories they left me with, and I intend to pass them in abundance on to my
children -

To whatever little extent I can.

The Miracle (08.12.2003)

My last day in Bombay before heading back to the USA is a Sunday, the beginning of the end of the week. I just
had a big lunch at Golden Thali, a dive near Marine lines. They serve khichdi of several kinds out of vast vats and
bring it to your table with a little kadhi and pickle and it makes for a fine meal.

Then I wander around Grant Road buying incense, drinking a masala Lassi, and looking for cast-iron vessels to take
to Boston.

Cast-iron vessels aren’t in fashion these days; people prefer stainless steel or aluminum or nonstick. The few people
I meet on the road profess not to know about any shop that sells them and tell me that if by some miracle I were to
find one, it would be shut anyway.

It is a Sunday afternoon when Bombay exhales. In these parts, they have had their mango pulp and coconut curries
and are supine under the fan.

Then I inquire at a used-paper seller, and he sends a boy to rouse a man living above a shop with its shutters down.
The man comes out in a lungi, and I tell him what I am looking for. He disappears behind the shutters and comes out
again with a set of four little cast-iron bowls for tempering. They are 65 rupees each, really nothing, and I buy all
four.

He has risen from his Sunday-afternoon slumber to sell something that makes him very little profit. I don’t know
why he would make an exception to his business hours for me; maybe he appreciates the fact that I am out on this
quest in the July heat. But he has done something important, on my last day, for my sense of my place in the city I
have grown up in.
The country of No has become, in that one small gesture, the Country of the Yes. I now realize that if you refuse to
understand the No, pretend it doesn’t exist, was never said, then, slain by your incomprehension, it will transform
itself abruptly into its opposite. Or it might never become a Yes but will turn into a wagging of the head, which can
mean either No or Yes, depending on your interpretation.

You will interpret the wagging generously, charitably, and proceed. I went home and they opened the door and took
me in, my family, and made them feel it could be their home too. They gave me the food I liked to eat and played
for me the music I liked to hear, though I had forgotten how much I liked that music and the chatter.

“How are you going to go back to Boston after this?” Lawyers, watchmen, bar dancers, and my Chinese foot cart
owner ask me.

“Boston will be boring.”

It’s a valid argument made by countless entities around.

I have no answer for them.

The way I see it when all is said and done, each person inhabits his own world.
Singapore (05.01.2002)

San Francisco International airport is a marvel to watch at any time during the day, but it especially comes alive
during the night. I wasn’t as awed by the airports anymore and having traveled multiple times on local domestic
flights courtesy of my generous employer who had big dreams for me, I knew my way around well enough to
navigate the ticketing and security nightmares that plagued the ordinary mortals.

As I head to my seat on the flight, probably the first one to board the business class that I see her in the seat next to
me holding the book looking out. It is the book that I have carried around if not physically then in my head. The
Tibetan book of living and dying was one of the first books that I had read in Barnes and Noble accidentally having
picked it up on a lazy Saturday afternoon and since then read multiple times not sure exactly what resonated, but
something that did align with my limited understanding.

She is a pretty girl around 25 with brown curls of hair and an air of all-knowing, but it is the eyes that catch your
attention. Brown and deep with a touch of sadness and an aura of mystery that told you she could be someone’s
girlfriend or a secretary in a boring office job or maybe an international spy all compassed into one. She isn’t a
stunner in that true sense of the word, but she has something that makes you look again and then linger with you
even when you have moved your gaze away.

“I have read this one. It’s one of the best books you will ever read. Probably the only book if you had to read just
one”.

I blurt out not entirely sure what had prompted that thought.

She looks up at me with a blank stare that probably depicted semi annoyance. Men had probably hit on her before
with their oft practiced one-liners in a feeble attempt at gaining attention. She smiles a flat bland smile and goes
back to her book as I shrink back to my seat, part chastised, part humiliated, even more, annoyed at myself for no
apparent reason.

It is almost 11.40 PM. The engines are revved up and the flight is the next one to take off from the runway. I close
my eyes thinking of the time when I would be back in India, meeting my parents and my sister who would all be
there but all the more excited to meet with Ana. It had been a year since we were apart and with the quest to ensure
that we saved every last dollar we had not talked much but she would be there, smiling and silent waiting patiently
for me to wrap up the duties of meeting the elders.

“Would you mind if I hold hands with you just for a bit?”.

It is semi-dark, but I can see her eyes and I instinctively understand — The fear of flying. With a silent nod, I
extended a hand which she clutches immediately, her nails already digging in as the flight kicks off.

Sometime later when it stabilizes at 35,000 feet and the roar of the engines has settled into a steady rhythm, she still
has her eyes closed, but she has released her grip a bit.

Somewhere within that, I fall asleep as the day finally caught on. Working 14-hour days in two jobs was not exactly
an ideal situation but I am glad that there was work and even happier about the paycheck that followed it. Having
lived without money for so long gets you into a situation where you want to grab in as much as you can with both
hands, almost fearful that it would be taken away from you at any moment or that the dream that you are in will end
with a cold splash of water and you would wake up again in that one-bedroom house, sleeping on the same wooden
bed — The corner of your paradise for 25 years of your life.

“Hey! You are awake.. I don’t like to eat alone. I saved a meal for you”.

She nudges me awake as I look at her with sleepy eyes. I smile, still embarrassed at the shade that she had thrown
me earlier.

“I am Natalie.”

“I am Zack” …

“No, you are not. But let’s call you that. It suits you well”.

She laughs as she starts to eat, and I follow wondering if I am offended. She thinks I am an all-out, brown-skinned
Indian, not even a mixed breed. I can’t blame her.

I ignore the barb.

“What do you know about this book that made you speak so highly of it?”

“I don’t know. I find it fascinating that we never inquire into the one thing that is the most definitive. –

The reason for our existence or where do we go after we go?”. It’s a rhetorical question not meant to elicit an
answer. She nods at her reasoning, deep in thought.

“You are deeper than I thought you would be”. That was sarcasm in my response to her burn before.

She laughs easily, entirely not offended.

We walk behind and talk to the flight attendants who have become my friends — the result of my over-frequent
travels. They smuggle us some much-needed lubrication and we come back to our seats and knockback small liquor
bottles and talk all night much to the annoyance of the surrounding passengers who give us glares from time to time
unable to sleep as we laugh, giggle conspiratorially, or swap stories, in bursts, interspersed by gaps of very
comfortable silence.
Singapore Airlines flight 207 touches down in Singapore at 7 AM local time.

The airport is almost deserted, and we are the only flight on the tarmac. My next flight to Bombay is at 10.30 PM
and her flight to Melbourne is at 10.00 PM. We have an entire day to while away and as I wonder how this goes; she
seems to have it all figured out.

“You are doing the Singapore tour, aren’t you?”

“No. I have never been here before.”

“You should. Come with me. You can hang with me and my friends all day. Such a waste if you don’t.

Let’s drop the stuff in my hotel room and then we will go. I promise you, it will be a great day”, her eyes are
twinkling with mirth.

We walk around all day roaming the city. Singapore is a contradiction in itself. Ancient culture existing right next to
modern without any juxtaposition. We visit the Buddhist temple and stand next to the tree of wishes, a local element
for all visiting tourists.

She stands there, eyes closed and her back turned to me for the longest time. A moment of prayer in her day as a
throng of people move around here at varying frequencies. It’s a shockingly intimate act.

“What did you wish for?” I ask when we are back on the road walking.

At some point, she has decided that holding hands is the most natural thing in the world and I indulge albeit slightly
uncomfortably.

“Ever had lunch by the beach?”, she smiles and easily ignores my question.

“All the time”. I blurt out and start to laugh, but then hold my tongue.

“Yeah? With or without wine?”, she quips sarcastically. I tap her on her head lightly trying to ruffle her hair
playfully, but she pulls away with a sharp move that startles me off.

“Hey, no messing with my hair. Remember that”, she jerks violently then recovers quickly and laughs her fists
drawn up in a fight. The anger is a bit off, but I tend to ignore it.

I hold up my hands in mock surrender as we head to the beach. Being around Natalie, I get a sense that anything is
possible: to marry and divorce women, make a lot of money, own a big house in Boston, live a large life. Natalie
carries her power source within her, like an alkaline battery. More like a nuclear submarine.

In the evening we head to the crystal pavilion, one of the most happening clubs in Singapore. It’s packed with
people. Sanjeev who is a party animal is also my old school friend. We meet up and he introduces me to his group.
Marika, who is at this moment the hottest model in the country, is hanging out at the club, looking just like a regular
girl in a loose shirt and torn jeans.

I am finished with our talk. Then I notice the marks. She has turned over a hand to get something on the table and I
notice a row of slashes going all the way up from the heel of the palm, all across her wrist, and to the crook of her
arm. It’s the same on her other arm. I take a chance.

“What are those marks?” I ask her.

“Those are cuts.” She looks at the marks.

“Here I had eighteen stitches.” Then she points to a series of raised dots on her skin. “Those are cigarette burns.”

I trace the cuts and the welts with my finger.

“Who did this to you?”

“I did it myself.”

“Why?”

“One was after I left home. The other was after my guy left me.” She has done this about four times, with a razor
blade. Her last attempt was three months ago.

“Why?”

“I was alone. I was just disappointed with life.”

Her veins don’t supply enough blood to her palms now, because they’ve been cut so often. Her wrist is scarred and
pitted like a dirt road. She can’t lift anything heavy. One of her attempts was so serious that her hand all but fell off
and had to be surgically reattached. She is twenty years old.

I glance at her other hand. Her vein is shot. Small pinprick marks all along like black ants along a highway. I have
seen this before and know what this is. I wonder what she is telling me and what she is hiding.

She suddenly looks up at the girl passing by.

“You were in the Abercrombie ad,” Natalie tells her in a small voice. She smiles and nods almost shyly.

At Sapphire, watching the way Natalie’s face brightens up and the extra energy that infuses her dancing, Sanjeev
says, “I’m worried that she’ll fall in love with you.”

“Or vice versa.”

“That’s impossible,” he says. Why? I am about to ask.

“How could you not fall in love with her?” she says. “I’m half in love with her already.”

After we’ve looked at the photographs of his latest shoot and a couple of drinks, we bid goodbye and as we’re
walking out, Natalie tells me about the model,

“She’s also cut.”

“What?”

“I saw, on her arms.”

Sanjeev later confirms this. I’ve met Marika at least a half-dozen times, but I’ve never noticed the cuts.

Natalie knew within five minutes of meeting her. She noticed a tension on Marika’s face, noticed she was talking a
little too much, laughing a little too much. So she looked at her wrists. Later I find out the model’s story. She is the
mistress of a married man with three children. He is connected with the underworld and threatens to kill anyone who
gets too close to her. So, Marika marks time on her wrists.

There must be a worldwide secret society of these women who’ve slit their wrists and survived, who recognize one
another automatically. The top model in Singapore and the girl from the top business institution in Australia have
this in common, their arms are marked with their anguish. In the end whether it’s the mind or the soul. In some
ways, we are all the same -- — members of the sorority of the slashed.

Jackson, another friend of hers from a while back comes in, dressed in baggy shorts. He is thirty-two and looks
older. He is losing his hair, and there is curious darkness around his mouth, probably from tobacco. He went to a
school in Singapore, got a law degree but never practiced.

“I am a vernacular boy.”, he says without prompting.

Instead, he started a software company that exports to the United States; the previous year he traveled there four
times. Jackson is also an amateur playwright. We talk about technical recruiting and costing software and taxes, with
Natalie between us. We’re both hiding something: I’m hiding my family from Natalie; Jackson is hiding Natalie
from his family. Only Natalie’s hiding nothing. She has no family to hide anything from.

She is sleepy and tired. She does not belong with us, I feel; she is young and beautiful, and she should be with
people filled with the same energy and lightness, men who have different uses for her, more innocent ones, than
either of us do.

On the ride going back, she is quiet. We sit next to each other, but her mind is a world apart.

It’s almost 7.00 and the flight is not due until 10.00 so we need to be heading back to the airport shortly. I still need
to take a shower and shave with the intent of being more presentable when I land. We go back to the hotel and she
corners the shower first. She hasn’t eaten much the whole of the previous day: a club sandwich at Sapphire. And
now she has ordered a full meal.

“Have you eaten?” she asks me.

“I will eat something at the airport”, I say.

“Then come here and eat with me”, she waves her hand inviting me back.

We eat from the same plate, usually a taboo in most of the white circles, but she is happy about it. She goes in to
wash her hands and I notice a couple of boxes of pills in her purse.

Always a curious one, I pick one up with the unknown name Lomustine while the other one is a local version of an
antidepressant, very common among most.

I laugh inwardly at all the pills that people take for every small perceived illness that we think we have. In India, we
used to just let pollution take care of it when we were young.

She walks out all of a sudden and I drop it back in her purse. I head to the bathroom, averting her eyes at almost
being caught and she suddenly stops me. My heart skips a couple of beats.

“Come here and give me a hug. We still have time.” She has a solemn look on her face as she walks out to the
balcony and stands there with her back to the guardrail. I am slightly befuddled at this sudden request. Being used to
sudden rushes of affection, I know this well. I extend my arms and she closes in.

We hug in silence. Two souls from half a world away with little intersection twenty-four hours ago now engulfed in
a sea of conflicting emotions. We stand there on the balcony overlooking the city. She holds my hand in a moment
of affection, but she is already far away. From the twenty-first floor, Singapore is nothing but a flood of lights.
Sometimes a lot is said when words are not spoken.

“We used to build sandcastles on the beach when I was a child,” she says, her eyes gazing far away.
“I never did. We were too busy working when I grew up”. I think but never say it. It’s a part of my life that I usually
don’t talk about, not to strangers anyway.

“The castle used to be beautiful. It had windows and doors and was decorated with conch shells and black pebbles.
It was the happiest time of my life. We build and build until the waves washed them away, just washed them away”.

She suddenly turns towards me with an intensity that I have never seen before, holds my forehead to hers, and in a
very slow voice whispers…

“Life is magical Z, but then every magic is just that — an illusion.”.

Something turns inside me. A premonition.

I have seen this look before, but I cannot remember where. I can’t take this anymore because, for reasons
unfathomed, it is bringing back memories — bad memories.

“We should go. It’s getting late”. I tell her as I pull away. I don’t do this well.

“Maybe we should miss this flight”, she says half-jokingly, but she is not laughing.

I look at her to see if she is serious and I hesitate. My eyes locked in, they flicker for just a quick second and she
recognizes it.

As suddenly as it has started, it ends.

She leans back up straight, laughs, and goes back to normal, starts to pack up.

I head to the shower thinking of the day. It’s been a whirlwind. The people I met, the places I saw, the conversations
I had. Some people have this capacity to envelop you in their storm and you are never the same again.

It’s getting late as I hurry out of the shower.

The room is quiet, and I quickly assemble everything to leave. Natalie is not around, nor is her luggage. Maybe she
is downstairs, waiting.

As I am about to pick up the passport, I notice a single page from the hotel stationary sitting on the bed.

It just has two words on it.

“Bye Z”.

I know what has happened, but am not yet ready to accept, internalize or rationalize it.

Picking up my belongings I hurriedly take a cab to the airport. The traffic is thick, and the night air is humid and
there are people everywhere in the market trying to get somewhere. It’s 9.00.

Her Melbourne flight leaves in an hour.

I rush inside the airport and breeze through the upgraded check-in. Changi airport is a sea of people all trying to get
to some destination. Her flight is on terminal 102. As I walk there, they have already started boarding. The flight is
packed, and everyone is trying to get in as early as possible. I don’t see her anywhere and I know she has already
boarded.

I am about to turn around and go back when I see her. She has already spotted me. She smiles and steps out of the
line. We stand there in silence with the question still lingering — Why?
“Z, I am so sorry. I will see you again…someday” That’s all I could catch as she whispers and hugs me for a long
moment. I am completely confused. I don’t understand her, but I hold her back as the throngs of people around us
move in unison.

The world is at a standstill, if only for a moment.

She pulls back suddenly, turns around, picks up her bag, and submits her passport in a single action.

Before I can think she has already crossed over and is headed into the flight. I suddenly remember that I don’t even
know her last name, her email, or her number. I take a step forward, but the gate attendant stops me.

“Sir, you cannot go beyond this without a valid ticket”, she holds her hand out as she looks back over her shoulder at
Natalie.

I nod and watch her walking in knowing this is the last time I might be meeting her. I hope she will turn and look
back or wave. She keeps walking, her head slightly drooping as if she is tired or just plain disappointed.

As I turn back to walk towards my flight, I am conflicted and angry at her, but still unsure why I feel that way.
Sometimes people are just selfish, at times they want a slice of their life to be compartmentalized.

Either way, their choices are half chances. So are everybody else’s.

Sitting on the flight from Singapore to Bombay, I am a bit sad, excited, and apprehensive all at the same time to be
going home after a long time. The dinner has just ended, and I am tired after a long day. My thoughts start to drift
back to the day and Natalie. I am disappointed at how she had left. Without any promise to meet again or even a
cursory attempt at communicating it.

“Come home sometime” we always say as Indians to someone who we would like to see again. Maybe it was the
Indian thing or maybe the Australians did not have this custom or maybe she didn’t think much of our encounter
today. I probably am just another acquaintance, in a sea of admirers, hanging on to her every word as she amused
herself for a bit and then moved away. All in all, it was interesting to meet a new character in my bland existence
even if it’s for a while, but I know there is more to that than what I am trying to convince myself.

I start to recall every word of every conversation we had that day, a childhood habit cultivated to record eventful
days in memory to be used for those not so eventful ones when I could go back to that place in my mind.

As I doze off to sleep, I suddenly remember her parting words on the sandcastle and the next thought is of my aunt
— Zarin Masi. She was the life of our small family, vivacious, laughing and I was the light of her eyes. She was
always showing me small gifts when I was a child, some of my happiest memories attested to her small gifts from
time to time.

Then one day she came home dazed with her left eye bulging and we were told they had diagnosed her with an
aggressive strain of brain tumor. I had stood by her death bed where she had shrunk to half her size within a month
bald and unrecognizable because of the radiation and the surgery that was just recently performed on her. She had
died within a month, a quick but painful one. Death — the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of every
one.

The feeling of premonition that I had in the evening is suddenly back with a rush, like a lead weight and suddenly I
sit up straight and pull out my phone. Lomustine as I type into the search engine still working with the spotty flight
Wi-Fi, but I have no idea what it is that I am looking for. The words “Stage 3 brain tumor” stare at me from the
screen as I scroll, but then I already know. It’s a brand of potent chemo strain drug available next to her hospital bed.
The barely noticeable needle stains on Natalie’s arms that I had judged as a past drug habit, now suddenly make
sense. So does the “Don’t mess with my hair” hollow laugh protecting her shred of dignity and in a split moment, I
am thrown in the deepest of regret.

I close my eyes shut tight in the darkness as warm tears well up, the mild drone of the jet engines my only witness to
the anguish within. I should have known. I, of all the people, should have known.

Sometimes the people who are closer to death are the ones who know the real value of time. Maybe we live like we
are never going to die, and we die having never really lived. In doing what she did, she forced me to be alive — if
only for today.

A deep resolution wells up within me. I know I will find her, and we will meet again someday. I will always be
indebted to her for what she had done.

I settle down in my seat and look out at the bright lights of Bombay coming up as the aircraft starts its stair-step
descent.

It’s time to meet the family.

Hanging Plants (05.19.2014)

I am in the office, and two people are talking in the kitchen about a hanging plant.
Her: I don't know. I just don't know. Am I watering it too much? Am I not watering it enough?

He: Yeah. It's so hard to tell.

She: I don’t know what to do. I just really don't want to kill it.

He: Well, sometimes they just die, you know.

She: WHAT???

He: Yeah, they have a finite life span. It runs its course.

She: WHAT?? NO!

It turns out hanging plants teach me everything I struggle to learn...

About life, death, and relationships.

The Pendant (11.03.2014)

" Ma’am, can I help you with that bag?"

walking back from work one evening on a cold rainy day in November. An old lady is walking ahead of me. She is
around 80, wrinkled, less than 100 lbs. yet elegantly dressed and pulling a suitcase behind her that's almost equal to
her weight.

It's evening rush hour and the crowds have a singular motive - To get to their trains. Each has through years of
practice optimized their route perfectly, the calculation of leaving their workplace just in time to reach their mode of
transport is down to a scientific equation.

The old lady is an obstacle. She is slowing down the crowd that does not want to break pace.

I am one of the crowd - on most days. Today, I have just missed my bus so the next one is still 30 minutes away. As
I slow down to a crawl, I notice things I haven't noticed before, or in a while at least.

The doorman outside the Harbor hotel who I usually ignore in my rush to get to the station.

The smiles of the Chinese tourists loitering around inappropriately dressed for the winter.

A single red flower that is still resisting its inevitable fate before the first snowstorm rolls in.

The old lady dragging a heavy bag, stopping every 50 feet to take a breath.
It's an easy decision.

I stop to ask if I could take the bag. She pauses, looks me up and down a bit too sternly, sighs, and then heartily
agrees, the smile on her face spreading from edge to edge.

I can’t help but smile too. It's just that infectious.

She reminds me of my grandmother who passed away years ago. The smile - wide, completely unflappable, and
utterly without any motive.

She is frail, almost delicate but has a grip of an anaconda as I offer her my hand to hold steady. I am surprised and
she notices the look on my face.

"I used to be a track athlete in my years", she says with a slight twinkle in her eyes. Beware, I am forewarned.

As we walk slowly through the traffic lights, down the stairs, and up the elevator to the terminal we talk like we
have known each other for a long time, years, centuries, probably eons.

Her bus leaves in 10 minutes.

"You remind me very much of my grandmother", I blurt out as we stand across from her bus terminal, her big square
suitcase occupying the space between us. I am immediately embarrassed. Don’t know why I said that.
"Then so be it my boy,” she says simply turns around and extends her arms to give me the biggest of hugs standing
right there in the middle of the crowd.

It's hard to say goodbye.

As I turn to head back to my terminal which is across the court, I am stopped. It's that anaconda grip on my arm
again.

I turn around and she is pulling her other hand out of her coat pocket. There is a small onyx pendant in her fist.

"For the lady back home, who takes care of my grandson", she says laughing.

Formality precludes that I protest, refuse, and walk away.

Instead, I find myself thanking her. She breaks out into another big smile. Another big hug follows.

Heading back home I look outside the window at the rain starting to come down hard and heavy, I look down at the
closed fist as I am still holding the pendant.

At this moment I feel like we are connected across time and space. She was my grandmother in some life just as I
had mine in this one. In that instant, the regret of losing my own grandmother years ago is just washed away and
replaced by a sense of immense gratitude, for life? maybe…actually no. That's not the right word. It’s gratitude so
vast that it’s completely indescribable.

I close my eyes holding that pendant immersed as the world keeps moving by.

I never give that pendant to Ana afraid that she would never grasp the brevity of the sentiment. So you took a
pendant from an old lady for helping her with her luggage - Just doesn’t sound like a very good explanation.
Instead, I tuck it away in a bag and as years pass by often pull it out like my good luck charm from time to time on
days when I need it. It’s always my secret.

On one of those days, out of an impulse I take it to an antique jewelry shop in the local mall.

The young jeweler peers through the thick glass on his left eye for a bit and then pulls in another older fellow for a
second opinion.

The older man after almost 5 minutes of turning it over and over, looks up at me slightly suspiciously.
"It’s a family heirloom. Easily north of $2000. ", he says handing it back.

I pocket it back as I step outside in the bright afternoon light.

Some things are never measured with money.

I had no way of knowing this then, but I know this now:

the line of your life is not decided by all the big interactions you agonize over.

It's decided by the ones you have no way of knowing are important at that moment - the ones you don't give that
much thought to.

The fragility of those interactions is what sets you free.

Jen & Ben (03.16.2019)

I had two friends that I knew well in my younger days. Two completely different personalities and yet both are
really good friends of mine. They never got along well with each other though.

Jen comes into class 5 minutes early every day. She has all of her homework done on time, in perfect order. Ben,
like a log in the ocean, typically comes drifting in about 5 minutes late. He may or may not have his homework.

Ben and Jen are two contrasting students, two familiar extremes:

Jen, the type of student who combs through the syllabus on day 1, looking for and formulating her game plan for this
class, has nightmares about bad grades. Ben, the type who immediately finds the attendance section of the syllabus
to see how many classes he can miss. On the first day at class, Jen will raise her hand to ask a nit-picking question
about the wording of a specific sentence in the syllabus. Ben will raise his hand to ask, “So ……are we going to
have a lot of homework in this class? Or….” Which gets chuckles from the class.

Hey – Ben just wants to have fun. Go easy on Ben. If Ben gets a terrible grade on a test, he’ll probably laugh about
it, show his grade to the person next to him, “Ha-ha bro – I got a 4. Not a 4.0, a 4 out of 100 ha ha ha”. Then he will
figure out how many A’s he has to get to fix it. And then, perhaps, miraculously pull it off.

Jen, on the other hand, gets anxious at the mere sight of red ink on her paper. She will contest every deduction. Lose
many hours of sleep. She will surely hyperventilate if she gets a B+ on an assignment. And a C? Forget about it.
You might get a full-blown meltdown.
Both of these people seem fundamentally flawed.

Ben’s nonchalance won’t destroy him now, but it will eventually bring many hardships to him in ways he doesn’t
fully appreciate. Unpredictability is something he looks for but nasty surprises will lurk around hidden corners.

Jen, on the other hand, will be a slave to perfection. Her life will be a fear-driven sprint. She’ll live with a constant,
unwavering focus on maximization. She will measure and then weigh every ounce of her worth by achievement.
Every decision will be flipped over and examined multiple times. Over and over again. In turn, her life will be
shadowed by the self-created storm that rains on her well-being.

Ben and Jen might remind me of people I already know. But the truth is, Jen and Ben already exist, within me and
so in all of us. They are voices that seek to be heard, selves that push to be seen. Adopting a successful attitude that
will bring happiness is not, and I repeat, not about finding the middle ground between Ben and Jen's polarized
attributes.

It’s about learning to choose between those overlapping attributes that define Ben and Jen, that exist in us. Knowing
when to channel Jen’s maniacal drive for perfection, to unleash its potential to tackle complex obstacles that fall in
front of us. Knowing when to react as Ben, to mute the sting of failure and regret. To suddenly feel light again.

All my life has been strife or more appropriately a voyage in seeking balance. Sometimes while flying my one wing
dips further than it needs to be. At times, it's the other and I find myself in a tailspin. My recovery from those
horrors in flight has so far been purely happenstance and is no guarantee of my flight path for the future. Platitudes
are easy when times are easy, and you are soaring in quiet skies. But I do know this -

Sometimes I need to meet the demand for perfection.

Other times, I need to invite Ben out for a laugh at my latest embarrassment.
Hell (06.28.2006)

“School’s my happy place,” she says with a touch of sadness.

I am sitting with Lauren Shaw, a Junior year student from Cleveland High School, Ohio. She volunteers at the local
soup kitchen for a dual-purpose – She can get a bowl of food herself. A fresh good warm-cooked meal, not the
crackers and soda she gets for dinner at home on days when the kitchen is closed.

But the other purpose is more portent. She wants to get out of the house. Not for the usual typical teenager reasons –
They took my iPhone away, or they didn’t let me play games on the console. Lauren wants to get out of her house
because of reasons that I barely start to understand as I sit and talk to her during our off hours.

“I don’t know where my mamaw is these days”, she says.

Lauren’s mother is a drug addict, a statistic, a number, a haze in the addiction-filled world of Cleveland, Ohio. Here
in downtown Cleveland, a mix of verdant farmland and old mill towns on the edge of Ohio where everyone appears
to know someone who has struggled with dependency, hundreds of people have died of an overdose in 2006. At her
school, she tells me four kids lost parents to drugs, and a fifth to a drug-related homicide.
I meet Lauren after some days when I visit the kitchen again. Her mother, back home after three weeks of who
knows where, says she’s done with heroin, ready for rehab, and wants to be part of her daughter’s life. But Lauren
has heard all of this before and doesn’t believe a single word.

Lauren’s trust was broken long ago, after years of watching her mother cycle in and out of addiction and rehab. And
now this latest discovery:

“I found a needle in her purse the other day,” says Lauren, seated at her station table peeling onions with brisk
ferocity, her head lowered. “And Mamaw found two more in the dryer.”

She takes a pause, and then tells me about the fitful tumble of excuses from her mom: she doesn’t know why the
needles were there; they were only syringes, actually, and not needles; she was keeping them for a friend.

Lauren rolls her eyes at me and sighs.

“It’s almost like you want me to be using it,” she says her mother pleaded tearfully, in a voice that children more
often use with their parents.

“Everything I do is never going to be good enough, so what’s the point.”, she had said.

As a bunch of us sit and peel a big bag of onions on one Saturday evening, one of our most disliked tasks, we joke
with each other as to who will peel the onions and who will take up the potatoes. We go for rock-paper-scissors to
settle our differences and I end up being laden with the onions. While we peel, harrowing stories of living amid
addiction spill out in halting conversations, stories that they have never told but want to take flight eagerly, as long
as they have a sympathetic ear.

One recent afternoon, Christian Johnson, a lanky 18-year-old who plans to join the army after he graduates from
high school, tells me about his mom who went to rehab when he was 11, but she relapsed last year on meth and
heroin. She now lives in another city several hours away.

“Mom has said that even us kids are not a good enough reason to stay clean,” Christian said. One of his sisters was
born addicted to crack, he said, and a brother was born addicted to Oxycodone.

“I’ve seen what drugs can do to a family and it’s not worth it to me,” he says as he looks at me with eyes so blank,
they scare me a bit. What will he grow up into? He is already swimming against a current so strong, I know at some
point it will just drown him. A few lucky ones will get out of this cycle, but most of them will just be here, churning
endlessly in this cycle because this is the only world, they have been in. This is the only world they know.

Amid the tumult, many teens said they faulted themselves for not saving their parents from addiction. Others said
they were made to feel guilty.

“Mom told me all the time that it’s my fault she’s using,”

Celeste, a senior year student perks up without any ado as we are talking, sharing stories.

A cheerleader and member of her school math team, Celeste has endured her share of emotional hardships. There
was Halloween last year when her mother overdosed at home while she was out trick-or-treating.
“It took four doses of Narcan to revive her”, she says matter of factly. Her cheerleading coach sitting on my left
confirms it.

“My biggest fear,” Celeste says as she suddenly stops peeling and looks up at me with eyes slightly misty, “is I’m
going to get home and she’ll be dead.” I pat her shoulder, an empty gesture. She could easily have been my
daughter, or yours.

As the kitchen winds down late in the evening, the teenagers start to scatter out. Some get rides back home with the
staff who know them well while the others just start walking. I offer to ride Lauren and Christian home. They both
live in the same neighborhood which is not too far away from the soup kitchen.

As I get in, Christian holds the door open for Lauren and then climbs up next to me.

“He is very protective of me”, Lauren laughs as he turns beet red.

“It’s a nice car you have mister”, he says, changing the subject quickly.

Days later when it’s the long weekend for Independence Day, I meet Nikki Clarke, Lauren’s mother. Lauren
introduces her to me one weekend as we are working in the kitchen. It’s a holiday weekend and we are going to be
running a bit slack. Without the background, I would not have known Nikki as an ex-addict. Her arms seem clean
except for a couple of rough spots that have crusted over, a sign of old drug usage.

Nikki sits with me during the break as the teen's horse around later in the day.

“Thank you for talking to Lauren. She can’t stop talking good things about you enough”, she says. I swat away the
conversation and we instead end up talking about her. Lauren joins us wiping her hands on her red apron. She sits
next to her mother and puts her head on her shoulders as Nikki gently runs her fingers through her hair. It’s as if this
is just another regular happy family.

Not too long ago, Lauren lived in a middle-class neighborhood with her half-sister, Lilly, her stepfather, and her
mom. They sat down most evenings for dinners cooked by her mother, who worked then as a hospice nurse.

“We always had everything we wanted, and they made sure of that,” says Lauren, who dreams of becoming a nurse
someday.

With Lauren sitting right there, Nikki tells me of how she was secretly stealing bags of morphine and other
painkillers from hospice patients who had died. Her plan, she said, was to sell them around town just to make some
money. That changed one day when, feeling overwhelmed at work, she began “dabbling in pills.”

Drug use wasn’t new to her. As a teenager, Ms. Clarke said she had snorted cocaine with her parents. One day, after
hospice officials discovered she was overprescribing narcotics, she was given a drug test, which she failed, and was
promptly fired. She entered outpatient rehab and stayed clean for a while.

But after losing an appeal to regain her nursing license during Lauren’s freshman year of high school, Ms. Clarke
said she lost her resolve. Distraught, she tracked down one of her sisters, who introduced her to heroin.

“I went straight to the needle,” she says looking up at me and then at the ground. She can’t look us in the eye or
seem to bear the burden of her indiscretions – especially not in front of her daughter.
At first, Ms. Clarke left no trace of her drug use. But drug usage is hard to keep laden behind curtains. Soon stray
pills started showing up tucked into sofa cushions and syringes were rattling at the back of drawers. Then one day,
Lauren, who had grown suspicious, came from school and peeked through a porch window as she watched with
horror while her mother wrapped her arm with a rubber strap and pierced her skin with a needle.

“I cried and cried that night”, she says.

It’s not the drug usage she tells me later when her mother isn’t around that got her that night. It was the loss of the
only adult figure she had in her life that filled her with an overwhelming sense of sadness. Her mother was her best
friend, her only rock and she saw it crumble – right in front of her eyes.

“I promised myself that I would never touch drugs in my life, but at the same time I wondered what it would feel
like to take them and not feel the pain anymore”. Her words are honest and crackle with an intelligence that is way
beyond her years.

As her mother surrendered to the drugs, Lauren said their home was filled up with filthy dishes, dog feces, and
strangers who came over to shoot up. She said she pleaded with her mom to go to rehab, but she was far too gone.

“I’d be crying, begging her to stop, but she was too out of it to care. There are times I still see the mom I used to
know. Other times I’m like, where did she go and when will she come back?”.

I look at her face. There is no anguish there. Just pure innocence and the acceptance of things as they are. She has
never known anything different for a while now.

The addiction got so bad, and her mother’s nodding in and out of consciousness so frequently, that Lauren became
too embarrassed to invite friends over. For a while, they survived on money sent by Lauren’s stepfather, who
worked out of state for months at a time. In his absence, her mother began a relationship with another drug user, and
more and more of the money went to buy drugs, they said.

In the summer of 2005, the family moved to a shabbier house. The girls spent many nights at home alone, sustaining
themselves on cans of ravioli and frozen dinners.

“Sometimes I’d have to go without eating,” Lauren said, “so my sister could eat.”

One evening, after we have talked through a lot, she hesitantly tells me about the night when she was sexually
assaulted.

“He wasn’t someone I knew.”, she says as if that was a consolation.

We are driving home from the kitchen that evening and the sun has almost begun to set on the horizon. Her hands
are neatly folded on her lap and you can see nothing wrong with that picture until you saw her knuckles – white
from the excessive force with which she clasps them together, trying to remember and forget that night - both at the
same time.

“He just forced me down in my bed as I was sleeping while my mother lay in the other room knocked out. I held
onto Mr. Doodles until he finally slapped me and threw it to the floor”. Mr. Doodles, she tells me later, was her soft
toy bunny, the only constant companion in a life filled with people who drifted in and out.
“It hurt so much after he left. I cried all night, but I pulled myself up and went to school the next day. I didn’t want
my teachers asking questions…. or my friends...”, her voice trails away interspersed with the evening Cleveland
traffic.

I am wondering if there is a legal obligation for me to report this. She is after all a minor.

“I’ll deny this if you ever tell anyone ok?”, she seems to read my mind. She is looking out of the car window, but
that evening as the Honda civic passed by under the streetlamps, I see her entire body heaving, shaking in pain at
just those memories triggered.

As we reach her place, I come out on the other side to open her door and make sure she gets home safely. It’s a
rough neighborhood and safety is a relative term bartered away with tangibles.

“You are like the elder brother that I never had”, she stands outside her apartment, looks up at me, and smiles.

“Maybe someday one will show up. You never know”.

We both laugh.

“More than half the members of Cleveland High’s softball team have a close family member who uses drugs, and
many live with their grandparents or a neighbor”, says Mr. Jackson, the softball coach, who often provides breakfast
before weekend games. He is a full-time trust fund lawyer and a legal advisor for the Ohio state college.

For years, Lauren’s love for her mother, along with her stepfather’s support, has so far helped contain the anxiety
wrought by the disorder of her home life, and Mr. Jackson marvels at the girl’s inner strength and her ability to focus
on the field.

But these days, with her family absent and no one to drive her to games, he says, the stress has taken a toll.

In some ways, Lauren said she has given up on a happy ending. She talks about going to college in Virginia, where
she can escape the vortex of love and fury she feels toward her mother. A vortex that threatens to consume her.

“She’s at a breaking point. Her emotions are just out of whack.”, the coach says.

Through it all, Lauren has managed to maintain A’s and B’s — and a 3.8-grade point average — while playing
center on her school’s basketball team. In softball, she ranks as one of her team’s top hitters.

“School’s my happy place,” she says without any prompt one day. The smile on her plump freckled face is just
enchanting.

The world is treacherous, and we think we save some part of ourselves safe from other people. We are always better
than they might imagine, the list of our hidden virtues and depths thick and cross-referenced. We always have some
secret that would hurt them if only they knew. But who else knows this self? Who can corroborate our stories?
I think of my childhood and those hands that held me when I was not yet ready to walk. Those nameless trust
scholarships, those small envelopes, and checks moved me an inch further. Where would I have been without them,
I wonder.

I want to be good. I really do. I want to believe in the absurdity of my expectations, but I can't help but think the
good part of me disappeared that evening she told me about the loss of her innocence. We cherish our heavens and
we dread the fires of hell someday when we are done here, and I can’t help but wonder if both are just here, right in
these moments. I wonder what kind of person would do that to another human being.

So, the truth, for now, is this: We have no good self or a bad self, we are what other people see, all of them, only
worse. And the things we promise ourselves and the curses we whisper at one another are not enough to keep us for
our whole lives.

I don’t have an answer as I walk by the pond across my apartment and wait up to see the feather white geese fly
away. My days at the soup kitchen are coming to an end. I am headed to India next week and I will not be coming
here once my family is back from vacation.

“You are like the elder brother that I never had” – I remember her words and they just refuse to go away.

As I stand there by the pond, I finally make a decision. It’s 2006 and the stock market has been doing decently well.
I run some numbers and run them again. There can be no half ways about this. There is human life at stake here.
Even more, is someone’s confidence in me if I decide to do this.

I dial Mr. Jackson. The deep baritone voice on the other line makes me stop for just a second.

“I would like to come by and talk about setting a small anonymous college trust fund this week”.

“Aren’t your daughters a bit younger for that?”, he says.

He seems slightly surprised.

“It’s not for them Mr. Jackson.”

“Not just yet”.

Monsoon in Bombay (05.19.1988)

The only event in the Bombay weather is the monsoon.

The first rain comes early this year, in the middle of May. I can smell it coming, over the sea. I say to the watchmen
in my building, “It’s going to rain.”

“Now?” they ask, surprised.

Now. I know that smell.

It used to be like this when I was a child: For four days there was thunder. All of us looked at the pale gray sky.
Animals and men drew long breaths, felt dry and humid at the same time. Winds came up suddenly, stirred the
sleeping dust, and carried it away in little whirlpools.

The summer had been hotter, longer than anyone could remember, although they said the same thing at the end of
last summer and every summer before that. It’s what you say at the cusp.

It was the time of the year at which the season of cricket, that game of hot long summer days, was poised to give
way to soccer, hopscotch, and marbles. We swatted the bat desultory, bored of the waiting.

Day by day the tension grew in the sky. At times everything would be covered in the false black. Birds would fly
rapidly; we would think they were flying in advance of the storm, so we came out in old clothes to the compound.
As we waited, we grew irritable and hit each other, fooled around, played tricks on the weak and the stupid. We let
the air out of tires, wrote obscene doggerel on the walls of the girls’ school.

The grandmothers said, “It is coming…. for sure.”

And yet it would not.

Farmers and governments grew alarmed. The papers were full of dire predictions. Grass wilted in the playing fields
of the girls’ school, forbidden to us, so we made it a point to sneak in and play hockey and trample the carefully
tended flower bushes.

The sea lay supine, exhausted, needing rain to lubricate, replenish herself. We went to the shallows and fished with
our palms, catching the minute sea creatures left behind in the suddenly created lakes when the sea retreated from
the rocks. The city and the building ran out of water. There was nothing with which to wash bodies or the clothes the
bodies had made dirty.

There was barely enough to drink; tankers came from the interior, and all the servants lined up with buckets, paying
exorbitant rates for the brackish water and then splashing half of it into the thirsty ground, earning them outraged
shouts from their mistresses.

At night the exhausted people dreamt of rivers and waterfalls; in the cinemas they watched the song sequences for
the shots of snow in Kashmir and saris wet in manufactured rain, watching the falling, flowing water, silently,
greedily. They bought and fell asleep to the recorded sounds of oceans and running brooks, clear water over
mountain rocks.

Then one day you knew. You saw it coming over the sea. There was a powerful wind and at first just a shower of
dust, a huge hell of a lot of dust, all the dust of the world up and in through the open windows of the buildings. If
you were downstairs, you had to stop your games and cover your mouth and your eyes. It entered your hair and your
nose, and you were sick of summer, you had been sweating all day and you could not stand summer for one more
second.

The clouds passed by overhead at great speed, carrying urgent dispatches from someone unknown to us to
somebody whom we could never talk to. The sky was blue-black, like the poison-filled neck of Shiva.

Then the first drop, so light you might have imagined it.

It might have been an air conditioner leaking. The leaves and branches were in a fine frenzy. Windows slammed
open and shut, and there was the sound of breaking glass.

The birds knew. They were gyrating wildly in the sky, desperate to get to their nests, to the crannies and crevices of
the buildings. All at once, the next few drops, and everybody knew. Servants and wives rushed to the windows to
take in the laundry.

A massive crack in the sky and then another huge roar from the earth, from hundreds of thousands of children all
over the city as the torrent fell upon them. All-day long you have been sweating, all day long your body has been
ready to receive it and has sensed it like the cows and the crows, and now the first rain is upon you.

Your parents have warned you about it, screamed at you about it: Never bathe in the first rain! It is black with the
dust and pollution of the atmosphere and you will get sick but you don’t care.

All the children of the world are out dancing in the streets and the parking lots and the gullies, and for once the cars
are stilled by the mighty juvenile throng, with the invincible force of the monsoon at their backs.
Big drops of water are coming down very close together, walls of water, worlds of water. And you are in the middle
of it and nothing can be seen except the water.

There is lightning and all is daylight again, but only for an instant. You raise your face to the water and wash the
summer off. It enters your eyes and nose and mouth and carries away all sin and sorrow with it.

When the rain finally stops, the air is suddenly sweetened. The trees and the shrubs and the weeds have dispensed
fragrance into the air.

Hundreds of long brown earthworms are crawling out of the softened ground. The parents will open the windows
and the rain-sweetened air will come in and you will sleep well tonight.

And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight,

Because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.
Prison & Pillows (07.13.2019)

”Would you rather prefer the prison or a surgery?” he laughs before he gets a tad bit serious.

“I wouldn’t know because I was hit with both at the same time”, he says as his demeanor remains quiet, almost too
quiet as we drive down the interstate heading south.

I am volunteering one weekend at the local crossroads shelter one balmy summer evening. It was Sue the shift
manager who pointed out Aslam to me. He is working with a group of women, talking to them. Around 55, slightly
plump for his height, brown mehndi dyed hair cut short just above his shoulders, he seems out of place in that
environment. He wears a blue East Indian jacket and has a meditation bead necklace around his neck. As he talks to
them, I watch him with almost waning interest. Nothing about him is different, nothing spectacular, and well not
until Sue makes an abrupt comment.

“He was in prison for 12 years, I think, till he was in his early 40’s and he is a lung cancer survivor…”

The remark seems out of place but gets my attention. For a second I want to ask her more questions. Instead, I find
myself asking her a different one –

“Will you introduce me to him sometime?” I ask before I even understand why.

In the days that I work there, I get to know Aslam a bit better. One evening, as we are heading out, I see him
standing on the bus stand outside. I ask him where she is headed and he tells me he is heading back home to Dover,
some 15 miles away. More importantly, almost an hour of a bus ride away, two buses, another half an hour walk
before he makes it to his house — a one-room apartment tucked away close to the northern woods.
“Come on. I’ll drop you off. I am headed in the same direction”.

It’s a lie, well a half-truth. I live a mile away, although it’s in the same direction.

We talk about the weather, the homeless shelter, and how he started to work over there many years ago as an
informal men’s counselor. He talks about attending college in his late 40’s to get an undergraduate degree before he
started to work.

“Those kids. They thought I was an alien”, he laughs, almost mirthlessly.

There is traffic on the interstate, and it takes us almost 30 minutes before we make it to his place. As we get closer,
there is a gnawing inside me to ask him what I have been waiting to ask all this while. I resist. Decent people in
American culture don’t pry or ask uncomfortable questions, especially not to strangers.

“What was it like in prison?” I finally ask as we pull into the driveway. Curiosity wins, mannerisms are damned.

I immediately regret the question, but he seems serene. Almost like he has expected it. I am waiting for him to paper
it over with some banal comments. Instead, he surprises me.

“Would you like to come in for coffee?” he asks without much ado as he rubs his hands over his pants, a nervous
tick.

Almost 30 minutes later, we are sitting in his small apartment. It’s a clean one-bedroom place but what’s remarkable
is that it’s almost bare. A small well-made bed in one corner with white sheets, a small writing table next to it, a
chair with an old shirt hanging on its back, a mirror just above the table. It suddenly strikes me that the bare
necessities resemble a familiar layout — that of his prison cell. Comfort is sought and found in the most unfamiliar
places.

“I was a much younger guy with a full head of black hair before I was diagnosed with stage 2 lung cancer”, he
laughs looking on his right directly in the mirror. He seems lost for a second.

“I’d already had 4 sessions of chemo when I entered the county jail. I had my medical records and a bald head from
chemo, and it was rough. By July, it was 105 degrees and no AC in a dorm with 130 men packed 2 tiers high”.

“And then finally, the day had arrived, Surgery Day. At 5 AM, I was shackled and handcuffed to 2 other men and
led to the bus that takes 30 of us to the courthouse. There we were put in a huge dirty concrete room with one open
toilet. The men call it the hell hole. We were up all night, some sitting, and some pacing despite the shackles, some
even trying to sleep on the cold concrete. It was a miserable night, 30 men snoring, praying, shivering, and waiting
for the dawn.

“At 7 AM when the guard started yelling names, we are frozen stiff and exhausted. They were going to court to face
their sentencing hearing decisions and they seemed worn out even before they started. I was worn out too, but I
wasn’t not going to court. Instead, I was going to be under the knife…”

He stops for a second to drink a sip and involuntarily touches the left rib, the area where it might have been.
“But no one called my name. I waited all day. I admit I was cold and scared. I had a one-sided conversation with
Allah. Allah, this is Aslam Shaikh. You have seen me all my life. My life is over anyway…I have disgraced my
family. Please don’t make me wake up again. Don’t make me wake up again. Please”

“A long time later I wake up in the hospital, bandaged & sore. But alive. My first thought is disappointment and
followed by sheer despair even before the pain of the surgery hits me”

I notice his change from the past tense to the present. He is reliving it, at that moment as a lot of trauma victims do. I
have seen it happen to the best, including myself.

“Twenty-five days of hospital vacation. A real bed, pillows, & three-square meals a day. Imagine how grim life is
when you think hospital food is fabulous. But then it was time to go back to jail. The men there were waiting. For 25
days, no one had touched me except the nurses with their needles and the surgeons with their knives. I was almost
invisible. They could not wait to get me out of there.”

“At the jail, those hardened men broke the rules and hugged me. Their hands were calloused, but they were careful”,
he closes his eyes for a second, his arms involuntarily around himself, if only for a second before he straightens up
and starts again.

“Because I lost lymph nodes too, the surgeon had ordered a comforter as I was at high risk of lymphedema and I
needed a pillow to protect my arm. They denied that order. They did not allow pillows in jail and I was not one for
who an exception could be made. We all felt helpless and slowly one by one they dispersed and left me alone”.

“A few hours later, they come back with their law, their orders”, he smiles for the first time. I have seldom seen him
smile, not that I can remember.

“Close your eyes, Aslam Shaikh, they said…”

“When I did, I felt something soft. I looked to find the most beautiful pillow I have ever seen. The men there had
just contributed their precious supplies of shirts and pants, old clothes, and even their much-needed thread and wove
them together to form a tufted square. Then they used the small contraband needles that were banned to punch holes
in the ends of the clothing. They shredded thin strips from another shirt to use as the thread to sew it all around.
Finally, they fringed it to give it that “designer look”, he tries to laugh, but there is none.

He hesitates for a second. A long second. He looks down at the ground, the cheap vinyl flooring, and rubs his feet
again and again over a small, bumped surface trying to smoothen it out.

As he never lifts his head, I hear him speak, again, but barely — almost in a whisper.

“At the lowest time in my life these junkies, and murderers looked after me and I will never forget them. They cared
for me, cooked for me dishes that they embellished with items that they paid for themselves. They took the prison
food and made it delicious. I hid that pillow under my bed every day for years and somehow it survived. The guards
knew it after a while, but they were kind too. I survived too just like the pillow. That was some 14 years ago”.

He sits there in his chair and looks right into my eyes fiddling with the prayer beads in his left hand, his back
straight — Survivor proud.

The coffee has gone cold between us and the sun has set long ago over the window behind him.

Here in the bedroom, we do not fit any representation of time, calendar, clock, phone showing the digits.
A shared understanding, is, for a moment like an animal between us,

Breathing poorly, as if wounded.

Best Feelings (06.20.2020)

Breakfast.
An oily omelet with crispy borders and freshly baked ghee rotis (bread) by my mom.

Challenging work with good directions, but nothing too heavy. I get overwhelmed by too much math.

Coldwater splashing against my face on a sunny afternoon.

Learning something new.

Feeling valued. Genuine appreciation.

The spray of orange mist when I peel it.

The smell of lemon as I throw the used ones into the garbage disposal (When my better half is not looking. We
disagree on where it should end up)

An extra hot shower followed by a cold spray just before it ends.

The smell of cologne. Fresh, yet tingly.

Floating in a pool watching a bikini walk by. My woman is aware of my proclivities and is amused by it.
Talking to a stranger. Unspooling what makes them tick, especially if they are interesting.

Talking over a meal with just one other person. I am not a fan of large group dinners where I end up withdrawing
into a shell and staying there for the rest of the night.

Digging into subjects I like. Humans. Relationships. So unpredictable. So different every time. Who are you? Or
better, who am I?

The smile on someone’s face as I give them something, they think they need.

A new lane was discovered in my town accidentally. It was always there, yet I never knew about it - Till now.

Thinking about my younger days especially my grandmother. Her simplicity. The sage advice was delivered without
any dramatic flair.

A starry night close to the ocean hearing the waves crash. The spray hitting up occasionally.

A rainy night snuggled in bed with a book. Thunder outside while my feet touch another set of feet adjacent to me,
searching under the covers.

A genuine and big hug from someone. It makes almost everything so much better.

Sitting on a meditation cushion watching the thoughts unspool in my head. This feeling that everything around me is
expanding as I merge into it and it merges into me.

A good cold pillow late into the night.

Getting alone into bed. Cool, clean sheets.

Spread out taking as much space as I need without any consideration.

Rain splashing outside my window.

A good night of deep sleep where I am slightly aware of my dreams.

Breakfast….
Eleven Choices (07.04.2007)

” Raise your hand if you wish for this…”

I am at a week-long retreat in a leafy tree-covered area in western California. It was just past our mealtime and as
always I had gorged on a bit too much – Thin spicy daal, potato, breadsticks, rice, and a sweet dish. The idea that
food will still be available come sundown is and will probably always be alien to me.

After each meal, we slowly amble back into the meditation hall. People had staked out the prime real estate, leaving
a cap, a t-shirt, a pair of glasses, a folded blanket, on a favorite cushion so that they could return to the same spot. In
the back row of cushions —with easy access to the door—I left my pen and book. The notebook was one I had
picked up as a last-minute item before leaving to catch the flight.

I find my spot on a meditation cushion near the back of a vast semicircle of meditation cushions, as close to the door
as possible. A couple of hundred people filled the vast hall: old, young, thin, fat, in tattered kurtas and trendy
designer wear. Lots of tattoos—mandalas, oms, colorful fishes, indecipherable Chinese or Sanskrit words inscribed
on biceps, ankles, necks. Bare feet with overgrown, fungus-lined toenails, or perfect bright red pedicures. Most of
the crowd looked like they had been to Rigpa—or places like Rigpa —many times before.

And then there was me.

 This is not something I had done before or even contemplated doing. Saints and mahatmas for me were usually
equivalent to charlatans. People who peddle their fake experiences and so-called knowledge for money.

So why was I here – Sitting in this corner row, looking up at the podium where the bald, plump Tibetan man sat
nodding spewing alien words, catching his breath to wait for it to be translated by a bony Asian woman sitting next
to him in brown robes.

Breathe in. I tell myself. Breathe out. The act seems forced as if that was not part of my DNA. Why was I here
again?

I felt like I had taken a wrong turn, gotten off at the wrong exit. I should have been at Mission Street - A couple of
hours down, getting a cheap massage at some shady-looking Asian joint. I needed to relax—and a hard-handed
massage seemed a lot more relaxing than sitting straight on a meditation cushion with hundreds of sweaty people.

But I wasn’t here to unwind—at least not in that way. I needed some answers. I was practically waiting, inhaling in
the dewy incense-filled air, waiting for the evening program to start. Instead of the world opening up to me, it had
just felt like an utter disappointment. I could barely keep awake while I looked around seeing some alpha types
making a real hard attempt at sitting straight and following the instructions.

Two upholstered chairs were set up at the front of the great hall, a table with two copper cups and a bottle of water
between them. An easel stood next to the chairs, supporting a large dry-erase board, upon which a handwritten list
was put on.

Rinpoche began by slowly gazing around the entire semicircle. He seemed to make eye contact with every single
person in the room. He was a large-sized man, perhaps in his early fifties, with a bald pate and an impish, should I
say Buddha-like, face.

“Everyone suffers, everyone gets sick and everyone dies,” he says without any emotion. “Everyone is struggling.
Life is difficult for everybody. Once you’re in, there’s no way out. You have to go forward. And we all die in the
end. So how to deal with it?”

As I sat there, the words sliced through everything: through my dull yet seeking mind, my pulse slightly arose, my
general state of alienation towards everything authoritative, everything rule-based pierced for a bit.

That was something, wasn’t it?

In a few simple sentences, he had addressed the root core of what I had usually felt. He knew about the roller
coaster, the slow ascent, the rapid downward plunge.

I was here. I had reached the ascent of the curve of my life. I had built it by decision and by accident—and there
would be no other and now the rapid plunge felt terrifying in its regard.

So how do I deal with it?

I raise my hand. This was so unlike me that I looked up at my hand as if it belonged to someone else. I usually never
engage in group discussions. It’s an anathema for me, built from a childhood laced with a lack of self-confidence,
disdain towards most, and an inability to believe that my opinions matter to anybody, even myself.
But I did have a question. It had been bubbling up inside me and was banging against my rib cage, my heart,
demanding an answer.

“Yes.” Anya, the translator pointed. Rinpoche turned to look in my direction struggling to gaze at the far end of the
hall. I suddenly felt the spotlight of his eyes on me.

“I was raised in a very religious home,” I began, sounding shaky. “But I’m confused. I don’t believe in all of these
different deities that you talk about nor do I feel any respect towards them. How do you expect me to perform these
visualizations that you talk about?”

Rinpoche tilted his head to the side. A smile played at his lips, as if he had been expecting this question, and was
delighted by it.

“I don’t think it has to be metaphysical,” he said. “It’s the expression of a wish.”

A wish.

The thought lingers in my head as if a seed is planted yet nothing comes out of it. The answer seems so –
unsatisfactory, almost incorrect. An antithesis of what I had expected. Dazzling verbiage of vocabulary that would
open worlds for me, unfold universes at my feet, enlighten me with a single piercing sentence.

The disappointment almost seems too much to bear.

After the evening session ended, I wandered the halls of the sanctum, lost in thought. I barely registered the
dinnertime crowd of people carrying colorful trays piled high with bowls of salad and pulses. A wish – but that was
something that children did. Naïve, unadulterated souls who did not have the worldly experience that I had. People
who knew there was no such thing as wishing for and being fulfilled because of it.

As an adult, I had long since given up on wishing. It seemed the equivalent of sprinkling magic fairy dust. Even if I
had a wish, I would never verbalize it – ever, lest it is unfulfilled just because of the act of wishing it. Instead, I
usually would adopt an approach of hoping for the worst, fearing the most extreme and then being pleasantly
surprised when the universe bestowed something better, at times the wish that I had never dared verbalized. Even
the gratitude remained silent, lest the wish is taken away again.

But really, what did it mean to fervently, wholeheartedly, name a desire?

To verbalize it out of a deep yearning—to set that yearning loose upon into the world? Could a wish be a less
fraught word for a prayer? Maybe it wasn’t about who if anyone, was on the other end, listening. Maybe devotion
had to do with holding up just the one end of the dialogue. Your end.

I look at the board where there are scribbled the eleven benefits of metta (Loving Kindness) according to the
Buddha:
People who practice metta…

Sleep peacefully.
Wake peacefully.
Dream peaceful dreams.
God’s love them.
People love them.
Gods will protect them.
Poisons and weapons and fire won’t harm them.
Their faces are clear.
Their minds are serene.
They die unconfused.
And live-in heavenly realms.

When Anya gave us the list of benefits, she asked us to think about which one most resonated with us the most.

Then, following a long meditation, she asked for a show of hands for each benefit.

Sleep peacefully was a crowd favorite.

People love them was super popular too, especially among women.

And certainly, poisons and weapons and fire won’t harm them - It had its devoted fan base of the muscle and tattoo
variety.

But there was one benefit that stood out for me - As if it were written in neon.

It seemed to me to be holding within itself the key to all of the others.

As the choices are recited one by one, I was the only person in that vast room to raise his hand for the 10 th choice -

To die unconfused.
The Cold Winter (03.29.2009)

I was an Engineer and an MBA in finance. I worked at a well-paying banking job near the southern coast of Ohio, a
relatively low-cost state. My apartment, food, and rental car costs were paid for by the bank. I worked hard and was
paid well, but for the next few years, most of my money would go towards scratching my day trading itch, rather
than a lot of savings. So, I lived relatively frugally, but quite comfortably, in my two-bedroom apartment, driving
my 2001 Honda Civic, enjoying the family, and enjoying life in general.

And then it happened. A freak stroke of luck -- — the financial tsunami of 2008 along with an urgent need for money
to pay off some medical costs. I had lost my job a month ago and did not have insurance during the period. All of a
sudden, the bills continued to come in, the margin calls continued unabated, and the markets continued to nosedive.
At the end of it all, I found myself staring at the carnage of my bank account. $ 2,140, it said in all. I did have some
80K salted away in my 401K’s.

I had no income for the foreseeable future, maybe ever, and no dependable means to pay rent when my savings
eventually wore out. I tapped an old friend from my days before and he helped me secure a job back in his old
company I used to work for — In Portsmouth, NH.

And so I went. Three shirts, two pairs of pants, a tie and a pair of formal leather shoes. A credit card on a tight leash
and lots of apprehensions. The family stayed back for a month. We had just renewed the lease anyway. I called a
very close friend of mine hoping he might let me stay with him in his room. He and I have been best buddies for
years now in the US.

“I am sitting on a beach in Melbourne”, he laughs. My spirits soar. I can have the room then, I hope.
“You can live in the hall room. My room has a lot of sensitive documents for my green card filing all littered
around”, he says without any comprehension.

Deflated, but helpless, I accept. I need one more favor.

“Can I use your car for a couple of days until I go back to Ohio and drive mine back?” I ask, this time a bit
apprehensively.

“Umm… Nah. I usually don’t let anyone use my car”.

I wonder what definition I use to call people my friends. But so is life.

So, there I was. In the middle of January, sleeping on a futon in the hall room that was cold as hell. I did not have
space to carry a thick blanket in my carry-on as I tried to save on the 40$ luggage check-in. Now I was ruing that
mistake.

“Here, you can have a blanket. You will need it late in the night”, my friend’s roommate Dennis kindly offers one. I
take it gladly. Nothing felt any better.

And so every day, I walked out of that apartment in the freezing snow, looked at my friend’s silver Honda Accord
parked outside, and walked the 4 miles down to the office, through the winding Ocean road, past the truck stop, on
to route 33 that fed traffic to the I-95N and then down Corporate drive. The last mile felt the longest.

The cars that passed would see a brown-skinned Indian, dressed in formals, pointed leather shoes, inappropriately
attired for the winter, drudging through the snow-covered roads looking behind him hopefully for a second as they
drove by.

The route 33 road that led to I-95 was the worst. The wind chill picked up and the cars that whizzed by, their tires
spit out a slew of brown-black ice muck directly onto the side and onto my right side. It was not their fault. There
was no actual road to walk, just a thin white line drawn on black tar. My right ear frozen, alternating my freezing
hands — One to hold the leather bag, another inside the pocket to keep it warm enough.

On days when Dennis went at the same time as me, he would drive me to the office. I could not imagine how better
and shorter the distance felt when driving in a car with the heater turned on at full blast. I wanted to thank him, again
and again, but instead, I just stared ahead at the road. Each pavement, each tree, each marking now intimately
familiar by the daily walking.

At the tail end of January, a freak storm hits the northern corridor. Sheets of snow overnight made everything around
me white. It’s a dull grey and dark day as I trudge through the snow, one step at a time. The leather shoes already
filled to the brim with white powder, my feet numb. It’s just the 10th day on the job and I could not afford to stay
home. There is no home anyway, just a futon by the cracked window with a black wheeler bag underneath it.

“Hey….”

I hear the sound of a car approaching but dare not look behind. I want to be careful with the leather shoes. The grip
is almost nonexistent.
“You need a ride”. He is not asking. He is telling me.

The guy is in his 40’s, with long gray hair with a mullet, a big guy with a blunt nose, and a thick face. Rednecks, we
used to laugh at these types. Now I am sitting in his truck shivering, the heater blaring in the ’80s, and the snow in
my shoes slowly melting forming a puddle inside and outside.

I apologize. He laughs.

And so, it becomes a norm. I walk every day and he stops by most days. Drives me to the gate of my office and then
goes off on his way.

“I hope I am not having you go out of the way for me…” I ask hesitantly one day.

“No man…I am just down the lane before yours. Relax…Here, have a bagel. I am taking some for the guys.”

From there on, every time I am in his car there is a bagel and a cup of warm coffee laid out in the middle aisle for
my breakfast.

I spy an office badge one day. Ryan Montana, Security Officer. The address is in Hampton, 20 miles away, in the
opposite direction.

I look outside the window and thank him silently.

On Fridays, I go back to my friend’s house and wait patiently for two hours at the bottom of the stairs to the porch to
be let in. When Dennis finally came back home after a couple of drinks, I walked up behind him.

“Hey, Sorry I didn’t know you were waiting. You could have called.”

There was no phone. Could not own that yet. Needed to save enough, quickly.

“No worries. I just came in like 5 minutes ago myself”, I find myself saying. At least I had a place to come back to.

So here I was — A Business Analyst working in a public company, one month away from being homeless through
no fault of my own, utterly dependent on the mercy or lack thereof of friends and strangers.

And what if there had been no kindness? What if God had not struck the light of mercy in these people? What if
there were no friends of friends to lay out a futon or share a blanket? What if I’d had no stranger to drive me at times
to work, to feed me a bagel & coffee from his breakfast, to put the heater on max to warm me up? Or no savings to
pay, first for the apartment rent, and then for the medical expenses?

I am now a mid-level professional. My LinkedIn is packed with recommendations, certifications, and requests from
people who want me to come work for them. I earn six figures and then some. I promised myself long ago I would
never be in that condition again.

My family never knew. Some things are better kept to yourself.

But that experience taught me something — I am so much more.

I am the sign beneath the overpass.

I am the voice from the curb.

Feed me.

Shelter me.

Help me.

I am you…

..
The Inside Job (12.22.2015)

“ You did a really good job today. That was excellent”. Genuine appreciation – a rarity these days.
My self-esteem coupled with my ego surges to new heights never scaled before.

“You could have handled this meeting a little better today”. The tone is simple, yet the words are brutal.

I am crestfallen, my self-esteem takes a beating. It will be a bit before it recovers, if at all.

After all, I am human.

I often rely on external sources of self-esteem, such as approval.

It feels so good.

The sweet rush of good feedback lasts all day. I savor it slowly like that Lindt truffle chocolate, peeling each layer,
again and again.

I find futile ways to tell other uninformed souls about it - without seeming all too vain.

It is all too obvious.

And then there are days when I just want to curl up into a ball and suck my thumb.

I replay the harsh words again and again.

I wonder why they were spoken. Maybe the messenger was not in a good mood. Maybe he exaggerated and it
wasn’t so bad, or was it?
The problem is any external source of self-esteem is fickle, like slipping sand.

I can’t use this dry sand to build a structure as important as myself.

It would be foolhardy to allow my regard for me - which has an impact over everything -to be based on such an
unsteady foundation as my ego.

The ego expands and deflates at speeds that leave me dizzy. It colors my perceptions for days to come.

What if I stop for a second and let the mind standstill?

Let the muddy water in the cup settle down.

Internal sources of self-esteem - They belong to me, so I have more control over how to regulate them.

Any external source of self-esteem is a roller coaster. Most times, I am my anchor.

In the turmoil of everyday life, I often end up overlooking a very simple fact.

Self-esteem is mostly an inside job.

The Future (08.29.2018)

A group of us are at a friend’s house for an annual Parsi new year party during which their little boat hooks up with
another friend’s boat in the middle of the lake. It’s the golden hour, just before sunset. Wine is being poured – or
Pepsi – take your pick. The smell of freshly baked kebabs is wafting in the air. In this soft summer light, everyone
on the deck is as beautiful as they will ever be. It is impossible not to feel the good fortune of being here at this
moment. The boat rocks gently. The hills surrounding the lake are glowing.

This friend- one of our close friends – has bought a home on a lake property that is distinguished by a long stretch of
private forest. As we stand on the deck within view of the overlooking property, he points it out to me.
“Our children will play together on that rock,” he says with pride, and with almost certainty.

I smile and think about how things will be someday. As I squint in the evening sun, I can see them. Two or three of
them – our grandchildren, running in the mud, crouched down with some toy guns, collecting pebbles along the
lake’s edge. He has the vision of it, I realize. He and his wife probably imagined that future when they decided to
buy that big of a house. Their kids are still about to go to college, but they are preparing for it – an eventuality that I
don’t know if it is so but for their sake, I wish it was. They are preparing for a time that is down that road but will be
here before either of us knows it.

I look across the group of people and spot Ana. She is wearing a blue flowing dress, she ballooned dress sleeves
flying in the wind. Her hair is slightly flowing in the breeze and she is wearing those elegant shoes that she just
bought from goodwill last week as a New Year gift for herself. She has gone through a lot this year. As she smiles, I
see the glimpses of that carefree girl from years ago. I want to reach out to her and hold her hand – to tell her it’s all
going to be ok.

Will we ever think much beyond tomorrow or at the worse the end of this week? Our lives as we live it are lived in
increments – increments of days, weeks, months – Definitely not decades. What’s on our calendars between now
and thanksgiving? When will it be bonus time this year? When will it be August so I can go back to India and
unwind the knot that’s been in my heart for months now? Does Jen need her infusion next week or is it the week
after?

I still cannot envision my old age. I look at my mother and Ana’s mother and cannot even hazard a possibility yet of
what it looks like. I have seen them have days where they feel useless, unworthy, under-appreciated, and struggling
to understand what they are living for. I wonder what will come of me once I am no longer the breadwinner of the
household. Will they listen to me? Who are they and what are they listening to? Will I be more inward-looking, or
would I turn into a bitter old man who has opinions that no one now wants to listen to? “Life, if well lived – Is long
enough,” Seneca wrote in a poem in which she reflected on the afternoon of life.

Our world will narrow as the storm of time washes over us too. It will bleach us, expose our knots, and whittle us
down like smooth old driftwood. It is this narrowing – not uncertainty, which is inevitable, undeniable a fact. The
narrowing – it may not happen today, nor tomorrow. Not this year, nor next. Not this decade, nor – perhaps – the
one after. There is an amount of luck that is also involved here, of course. But some things are bigger than luck that
are in play here.

The boat continues to glide past the lake, leaving behind our future grandchildren and their small, curved backs as
they forage for treasure in the mud. I want to call out to them. I have a feeling that I almost know their names.

I want to let them know that I intend to be on that lake when they are ready –

Sitting on that rock under the great old tree.

Watching them from a spot in the shade.

Melbourne (05.17.2009)

I look up Natalie’s address and decide to visit her. She doesn't know I am in Melbourne and I don’t know what to
expect. It’s almost been eight years since we last met which was also the only time, we saw each other for a day
during our trip to Singapore.

The address is in Port Phillip Bay, a suburb in the outskirts of Melbourne City very close to the ocean. I know she
loves the ocean, so this makes a lot of sense. I am hoping she still lives there. The internet is a beautiful thing. You
find all that you need for and then some more.

It’s almost 5.00 PM when I can get out of the office. I take the city tram to head south. The tram is loaded with
people trying to get back home. Everyone wants to shave off that last second to reach home a bit earlier, earlier than
usual to do the same mundane things that people do. Cook, lounge by the sofa, watch TV, pamper their dogs or fight
with their spouses.

I reach the address and walk towards the area. It’s a leafy suburb with a lot of people walking around in the
evening. I knock on the door. A lady opens it. She is around 50 but she has an aura about her. Something about her
that makes you want to stop dead in your tracks and stare, without intending to do so.
She is wearing a red top and old faded jeans. Her hair is up and in a ponytail behind her head. “I’ve just oiled it.”,
she said later…She has just got back from work only fifteen minutes ago. She is not expecting me at this time. I
apologize for the intrusion and introduce myself.

I am not sure how to do that either. I met your daughter eight years ago on a flight out from San Francisco or that
she left without giving me her number or her address. I start to shuffle in my pocket to bring out an old photo that
we took at the bay. It’s my only memory of her. The picture is old and shows the wear and tear of time. Folds and
creases all over but the bright smile still stand out.

As soon as she sees that picture, she recognizes me, and her expression changes from quizzical to sheer warmth. She
holds out her arms and envelops me.

“Z! You are Z from Singapore. You finally showed up!”

It’s my turn to be surprised.

“I am Christine,” she says as we head inside her cottage. It’s a small place but tastefully done.

There is a small glass table in one corner, a statue of Buddha with a small stone waterfall on the other. There’s a
candle glowing in one corner. It’s getting dark outside.

“Natalie told me all about you. She couldn’t stop talking. Come sit”, she gestures towards the sofa facing the kitchen
garden on the outside.

She serves some refreshments quietly and we talk some more about when I came to Melbourne and the places that I
plan to go to this weekend. She talks about everything but Natalie or how she is and what she was doing.

The question that I came to get an answer for still lingers, like a 400-pound gorilla. How do you ask a mother if her
daughter is still alive? I look around for clues and am not paying attention to what she is talking about. The
conversion lingers.

“Come, I’ll take you up to show you her room”, she abruptly gets up.

I follow her down the hall into the narrow passageway and up the wooden stairs. The house is immaculate, but you
could see the lack of maintenance, the lack of a man around the house tinkering with tools, fixing things.

The room is a small attic. It’s spare and clean. The bed is made with a green bed sheet that falls over the side. It is
clean, and the open window brings in the sunlight and air. There is a battery-powered cuckoo clock on one wall and
a small photo frame of Natalie with a younger girl smiling brightly by the bedside. Her sister looks identical to her
except more innocent, almost naïve.

She is standing behind me at the doorway and I have my back faced to her. I dare not turn back.

“When did it happen?” I ask.

“December 26. The same year you met.”

I am afraid to turn behind. It all comes back with a completely unexpected force. I didn’t think it would matter much
after all these years, but it still does. I am not sure why. It was just a meeting for a single day. I tell myself. Some
people have this way of leaving an impact on you long after they are gone.

It’s getting dark outside and she asks me to stay.

“Not many people come to visit me. Come sit, I will make dinner” she says with a smile.

While she is cooking, I offer to make her iced coffee, and she comes back into the kitchen with me. As I put the
milk in the glasses, she sits on the kitchen counter, her legs dangling over the edge. I’ve had guests invite me to their
apartment before, but nobody has done that. It is an informal, spontaneous gesture.

“Was it painful …...in the end …. for her?”, I am not sure I want to know but I ask anyway.
“They had her on the tube for a month, but she was still smiling at times. I used to go visit her every day. She liked it
when I sat next to her and told her stories about her childhood.”

She suddenly stops and turns around.

“She liked you, you know that?”

I continue to do what I am doing, not sure how to respond to that.

“She wanted to tell you everything about her illness, but she was afraid that you would dislike her, treat her like
everyone else treated her, with pity, like a delicate porcelain doll, almost contagious.

I understand. For a change, she knew someone as she was before, beautiful carefree without all the preconceived
notions. It was a gift.

She continues to cook. Her work is quick and precise. There is no wasted movement. I stand by and listen to her.

“Natalie was particular about a lot of things. When she was small, she needed to know everyone’s birthday so she
would be able to pre-plan and make them a little goodie bag. She had to make sure that all of her toys were in place
and made weekly rounds to do so. What she needed to know the most was how long until the next visit to Dr.
Steven”.

“There’s a reason Z …as to why this prison is the worst hell on earth. It’s hope. For the longest time, I thought she
would get well. That a miracle would happen, that my little girl would be ok.”

She turns around to cut some salad and I start to get a faint idea of how she relives this grief day in and day out.

We have our dinner and talk late into the night. It’s almost 12 when I get up to go to sleep. Somewhere in between,
she has convinced me to stay the night. The house is decently sized and there are enough rooms. The last train back
to Melbourne city has long gone.

She comes by with blankets and takes care of me like her own child patting my head. She sits by the bed just like
my own mother would and we talk about Natalie and how she always brought people into her fold, into her circle
even at the consequence of getting hurt by it all.
I have never had the courage or the will to do that. I guard myself with a genuine fervor of someone who has always
lived life on two different fronts - The faceless outside that cares less about anything and the more caring deeper
realms of the inside.

I drift off to sleep and I dream of dreams that I cannot remember, yet each one of them is vivid in itself.

In the morning, I get up to the smell of her making breakfast. It’s a dinner-sized omelet with pancakes. In between,
sips of coffee she looks up to glance at the sunrise behind me through the French window.

“Would you like to visit her grave? It’s not too far from here. She wanted it unmarked so it would be hard for you to
locate it. I can take you there if you like”, she hesitates for just a bit and then asks.

“Yes. I would like to…” I start to say but don’t find the right words to complete the sentence, so I just nod.

We take her car to drive there. The area is beautiful and covered with greenery. Birds are chirping among the trees
and it’s a beautiful day. It’s a Saturday and there is nobody around this early in the morning.

There’s still some dew on the leaves as we walk through the range of graves, some elaborate and wordy, some just a
decrepit resemblance of mud and stone. The graves have become a symbol of our wealth and status long after we
will be gone. I wonder how much of it has to do with the ego of the loved ones who created these graves. The ones
who passed away probably don’t care anymore.

I remember an incident when I was traveling with a highly accomplished Buddhist lama and his assistant. We were
driving through the road in San Francisco that faced a large-sized cemetery and the assistant had pointed out –

“Rinpoche, look how clean and well kept their places of the dead are”?

It almost looked like Lama Kham had ignored his statement as his eyes were closed and he was mumbling a prayer.
He opened his eyes, looked at the large houses on the other side of the road, and exclaimed with some amusement –
“Yes. Even the places of the living dead are well kept.”

We walk along the stone path with her just ahead of me. She points out a small grave in the corner.

She waits up for a minute and we both hesitate.

“I’ll be in the car,” she says as she starts to walk back without waiting for an answer. She has a sense that maybe I
would like to be alone, even if just for a bit.

I step on a particular square of cement on the path towards the grave and look up and see a tree springing up. It’s just
a slab of stone, unmarked with some old flowers on it. There is a large tree that shades it and a layer of leaves has
fallen. The terrain is littered with memory mines.

I remember the laughter, the little things that amused her, the things that annoyed her. Life was lived in a heightened
sense when I was around her and I get that same sense even when she is laying down now.
She had asked me to stay back for a night, to spend some time with her and I had refused. I wish I could turn back
time even if just for a bit.

Instead, I sit by the stone under the shade of the tree.

After all these years, I thought had made peace with her memories but most of it, with myself. In that moment
sitting on the rock looking at that dust lined grave the false sense of calm is shattered and before I know my vision
clouds over.

I know what’s coming and I fight it, needlessly so. Men don’t weep, especially not over someone who they met with
8 years ago for less than 24 hours.

It’s a futile attempt and I finally give up on it. The leaves continue to blow in the wind, the earth continues to
revolve. Life in its momentum never stops for any of us.

After a while, I stand up and touch the grave, sweeping away the dust with my hand, slowly but deliberately, a mark
of respect but even more a sense of affection for her, from years past. In a world surrounded by a lot of darkness and
grief, she had made me smile, even if for a bit. She would always be special.

As I walk back to the car where Christine is waiting, I am light. It’s as if I have left behind a part of myself.

Dust to dust, they say.

Someday we will meet again, my friend.

Just not yet….

The Vajra Bell (11.19.2009)

‘ R
emember, all the things that will please you or terrify you will come from your mind…” he says with amazing
conviction.

I am standing in front of a square room, 12x14 in size. It’s in the middle of the wilderness with no civilization
around it.

As part of the advanced Togal practice, I am about to be ritually sealed into this dark room for the next 5 days. I
peek into the room with a nonchalant attitude towards the things to come. The monks who are standing around me
are exhibiting an opposite demeanor and my naïve self, yet never wonder why.

A large pot of water lies in the upper right-hand corner. A bucket that will act as the defecting mechanism as shown
to me. A leather piece in the middle will be my meditation cushion, 4 feet away from the basket.

“Eat and shit as much as you can before you go in”, a bald Buddhist monk who speaks a spatter of English kindly
advises me.

“Whatever you do, do not topple over the basket”, the third one laughs putting a hand over my shoulder.

“Look at the room closely. You need to know where your things are in the dark”, says the other.
As the ceremony concludes, I am told to step over the threshold and into the hut. The chanting outside reaches a
crescendo as Rinpoche takes my hand into his and leaves me a vajra bell at the corner of the door.

“Ring it if you want this to end. Someone will always be outside. Don’t push things too hard. All the things that will
please you or terrify you will come from your mind. Remember that”.

With that, he pulls away and steps back. I take a step backward as I am told to do.

I watch the surroundings outside in the bright morning sun one last time as I blink rapidly,

I learn the refrain: Take a last look, take a last look. It’s going to be a long, long time.

The door is pulled shut and it’s complete darkness and silence.

As I sit, I am relaxing into the deep nothingness of no expectations. I have been telling myself: There is nothing else
that I want besides this moment on a leather block inside of the cabin. I imagine looking out onto the water, a
velvety breeze blowing through the trees, across me. I am trying to feel merely like an object, with planes and curves
the air must negotiate. It doesn’t count, though, if I have to tell myself this. I realize with consternation that I have
almost no idea how to be without design or a wish formed for the next moment. Among a thousand other things, I
have been turned to hear the phone ring or the crunch of tires on the gravel. I like to think that, as an adult, I have
barely spent an hour without talking or without surrounding sounds. But this is old anticipation made new.

I can’t decide if it’s crueler to have or not have these anticipations. I used to think satisfaction equaled stagnation —
but right now as I sit in here my mind is slowly in a dull daze. A slow sinking into the muck.

I look at the surroundings ahead of me. Red clouds swirling in a dust storm of light-tingling particles. My mind
suddenly fixates on a single particle, a spec of white that slowly grows in proportion until it becomes a cloud of
smoke, white smoke.

My eyes have started to dull again when suddenly out of that cloud an open-mouthed face looms across from me. I
can count the teeth, I can smell the breath, hot…. I jump back a couple of feet and my elbow hits the wall as I wince
in pain. I feel the tingling in my blood, little pinpricks of panic on my skin, the hairs on the back of my neck
standing in attention. Terror seizes me as I blink, again and again. Nothing. There is no white smoke. There is no
face.

All I am left with is a thumping heart and beads of sweat, slightly nauseous yet completely aware of everything
around me.

Picking up a stone from the ground I feel its shape. The jagged edges, the smoothness of the plane. My mind tries to
guess its weight. 10 grams? Maybe. Maybe more. I think about the family back home. The girls. They must be at
school; I think before catching myself. I don’t even know if it’s morning or noon. A vague sense of apprehension
envelops me. Disorienting me.

I need to know if it’s morning or night. I need to know how much longer I have here. I sweep my hands on the floor
looking for the vajra bell. I can’t seem to find it. What am I doing here? 3000 miles away from home sealed in a hut,
miles away from the nearest civilization. As I curl up on the small leather cushion, I begin to fade in and out of
sleep.
The torrent of thoughts has turned into a downpour and I can see each one of them as the form, come into focus and
eventually fade away as the next one is already forming. Really? What is wrong with me? What is it that I am
seeking? What answers can I fathom in this darkness?

I wake up and find myself in the same position as before except that my lower half is drenched in sweat. The
darkness does not feel threatening for a while. I have as an adult been very comfortable with darkness as well as
confined spaces. The feeling of being in a mother’s womb surrounds me.

I sit in a meditative posture for a while and focus on the practice of Tonglen — The giving and receiving. The face of
my wife comes into focus, kind and smiling and I breathe in her suffering into my heart center as I breathe out the
green light of peace and well-being.

I close my eyes for a bit as the lull takes over. It might have been minutes or hours but as I open my eyes again, a
white apparition, a face of terrifying proportions is right before me. It can swallow me the whole. It can swallow the
universe and it's rushing towards me, like a wild dog on a leash inches away from my face. “Remember all the
terrifying images that you see come from your mind”, I try to keep those words close.

Suddenly the image crystallizes. The white smoky apparition takes the face of my aunt who passed away years ago.
The terrifying blood-curdling shriek comes from behind me and I almost fall over. I try to get up but I am rooted to
the spot. The face takes a varying proportion of horror as I turn to my side and hurl throwing up. I still have some
sense to fall to the left side as I drift into a dizzying sleep.

The last thing I remember is my hand sweeping the floor looking for the vajra bell. Instead, I find the stone that I
hold in my left hand. I need to get out of here.

The dream is beautiful as I find myself flying over green-filled mountains with shades of subtle light. Beautiful
flags flutter in the wind. I sit amid sun-kissed grass, the slight dampness of the morning dew in my fingers.

There is a view of softness and sacredness in which the ’external’ world and body sensations are united in a vivid
play of light, like a colorful unreal cathedral of immense proportions, no longer out there, a fully embodied
simulation. Arising thoughts are clear translucent flashes overlaid on the sensory experience and the difference
between a visualization and the “real” world hardly noticeable. The objects and routines became not only a source of
delight but also a gate to this refined way of being, the flow of translucent ordinariness.

The fluctuations seem to be settling for the time being. Now it is so self-evident, the built-in transparency of the
cascade of sensations, flood of luminosity that spontaneously clears boundaries and conceptual obstacles of the
ordinary mind.

So hard to believe that it has been hidden in plain sight all the time. I spend the time engaged in this heaven. At
times there is deeper space, slowing down of movement, everything becoming tranquil, purified, and clear. Just
some small groups of white thigles swimming to the surface and then submerging again.

A deep feeling of immense gratitude washes over. Who can I thank? What should I be grateful for?

I sometimes close my eyes and put my hands in front to convince myself that I am looking inside myself and not
outside. It’s fascinating to see my mind recreating the outlines of my hand, but still keeping them transparent, and to
be able to look at the visions through them. From this day on until I finally emerge, my whole body looks
transparent and usually glistening with light, which can become quite tiring at night as the bright lights shooting
right in my eyes sometimes prevents me from sleeping, as if having trucks on the highway coming towards me with
headlights on full beam while trying to get some rest.

I lose track of time as the minutes tick by. Time, as it exists seems stretched like a rubber band elongated along its
axis. The sense that something important, dangerous, fathomless, is about to happen under the sky in that hut, turns
into feasting, a gorging of the sky to mouth, a race to fix starlight and portent in my blood.

The first hint of death for me is the dimming of the sky comes darkness, darkness darker than what I am used to in
that surrounding when I am again under the jurisdiction of vigilant night lights. I learn that plenty has nothing to do
with permanence, so the ripe stars had to be fixed in the shit bucket, eaten until the juice ran out the sides of my
mouth and the seeds clotted my teeth.

My mind after all these days is sharp and distended — all at the same time.

It’s at that time the door suddenly bursts open and I hear the sound of nature. The birds chirping, insects, leaves
rustling — I am attuned to every sound. Even the slightest breeze. The air is fresh and there is a slight taste in it, the
birds singing, I could hear the small waves of the lake rushing to the banks, everything looks so wonderful and
sharp, the visions of color still superimposed from the other world.

I am still slightly shaky and the stout cook who also doubles as the head monk holds me firmly.

“The bath is ready. I will wash your back. It’s a tradition. The last will be the first.”

I see the steam rise in the open bathhouse. It is nothing but a wooden bathtub in the middle of the valley surrounded
by open mountains on all sides. It’s cold outside and I am slightly shivering. The cotton clothes feel oddly
comfortable.

The cook has taken care of heating the water using wooden logs and he has done all the chores by himself. He is
probably more exhausted than I am since he was keeping guard outside my hut. He was in some ways, my savior.
His soft wide face is split into a big smile.

My clothes are caked to my body and I am eager to just strip them off. I keep pouring hot water on my head, front
and back as slight flakes of snow float around. After all, I am at an elevation and it’s the coming month of winter.
From the corner of my eye, I see the short cook bent over brushing his teeth, his salt & pepper beard white with
foam.

As I finally settle down in the kitchen to eat tsampa, made from roasted barley flour, the traditional Tibetan
breakfast, Anya, my interpreter, directs me to the other side. She pushes me forward — “Gampa has made an
American breakfast for you, believe it”

And so it was. There is a table neatly laid out for us. Fried eggs, crisp rolls and butter, and strawberry jam. I eat until
I cannot eat anymore and then roll over right there and sleep for hours under the watchful eye of Anya, my protector.
I dream vivid dreams yet there is a feeling of dread lingering just around the corner, like something bad that is just
about to happen.

The rest of the day I spend sleeping, walking, reading, and eating. The world at times is just a shimmering dance of
light and shadows. The tingles dance vaguely on the horizon of my consciousness but that is all. It is all a vast array
of silence in my mind, like a farmer who has just come home after a day of tilling in the fields and now splayed
relaxed in his chair. The only feeling I am aware of is intense contentment.
As I get ready to leave the retreat, I hug the short cook and he hugs me back with equal fervor. I don’t know his
name and I have a feeling we will never meet again, not in this lifetime. I look at Anya and she extends her hands
holding her robes. As I hug her, a feeling of intense silence comes over me. Like this is how the universe is
supposed to be. This is how things should be, just perfect.

Finally, I turn to look at Rinpoche. His bald head shining in the evening light catching the last rays of the California
sun. I suddenly remember the Vajra bell and I ask him while simultaneously watching Anya as she translates –

“Where was the Vajra bell? I just could not find it in the room once you had left”, I ask, the feeling of annoyance
creeping up inside me.

The bald plump monk laughs as he pulls out the bell from the other side of his desk littered with Tibetan
manuscripts.

“I never left the bell in the room”, she says looking at him, translating in real-time.

“There was no bell in that room, just as there was no you there”, there is mirth in his voice before he finally turns
serious.

Holding my palms, he looks into my eyes as Anya continues to translate….

“There was no bell “, he said…

“If you could really understand that there would be nothing left for you to look here.
Vocabulary (07.22.2020)

What doesn’t go on Instagram, Snapchat, or WhatsApp: My Bank statements, past due notices, glances exchanged
conveying our shared concern.

Blue Cross Insurance bills, sleepless nights, tuition costs upcoming. E-mails bearing disappointing news of her
condition, phone calls for hours trying to reconcile insurance details. Great heaving sighs.

The way sometimes my daughter Jenifer and I put our arms around each other when she is down and has a UC flare
going. She is in pain; her weight is dropping and none of those expensive medications or infusions are working.

We just sit there and look at each other - hoping silently things would improve.

Sometimes she has her head in my lap as she is curled into a ball and I am running my fingers through her hair
holding her close - my baby. Sometimes, I run out of my parenting skills and I head out for a drive so that I can
come back with some unadorned optimism.

I am on the phone with her doctor who tells me her counts are way off the charts. I keep an even tone as I wrap up
the conversation and sit down next to her.

“You okay Dadz?” She asks her face a borough of concern.

“Yeah. You okay?” I ask, understanding the futility of the question.

As I sit back down, I tell her about what the doctor just read.

When she hears it, Jenny reacts in a way only I would notice: the quick blink, a slight nod, but otherwise impassive,
trying to give nothing away, but I see her eyes are already starting to flood up. I wish there was a way to take this
upon myself and let her be the normal happy teenager that she could be.

It’s early in the morning - the lunch is still cooking on the stove and we are bleary-eyed as we bury our heads in
each other’s shoulders.

You okay?...

A shared vocabulary - like a soundtrack to our lives - so familiar that we hardly even notice which of us is speaking.

Eighteen years.
Selfish (07.29.2016)

My flower vendor's two-year-old son developed a fever. He started shaking and vomiting. They rushed him to the
hospital.

That first sleepless night spent watching the doctors scramble to administer medicine and draw blood for lab tests
became two. And then five.

And then twenty.

Something was wrong with the boy, but no one could figure it out. Meanwhile, his medical bills were piling up.

India, unlike some other countries, does not offer free public healthcare. But if you want immediate help, you need
to go private.

After many days of sickening worry, the boy got better.

But my friend had already taken predatory loans at 20% interest. And to keep up with the payments, he had to sell
his phone, and then his car.

The lenders would show up at his house unannounced, threaten him, and yell profanities.

His life had become unbearable.

When I find out I am furious. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?!”

“I was ashamed,” he replied.

I can’t stand his suffering. I felt it burning inside of me. His misery has become mine.

I have to do something about it.

So, I lend him money. It’s peanuts for me but it’s almost his year’s paycheck. He paid up and closed a few of the
accounts.

" I slept well for the first time last night sir”, he says with overflowing gratitude.
I feel better. Almost elated. Slightly superior. Almost godlike, even if it's just for a second.

I know I will reside and rule in this person's memories for a long time. At least that's what my ego is telling me and I
am listening along. It feels good.

That night after he tells me how he slept; I end up getting my first full night's sleep in almost a week. The damn
jetlag, I tell myself.

I realized something startling about helping others along the way—

It’s the most selfish act in the world.

But it’s the only kind of selfishness that makes sense to me.
College (03.28.1992)

All Andheri is agog. The colleges have finally started and it’s the first week. Everyone’s in a hurry trying to find
their class or trying to get out of one. I am just another boy trying to mix in with the crowd. Some want to stand out
using a mannerism of different techniques and then others just want to blend in, like the blue in the sky.

People linger in front of the pan shop and, when challenged by the cops or by Rajan’s boys, say they’re waiting for
their pan to be made. They’re given a shove to go on. “There’s nothing to see. Go, go, and get to the class. Line up
now!”

I start to move back to my class talking with my friend Chandrasekhar aka Chandu. He is a skinny fellow with a
razor-sharp mind and the intent is that just being associated with him will probably bump up my IQ by a couple of
percentage points. We move to the canteen and sit outside. I don’t know what the inside looks like. Never had the
money or the bravado to go in and take a look.

We sit outside where Patil is frying vadas. I wait for him to finish frying; the dozens of people around me do the
same. As soon as the ladle emerges from the vat of boiling oil full of vadas, beignets conjoined with wisps of yellow
batter, the frenzy begins. People are thrusting their money forward, mostly 10-rupee notes; in front of the assistant is
a thali full of 2-rupee coins.

Nobody seems to be ordering just one. Not everybody will get their vada pav from this batch; the timid will have to
keep waiting. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of
the vada mixture—dark with garam masala. My nose is red and raw from the pollution of the central city, but I can’t
keep my eyes on the psychedelic chaos of the streetscape.
It was Chandu who had first pointed her out to me. In the middle of the more or less demure girls on the sidewalk,
there she was, the tallest, the one with the longest hair, the most dazzling smile. All the other girls blurred and faded,
as in a movie when the heroine suddenly comes into sharp focus as she’s walking in a crowd of people in the street.

Her name is still unknown but that’s a concern for later. Chandu was taken with her. He thinks she is the most
beautiful woman he had seen, and I could not disagree with him.

“F*** those rich Bombay girls, who need them!” he declares, after several days of unsuccessful flirtation attempts
with them. He stares openly, mouth agape. This girl has a way of getting your attention without even making the
least of an attempt.

We share a computer class. The ten of us sitting in a row are attempting to master the skill set that will someday take
us to the USA or at least that’s how most of us think of it.

I see her out of the corner of my eye attempting to evade the obvious flirtation of a hell-bent Bihari guy who just
does not get the message that she is not interested. She is cool, collected, and yet amused by his advances.

He finally turns back disappointed and looking around to see if someone has noticed his humiliation.

I have just learned the art of sending a message using the NetSend command. I decided to give it a try and in a burst
of bold type out a message to her.

As she sits back on her seat, I press send.

“That must have been exhausting!”

I see her look at the message and then around the class scanning. She finally types back.

“It sure was. Do you always keep a watch on your surroundings?”

“Especially when someone is being cut down to size.”

“I am sure you have had your disappointing days too”. She types as she laughs looking at the monitor.

“Sure. I might be having one right now.”

“How so?”

“When you tell me that you are too busy to have a coffee”, I type impulsively knowing that I will have to borrow a
20 for the coffee from some unfortunate soul - if it ever happens.

There is silence, not a movement, nor a response.

I stare at the monitor willing it to respond as I want it to, but the gods are not aligned.

I probably haven’t breathed in the last 3 minutes.

“Sure. We can…... After class?”

The world is bright and awesome again.

“That works... I am the second last one from your right.” I type back nonchalantly.

“I know”.

And so, it begins…...

The Empaths (07.13.2012)

” Y
ou probably don’t know this, but you are an “Empath”. The man with the white hair says this with a slight
laugh.

We are sitting at terminal 1B in Dubai waiting for a flight to Boston and are having a light conversation.

He is a clinical psychologist and we have traveled together overnight from Melbourne on a 12-hour flight. Like
soldiers in a trench, we have survived the ordeal. We have talked about our families, our fears, our experiences.
Being strangers just a day ago, we have bonded over bottles of liqueur in those damp confines of the aircraft.

Of course, as a psychologist, he is always on his job. Evaluating, probing, and measuring.

“Never heard of that word?”, he asks amused. I nod in denial. I am proud of my extensive vocabulary and he has just
busted that bubble.

“Empaths are sensitive to slight nuances of behavior that others may be oblivious to. If you notice these things, you
are most certainly an empath”, he says with slight emphasis.

I have always known this but now I have a word attached to the mindset.

I notice minute shifts, small things, and almost everything, and by everything I literally mean everything.
I notice when someone stops hitting me up like they used to.

I notice when the way someone talks to me starts changing. That slight passive-aggressive tone in their voice even
when the actual statement is just blandly soothing, even patronizing.

I notice the little things that people do and the little things they used to do and when they stop doing.

I notice when things change and when they no longer look the same.

I notice every single little detail even though I am blissfully oblivious to the big picture and miss most things that
others usually catch.

People are surprised when I tell them things, they probably haven’t even noticed themselves. They wonder how I
know.

However, it’s annoying and at times makes me slightly worried, paranoid.

A sigh from my daughter – Is she sick? What is she not telling me?

A slightly tighter tone when my manager is talking and then an hour later a nice conversation, he is having with a
colleague nearby – What did I do wrong? Will he ever like me?

I am an empath and I absorb other people’s opinions.

And this is how I survive.

The Landing (03.30.2000)

KLM Flight 62 from Amsterdam lands at Detroit International airport without an event and everyone scrambles to
gather their luggage.

It’s almost 11 AM and the scene outside the window looks serene. It’s bright sunshine and everyone is in a hurry to
get out as soon as they can.

I pick up my book and passport and impulsively check my front pocket to feel the 123$ that I own. It’s my only
valuable possession given to me by my dad when I was traveling. He probably worked for a year in the temple
collecting tips from wealthy clients before he could muster up that sum.

The lady ahead of me who had exchanged her seat with mine turns around and smiles. I shuffle and nod politely
thanking her quietly but still never understanding how to react to a stranger smiling. I am as they say – fresh off the
boat, except that the boat is now an airbus.

As I get off the flight, I stop to take a look. Detroit International Airport is not one of the model airports in the
country or the world, yet this looks like the best airport in the world to me. The floors are clean and gleaming and
the air smells fresh and clean. Everyone seems to be in a hurry yet there is no pushing and shoving around or
encroaching of space.

I am a bit apprehensive as I approach the customs counter. The big muscled bald customs officer is polite but
professionally cold in his approach.

“Mr. Sidwwwhwahaaa?”
I am supposed to acknowledge this query and yet I stand there staring. He glances up when he does not receive a
response and is a bit annoyed.

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the United States today?”

“I work in G.D.I and…”

Even before I answer he cuts me off. “Do you have any food or vegetables with you?”

I hesitate mentally running notes in my head of the things that I own.

“No”.

He looks up, curious and amused. He knows that every Indian visiting always carries with him a raft of contraband.
Masalas, dry snacks... The whole nine yards.

Glancing up one final time, he hesitates for a bit and I hear a loud thud of the stamp meets the face of a blank
passport page, a sound that I will come to recognize the time and again on my visits, but always with a sense of
impending relief. I can breathe again.

“Welcome to America”
The Sucker (08.18.2019)

" There is a need for 500 rupees”, he keeps repeating, his eyes just slits, as he looks towards the ground.
I am standing in Dadar railway station heading for Pune to meet my brother-in-law for the weekend.

It's a yearly ritual when coming back from the states. I get to see him one day once a year. He takes me out for
dinner and although it's an expensive affair, in all these years I've never even made a presumptive attempt at picking
up the tab. Every year, I eat and talk and laugh with them and then sit there slightly mortified when the check
comes in. Not that he has ever hinted the other way either. My sensible better half knowing my proclivities will take
care of things behind the scenes writing out a generous check every year to them as our way of showing
appreciation. I don't know the amount. I don't dare ask. I would rather not know.

It's early morning on a lazy Sunday and yet there are throngs of crowds everywhere on Dadar station. College
students heading back to Pune clustered together laughing, a bunch of old-timers who have known these tracks for
years. There is also a local stud dressed in a tight t-shirt, fake gold chains propped around his scrawny neck,
adjusting his coiffed hair looking into a cell phone.
Behind those groups, I notice a middle-aged guy walking with a red and white stick, a universal indication of the
blind. He wears a white shirt and pants both of which look like they have seen better days. A white triangular cap
sits in his head and is usually an indication that he is a villager. A small cloth bag hangs from his left shoulder.

As he shuffles through the crowd it looks like he is looking for something. He taps his stick as he walks, sometimes
teetering on the edge of the platform but seemingly finding his way back, leaving my stomach in a knot. People are
moving around him but not all are considerate. A scrawny guy running from the other direction suddenly slams into
him a full momentum. For a second scrawny guy is stunned by the impact and stands dazed. Then he starts to run
again as the blind guy moves ahead, slowly now, with some coiled-up apprehension.

I finally decide I've seen enough and walk up to him as I hold him from the arm.

"Where are you looking to go?” I ask.

"D3".

He is telling me his coach number.

I am in D4 going on a different train, so I hold his arm and start walking. It's not that far and his train is already
being announced so it should be coming in less than 5 minutes.

I suddenly notice his feet.

They are devoid of any footwear and his left toe is bleeding from some recent wound. Very recent.

"Your toe. It's bleeding", I tell him, almost speaking to myself.

" I know sir. A man just ran into me. His shoes...."

I stand there next to him holding his arm on that crowded station watching the red puddle around his toe widen.
Nobody around him notices anything or they pretend not to. Here in this part of the continent as in anywhere else it's
each man on his own.

"What are you doing in the city?” I ask, trying to distract myself. There is no concept of first aid around here. You
get hurt. You suck up. You move on.

"I am from Nanded. I was here to collect some funds for my son's education. He is in college now. I collected 1300
rupees (18$) but fell short of 2000 that we needed.".

There is regret tinged in his voice and I look at him. There is no expression on his face. Just two closed slits.

"When was the last time you ate?"

There is no answer. I don't think he has heard me. His train is being repeatedly announced now over the
loudspeaker. A minute passes by in silence. His arm is getting uncomfortably sweaty to hold yet I dare not leave it.
The red puddle around his feet is already starting to cake up.

"Day before yesterday", I hear him say with slight hesitation. He then looks the other way.
"Would you like to eat something?"

"Oh no! The train will be here any minute. I don't want you to miss it”. He thinks I am taking the same train.

I don't correct him. Instead, I am eyeing the distance between us and the nearest food stand. 100 meters, 5 minutes. I
think I can make it.

"Hold on here. Don't go anywhere. I'll be back".

Before he replies, I am already sprinting, navigating the crowds.

As I bring back some piping hot samosas wrapped in a newspaper, I regret not picking some for myself. They smell
the smell of the heavens.

The smell reaches him before I do. The face breaks out into a smile. The closed slits look even smaller, but the face
is pure joy.

He doesn't thank me but instead touches the packet to his forehead and shuffles to put it in the small cloth bag
hanging from his shoulders.

"If only I could find 500 rupees”, I hear him say. I think he wants me to hear it.

A 5-year-old boy caked in mud, shirtless with his stomach bulging suddenly stands in front of us.

"Sir, 5 rupees sir...."

The boy is going after me. The obvious choice. Dressed in a t-shirt and sneakers which a chic-looking roller bag, the
village bumpkin in a white cap is not even worth asking.

I ignore him. Having spied his mother, a thin Indian woman clad in an old saree standing on the other side, I look
the other way. It's a professional setup. Having lived here long enough, I know one when I see one.

As the boy sees no movement, he loses interest and starts to move away.

I suddenly see the blind man reach out. His hand catches the boy by the shoulder.

Two samosas emerge from the packet in his bag and before I know it the boy is already nibbling the crusty outsides,
his face breaking out in all smiles. His mother stands there in the other end frowning. Money, not food is the golden
rule in professional panhandling. He is just a kid. He will learn his lesson someday. Today is not that day.

"They get hungry too sir", he says by way of explaining that he means no disrespect giving away food that I got for
him.

"Just if I had made the remaining amount, I could go back without any issues..."

I hear him but pretend to ignore him.

I noticed that he didn't eat his food immediately but dropped it in his shoulder bag. I have been hungry for three days
to know what it does to you and any semblance of self-respect that you have. I file that away somewhere as we stand
there, my fingers clutched tightly around his arm.

"We have no land to till anymore. My wife died some years ago. Just this boy. He is our only hope."

I stand there in silence.

It's not that I am not moved by his story. But I smell a setup. Having seen that I got him 50 rupees worth of samosas
in a blink, my accented Hindi, the deodorant scent wafting off me... I think he has done the math.

Suddenly he is not the victim anymore. I am.

"Train 12914 Tapovan express arriving on platform number 4"

As the announcement for the incoming train reaches fever pitch, so does his self-mumbling. To his credit, he never
asks explicitly.

"I wish I could stay another day and scour some charity, maybe...but I have to get back. He is alone there"

"How long will it take you to reach? “I ask, changing topics.

"13 hours sir"

I find myself touching the inner corners of my back pocket where bills of 500 are rolled up. India after all its so-
called progress is still a cash-based society. Carrying decent amounts of cash is always a good idea.

I slide it almost out and then back in. I pull it back out this time ripping off a 500 rupee note from the pack and
sliding the rest back in. I slip it back in.

I look at his face trying to decipher some element of deceit, trying to use my skills of reading people. All I see is a
dark pockmarked face, those old white clothes, and that triangular white cap

And of course, those freaking slits.

My logical brain has kicked in a long time ago. He has made a reservation. Even when subsided for people with
disabilities, it's still an expense. Not eating his food immediately. Maybe he is storing it for later. It's a long ride
after all.

The train punches into the station as the clamor around us suddenly reaches a feverish pitch. People are tense and
ready. Ready to jump in first. To corner the seats, get settled. I don't blame them.

As the train halts, I slowly push him ahead covering him from both sides with my arms pushing people outwards so
he can climb in before someone runs him over from behind or from the sides.

"Third row on the left". I say as I give him a final jolt inward and upward and let the crowd from behind carry him
in as I remove myself from between him and the eager travelers behind.
I stand by the window as I see him come back and settle into his seat. He folds his stick and tentatively looks
outside.

He is searching for something.

He is looking for the sucker.

"I am here...”, I find myself whispering to him, the metal bars of the windowsill separating us.

The loud whistle pierces the air as the train starts to slowly move.

I look at him for a second. His fingers are clutching the metal bars of the windowsill separating us, the fingers
reaching outwards. Moving.

I suddenly reach in my pocket, pull out the entire pack of the multicolored currency notes of all denomination, the
gray 10s, the blue 50s, the dark-hued 100s, and of course the purple 500s as I roll them all up into a discreet looking
pack. I pull his hand out, thrust the pack, and fold his palms tightly lest he drops it on the track.

He doesn't.

Instead, he smiles. It's not the smile of delight or the sudden encounter of good fortune.

It's a smile of knowledge.

He knows.

And in that instant, I realize it too...

The train moves and I stand there watching the white cap move away as someone from the crowd pulls me behind.
The train has picked up speed and there is some well-wisher behind me.

Four hours later as the train moves into Pune Central station, I walk out into the bright sunshine, the incident already
a distant memory.

As I hail a rickshaw to take me to my brother-in-law's place, I habitually touch the jeans pocket for the familiar
crunch of paper.

There is none.

"Where to?". The rickshaw has stopped, and the driver is already anticipating my entry into his vehicle.

“Sorry. Nowhere", I say as he looks pissed.

I don't wait for an answer. Instead, I dial.

"Hey! The train is running around an hour late". I am hoping he is not savvy enough to look it up online and call me
out on it.

"No worries. Let me know when you are close”.

Turning around I cross the street and start to walk.

It's going to be a bit of a walk home.

Perfection (11.21.2002)

I don’t remember the last time I slept through the night. My sleep is restless and fragmented, and I sometimes used
to wake up punching the air.

The dreams or should I call them the nightmares. They felt so real.

I don’t toss and turn anymore.

And when I do, she pulls me in closer and holds me close – Tightly. Like an infant snugly wrapped in a blanket. I
don’t move anymore, and I sleep peacefully.

Those nightmares have slowly faded away. I don’t see those hanging feet anymore or the body floating in the dam or
the face spewing foam.

I don’t jerk up awake ready to beat up someone. To defend when there is nothing to defend.

Instead, I wake up with her next to me smiling.

I am just starting to get used to this.

Her pajamas are wrinkled, her eyes are groggy, she needs to find her glasses and she will gladly push anyone out of
her way because this is the untouchable, sacred time when she has her tea.

As she sits there on the table drinking her tea with that usual round biscuit dropping crumbs all around her, the
sunlight from the window falls on her face.

I am standing there next to the stove.

“She is beautiful...” I think, lost in wonder.

It’s something there.

“She looks so beautiful”. I keep repeating like a moron.

There’s something that gives this impression that someone is perfect.

Perfection is not within the realm of possibility for humans –

Not in the people that we have affection for, not in the relationships we build,

Not in the things that we do.

That's why there exist these beer goggles, this thing, we call –

Love.
First Snow (04.12.2000)

It’s Sunday and the entire town of Ann Arbor is covered in a shroud of laziness. There are very few people on the
road, even fewer than what I see on a normal working day. The trip from my rented apartment to the GDI office is
around 4 miles. Not a terrible distance to cover.

I want to get there so I can study for my upcoming interview with prospective clients. The sun’s shining and the
slightly cold air is perfect for a walk. I have a half sleeve shirt on and just don’t realize that I am an oddity walking
down that road with people covered in jackets and gloves.

It’s almost 4.30 PM and the couple of people that have shown up for work are about to leave. They ask if I need a
ride and I am too shy to inconvenience them. I tell them I would be working for a while and a couple of friends
would be picking me up. My friends are my two legs and they usually can carry my distances.

The sun is almost setting as I get out of the office and start to walk back. Small white flakes are floating in the air
and it’s starting to get cold.

I walk as fast as my legs would carry me as the snow slowly starts to pour at a steady clip. My hands with the half-
sleeved shirt on are numb from the frost and the formal leather shoes I have are no match for the Michigan winter.
I am shivering as I walk down quickly, barely having covered half of a distance looking around to see if I can spot a
car, a house, or a human being. I close my eyes and think about the sweltering heat of the Indian sun, a trick taught
to me by an old friend back home.

It does not work.

I look at a signpost that shows the time and temperature from the local bank. It’s 23 degrees and falling.

The apartments start to show up in the distance and I pick up the pace. I have never experienced cold or as a matter
of fact, the brutality of the North American winter. This is my first experience, and it has left me numb and shaking
even though I am trying to be man enough to wade through it.

It’s almost been a solid hour of brisk walk and I am home as I ring the buzzer hoping to get in and crawl to bed.

There is no answer. They have all gone shopping at Costco. There are no people outside the apartments.

At 6.30, an hour after I reached the apartment, the car pulls up and my roomies pile out. They see me knocked out
right close to the door.

The thermal heating from the middle insulation of the apartment has done its job tosave my frozen Indian behind. I
wake up in the apartment covered in blankets and the heat turned on full blast.

My roommates are horrified by my condition and think of calling 911. Mustering all the remaining consciousness, I
shake my head in refusal. Even in this condition, I know that calling 911 entails spending some money, money that I
did not have or could not afford to splurge. Whatever that amount is, it’s more than enough to compensate for my
condition. It takes a day to feel normal again, but I bounce back.

A good thing did come out of this incident. Now I end up donating winter coats off my back to random homeless
people,

Even at the cost of incurring my woman’s wrath…

Wild Things (09.22.2018)

I have a coworker who is slightly erratic, feared by some, and mostly kept at a hands distance by everyone.
He is a smart chap, decent at what he does, and highly opinionated because of his intellectual power as most smart
people do at times.

He has a weapons-drawn attitude and tends to push back hard and openly to any individual who disagrees with his
opinions.

This happens especially in group settings where he disagrees so vigorously and so viscerally that people at times just
shrink back.

It ends up building resentment to a point where most people just think he is a jerk.

His professional attitude has now congealed into a personal opinion about him with people.

I happen to be in one of those meetings and he does the same thing with me. I don’t relish it, but I try not to push
back, just lightly deflect and the topic of discussion ends. Group confrontations never end well, and I have visited
this circus before, many times with different clowns.

My manager who is also on the same call is incensed. He feels like we should push back harder as it reflects badly
on the team. He has a completely valid point.
Knowing we will be in many more such interactions together, I decide to talk to this coworker. I am slightly mad at
him and that’s increased after the conversation with my manager. I now almost hate him at this moment and decide
it’s time to do something about it.

I call him up to ask if he is free and that I wanted to talk. The exaggerated mark of respect is meant to disarm him. I
plan to do some damage. We agree to meet up in the afternoon when I am in his location.

My meetings go on longer than expected. By the time I walk to his desk, it's already late.

As I stop by another coworker’s desk some feet away before meeting him, I am still slightly apprehensive. His desk
is at an angle where I am on his side and he can't see me, yet.

As I talk to the guy, I see him on his desk looking tired and drawn. He is holding his head in his palms pulling back
his hair with the elbows on the desk, muttering to himself. He slightly opens his drawer, peers, in, and closes it.

He is surrounded by cubicle walls from behind, nobody is looking at him from the front, so he takes it as a safe
space.

I watch him from afar and it's obvious he is in a slight state of despair. My anger I have been holding all noon
suddenly finds a slight release.

As I walk down to him, he closes his desk, looks up, and smiles.

"Oh Hey Z. What's up?” he asks.

We start with some light conversation. Nothing specific. Weather, kids, and family.

I have an angry script playing on a loop in my mind. Instead, I find myself asking and talking about our family,
comparing notes on our commutes and childhood days, almost genuinely.

We end up going from his desk to the kitchen having coffee and back at his desk. We talk like long-lost friends.

My entire agenda is kept to the side. I enjoy a good conversation for an hour instead.

It's getting dark outside and I need to get going. The people around his desk are long gone.

The last commuter bus home is in 15 minutes.

As I start to wind down the conversation, he turns towards me, opens his desk slightly, and without any preamble
shows me a picture of someone he deeply cares about and how she has been running sick for months.

The animosity that I had is now just plain concern. I sit down back again.

We talk about a similar experience I went through years ago, another that I am going through, and I can see the
agony on his face clearly as the mask finally unravels.

"Z, am I doing ok up here?” he asks, suddenly looking around.

I understand what he means and want to tell him he has done an amazing job so far and that people love him for his
work.

Instead, I find myself giving him a more honest answer.

I tell him that he is asking my opinion on something he already knows.

As he hears this, his entire being just deflates. The validation of what he has suspected for a long, but finally is out
in the open, hits him hard.

We all want to be liked and well regarded. Grizzly bears are no exception.

A deep well of empathy springs up within me. Instead of shaking hands, I spread my arms out.
He hesitates, then breaks out in a big grin and we share an awkward man hug. For a second, we are just two old
friends running into each other.

We part and I walk back to the bus station. The last commuter has long gone. I end up sitting at the empty bus stand
for a couple of hours before the next long route bus comes in. Dozing all the way through, I reach home at 9.00 PM.
It’s been a long day.

As I end up in bed that night, I think of this interaction. I could have easily pushed him off the edge knowing where
he was standing already, for what? Satiating my incessant need for approval?

Will he change completely from here on?

I doubt that.

Someday I hope we will work together as one team, but I am clear-eyed about when or if it will ever happen.

Bears will still gnaw at tree barks. They will still growl often. They might even tear apart limbs from time to time if
you get too close.

But having come face to face with one in its natural habitat, I come away with something better.

I went into the dark forest seeking to slay an enemy.

Instead, I come out on the bright side learning more about another even more complicated adversary -

Myself.
Iranian Cafe (07.27.1993)

The Iranian has its set rhythms. It opens at six-thirty for people wanting their first cup of tea. Then the taxi drivers
come in for their breakfast of “doll,” which is the Parsi way of saying dal, eaten with pav bread.

“The afternoon is colorless,” as Rustom puts it.

In the evening, people come for their beer. There is a huge cloth market nearby, and the cloth traders come in around
seven. They talk mostly among themselves and live in the suburbs; they have a couple of beers here because they
can’t drink at home. At ten o’clock, Rustom pulls down the shutters.

“For a bar, we shut far too early,” he says.

Most of the customers are of a certain age. In the mornings, from six onward, the tables are taken by the longtime
regulars, mostly Parsis and Catholics. One group of four or five old Parsi men has a favorite table at the Iranian.
They get very impatient if they have to sit anywhere else. If just one person is occupying that table, they will sit at
the table next to or across from it and stare at him silently. Or they will stand around it and crowd the usurper.

“It’s a fetish,” says Rustom.

Once lodged at their table, they will discuss issues of the day with vehemence. But the first thing they turn to is the
Deaths column in the Jam-e-Jamshed, the community organ, the chronicler of the steady diminishment of their
community.
Another old Parsi gent who was once an owner of a large factory would come every afternoon at the local bakery
shot at three o’clock. As soon as the waiters saw him sit down, they would put three cups of tea in front of him.

He wanted, for his reasons, all three cups of tea simultaneously, with three pieces of Brun Maska, a hard bread
coated with salted butter. The Brun Maska, he would dunk in just one of the cups. As soon as he got there, he always
made it a point to put a 50-paise coin on the table, for the tip.

Most of the Iranian clients, who are more affluent than he is, do not tip. But this gentleman had been cheated out of
his house by his sons; all day long he sat in the fire temple down the road and lived on the alms the devout gave him.

So, observes Rustom, this man dependent on alms knew the value of both giving and receiving. He had two shirts,
wearing one while he washed the other daily and ironed with care by putting it under his thin mattress overnight,
without fail.

It was faded and threadbare, a couple sizes too big for him either donated by someone or signifying the healthy days
he had once lived, yet he had a regal air about him.

An air of someone who had run things for a living, someone who had employed people, someone who was used to
giving orders or money. Someone who had handed out money and yet in his old age here he was, forced to extend
his hands to others. People who did not know who he was or had been, people who shunned him as crazy, eccentric.
You could almost see the disgust in his eyes. Not directed at anyone, except himself.

One who couldn’t live anymore in indignity yet couldn’t die either. Life has a way of extracting its pound of flesh.
Not just from the living but also from those in that twilight zone, lingering. Neither here, but not yet crossed over.

As I put a hand on his shoulder, he turns back to look at me beyond those thick bottled glasses. I have bought a shirt
for him from the street vendors outside, estimating his size.

As I hand it over to him, he takes a look at it and gives it back to me, looking up disdainfully.

“What for….?” he says.

Bhenchod (04.21.2000)

I existed in Ann Arbor, but I lived in India, taking little memory trains. The fields at dusk. Birds flying home
overhead, your car stopping by the side of the road and you getting out. Noticing minute things again: the
complexity of the gnarled peepal tree by the roadside, the ants making their way around it.

You go to take a leak in the bushes and lift your head and see. It is warm and close and humid; you are protected
once again. There are no people to be seen, not in the fields, not around the one but you can see in the distance.

Dinner is waiting in the city, at the house of your aunt, but you want to stop right here, walk across the fields by
yourself, walk into the peasant’s hut, ask for some water, see if you can stay in this village for a few days.

A couple of flies have sprung up and are buzzing around your head; you are trying to piss and wave them away at
the same time, ruining your shoes.

“Bhenchod,” you say.

I missed saying “Bhenchod” to people who understood it.

It does not mean “sister f***er.”

That is too literal, too crude.

It is, rather, punctuation, or emphasis, as innocuous a word as “shit” or “damn.”

The different areas of India can be identified by the way each pronounces this word—from the Punjabi “bhaanchod”
to the thin Bambaiya “pinchud” to the Gujarati “bhenchow” to the Bhopali elaboration “bhen-ka-lowda.”

Parsis use it all the time, grandmothers, five-year-old’s, casually and without any discernible purpose except as
filler:

“Here, Bhenchod, get me a glass of water.” “Arre, I went to the Bhenchod bank today.”

My mom used to chide my dad on not using the bad word.

“Bhenchod…who is using the word?”, he would say and my mom in an attempt to be stern to set a good example for
us would burst out laughing and so would we.

As a boy, I would try consciously not to swear all day on the day of my birthday. I would take vows with the Hindu
kids:

We will not use the B-word or the M-word.

In my first Michigan winter, wearing a foam jacket my parents had bought in Bombay that dispersed my body heat
out to the atmosphere instead of preserving it, sucking in the freezing winds during my four-mile walk to work and
drawing them to my body, I found I could generate warmth by screaming out this word.

Walking into the wind and the snowdrifts, my head down, I would roar,

“Bhenchod! Bheyyyyyn-chod!”

The walk to GDI, my place of work led through the quiet Newbury street residential neighborhoods, and the good
Irish, Italian, and Polish senior citizens of the great city of Ann Arbor who happened to be home in the daytime must
have heard this word on very cold days…

“Bhenchod! Bheyyyyyn-chod!”

Screamed out loudly by a brown Indian guy - dressed completely inappropriately for the weather.
The House (03.29.1987)

I come running home from school at 1.00. The house smells of sandalwood and spices
"Grandma, what's for lunch today?”, I ask slightly breathlessly running up the stairs.

"Dhansak and veg cutlets", she says as she puts the newspaper on her side.

Her eyes search for a known reaction.

"Awesome!!!!” I squeal in pure pleasure. My day is made. My younger sister isn’t far behind.

I put my shoes in their corner, the bag in its place and get out of that stifling school uniform, and wash my grime-
covered face. It's time to eat.

I go to the kitchen and under the small old single burner gas stove is a plate covered with the most delicious food on
earth - Brown caramelized rice topped with spicy daal. A single veg cutlet sits in the corner of the plate. Onion salad
and a small slice of lime on the side.

I come and stand in front of her as she is laying down on the bed reading the paper. She knows what I want. We split
the paper into two. I get the comics section; she takes the news.

Sitting on the balcony, I spread the newspaper and read as I devour that spicy Dhansak tamed with sliced onion
salad reading Phantom or Mutt & Jeff. Eating ever so slowly...., prolonging the pleasure.
I leave the veg cutlet for the last. Punching a small hole, filling it with lime juice from a single slice of lime she
always leaves for me, and adding a slice of onion.

Nothing on earth has ever tasted so good.

"Grandma, can I sleep here for a bit?"

I ask her as she is weaving a kasti later in the evening, a traditional Parsi sacred thread. It's hard work with little pay,
but she smiles and pats the space next to her on the small mattress.

I lie down with my head on her lap, face upwards - always upwards.

She puts down the instruments and slowly runs her fingers in my forehead, ever so softly.

All the agitation drains out of me, like a drainpipe funneling water away.

I close my eyes and feel those fingers on my head, and I am swept away. Swept away somewhere far where there is
no hurt, just a gentle wave of warmth enveloping me.

I remember this well because it was a day before she passed away.

I don’t go to that house anymore.

I know I need to go to Andheri.

I need to go to that house and have that Dhansak and sit on the balcony overlooking the other apartments.

Maybe dig up an old newspaper from somewhere.

I haven’t done so because I am so very afraid - I will not find her there.
Renunciation (08.08.2009)

“W hat does it feel like to take a human life?” I had once asked a guy who had committed not one, but two
murders. This was a time when I was in college and knew him because his friends described it in intricate detail.

He shrugged.

Years later, when a friend calls me one day and tells me about a family in the diamond market that is about to
renounce the world—take Diksha—I put aside everything else and go to meet them.

They are the other extreme - they are Jains. They are becoming monks in a religion that for 1,500 years has been
built on the extreme abjuration of violence.

They are preparing to enter an order that has a different conception of life and its value, where they will stay indoors
all four months of the rainy season because if they inadvertently step into a puddle of water, they will be taking life
—not only killing minute water organisms but also killing worms.

From men who sleep peacefully after taking human life, I want to go to a family that thinks it sinful to end the life of
a puddle of water.

I grew up with the Sardars and Jains. Many of my best friends in India and America are Jains.

At lower Parel, in Bombay, we lived close to a Jain temple; every day I saw monks sitting in the lobby of our
building working on each other’s hair. I did not know what they were doing; it looked like they were picking lice.

Later I learned that it was how they kept their hair short, by pulling it out by the roots. Some days they sang hymns
about renunciation set to Hindi film tunes.

On a particular day, the Jains paid the men with birdcages sitting outside the temple to release the birds; every soul
they freed aided in the account book of their salvation. The small birds flew out and settled on the rooftops of the
city, there to be devoured by crows, kites, and eagles. And the bird sellers went back to the forests and trapped more
birds to bring next year to the city.

Downstairs, as I get into a taxi, I look around the street landscape of the so-called sinners that night. On the ground
floor of their building is a Fiat showroom; the opposite is a bank, urging its loan money upon the public; and next to
it is a bar, the Gold Coins.

The murderer who I met years ago now lives only a short walk away.

Some months after the Diksha ceremony, I go to see how Dayabhai is doing in his life as a
monk.

He and the two boys are spending the monsoons in Vasai, in northern Bombay... The Jain temple and its attendant
institutions are in a quiet quarter of the town, with old painted wooden houses all around. Dayabhai says to me.
Then his body would have been better able to stand the demands he is putting on it.

As it is, he sometimes feels weak and can’t stretch his body as much as he’d like to.

“I wish I had taken Diksha thirty years ago,” he says again, in the presence of the wavering boy.
I ask him about the process. Dayabhai had defined moksha for me:

“In the bliss of moksha, there is no desire.” It is a simple straightforward definition: salvation is an absence of
desire.

There was no competition in the village, he says. A potter would make only enough pots and cups as could be
bought by the villagers, and he would barter them with the farmers for food. There would only need to be one potter,
and he would work on a hand-powered wheel. But now, with electricity powering up his wheel, he can make many
more pots than the village needs.

“What is he to do with all these pots?”

“He has to go elsewhere to try to sell them, and that creates competition.

It is the same with diamonds. Electric cutting machines have made possible the cutting of diamonds on a mass scale.
A diamond doesn’t degrade; it doesn’t get old with use.

So with more and more diamonds being cut, people have to use more and more of them. What do you do after you
have rings on all ten of your fingers?” Technology leads to surplus production, which leads to competition, to the
death of the village and its barter economy, and consumption for its own sake. “

It is a Jain version of Marxism.

I talk to Dayabhai for a bit and I look at the expressions on his face.

He seems to be really at peace, a completely different person, and what was that joy I saw on his face, that frequent
smile?

His children I am less sure about. He had a huge loss once in his business. Was that the real reason he quit the
world? What did he get tired of? Did he quarrel with his wife?

“My past was very bad,” Dayabhai said to me. “All of my family knew this.”
Dayabhai admitted that his head had been full of worries for the seven years before he took Diksha, worries about
money, and worries about his family. He had shown me his two red vessels, made out of a gourd that he now uses
for a vessel.

“I eat, I shit. I don’t worry about whether the servant will come today to wash the dishes. There is no tension. I don’t
worry about what to do tomorrow.”

His mind is completely free to concentrate on moksha. Whether his family survives or not, whether his business
thrives or not, is no longer an issue.

For a long time afterward, in my life in the cities, I think of Dayabhai, of the utter final simplicity of his life.

In Boston, I am beset with financial worry. How will I educate my children? Will I be able to buy a home?

Starting the downward arc of my life, I feel poorer every day compared to my friends who went to school with me,
who are making money in technology and on the stock market, and who are buying up apartments and cars and
raising their prices beyond my reach. I am earning more than I ever have before – more than six figures, and I am
also feeling poorer than ever before.

Each time it feels like I almost have it within reach at last—financial security (if not wealth), a working family, a
career—it slips out of my grasp like the frogs in the pond of Versova Welfare Public School. We would catch these
frogs with our hands and clutch them so tight it seemed impossible or miraculous when they jumped out of our fists.

Dayabhai has just bypassed all this.

He has leaped over his worries, outdistancing them, outfoxing them.

In response to the possibility of a loss in his business, his answer is: I have nothing, so I can lose nothing. When
faced with losing his loved ones through death or illness, his attitude is: They mean nothing to me, so their illness or
death doesn’t affect me.

Before anything can be taken from him, he has given it away from himself. And I continue on my way, always
accumulating the things I will eventually lose and always anxious either about not having enough of them or, when I
have them, about losing them. Anxious, too, about death.

The greatest violence is your death—that is, if you fight it.

Dayabhai has even triumphed over death. He has divested himself of everything—family, possessions, pleasure—
that is death’s due.

All that remains is his body, to which he has renounced title in advance and treats it as a borrowed, soiled shirt.

He can’t wait to take it off.

Dayabhai has beat death to the end.

He has resigned before he could be dismissed.

Neon Signs (08.19.2019)

Deep within my body, the past is still alive. Everything that has ever happened keeps coming back in different
shapes and forms.

I might be meditating, and then, suddenly, instead of sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor in Portsmouth, I am
transported to the Dartmouth Hitchcock's hospital room, watching my daughter as they wheel her out on a gurney,
her mouth slightly open, her eyes closed, still in throes of the anesthetic stupor.

While lying still in the Surya namaskar pose, my forehead pressed to the floor, suddenly I am in Bombay at age 18
walking home and seeing my father standing outside our apartment chawl wearing a prayer cap looking out for me.
His eyes meet mine as I grow closer, and I know that my grandmother is gone.

I go attend 10-day meditation retreats trying to get away from it all. I almost succeed.
I close my eyes and am absorbed deep in meditation and suddenly I see her hanging from the rope and I am standing
by the door, my legs cemented to the ground. I flinch in terror and open my eyes to see the one sitting nearby
looking at me disapprovingly.

It’s a seductive idea, closure—but maybe, just maybe it’s a myth. The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she
wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: "Pain carves a deeper memory", she had said.

The quieter and more internal I become, the more these stories unspool. Prayer, meditation, yoga seems to unleash
the past, rather than bury it.

What good does all this searching do, when so much of what I find is hard to take?

Why would anyone sign up for this?

Especially when there are so many ways around it?

Why does it give me so many words? So many words that tell me nothing, yet make me recount everything?

Sometimes I want to run away from it all: Have a few drinks, take a sleeping pill, and buy those overpriced clothes
from the mall. Anything to sedate me—to mute the endless loop of stories. And sometimes I give in, but I end up
doing none of those.
I just walk, hours and hours or clean the house, every single inch with too much precision – In complete silence. The
clarity is too painful, and I want to forget. My kind woman, knowing just a shade of that turmoil, keeps to herself.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. Not in the long run. There is no permanent forgetting.

Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, and when they come back,
they are circled in neon.

Having absorbed the darkness of being in the closet for so long, those stories seem to blaze with fierce intensity.

Take a look at me, they say. Re-live me again, they implore.

They are all the more alive and agitated for having been confined, hidden.
Children (02.19.2006)

In India, people are friendly to my kids. The receptionist at the airport lounge follows us about, makes us coffee,
brings out cookies for the kids. She engages Becky in conversation; they discuss the toys each of them possesses.

A businessman looks up from his morning paper and speaks to Jenny in Hindi. In India, my nieces approach
strangers with confidence; they rest their hands on our guests’ knees, play with the women’s sarees.

They will have to learn to put more distance between themselves and other people when we take them to America.
They must learn that people don’t like to be touched and like their spaces.

Why, it’s happened right here, in the first-world parts of Bombay…? A friend who has lived in America and
returned is irritated by four-year-old Jenny because she touches things in his apartment—the music system, the glass
cabinet—and climbs on his table.

Then, in the taxi going home, the driver turns around and says, without preamble, “Children live under the shade of
God. What adults wouldn’t be able to tolerate, if they get hurt, doesn’t affect little children.”

The rich have the theater, parties, and foreign trips. The poor have their children; they are entertained by them; they
are sustained by them.

When they come home off the Virar local late at night just close to 11.00 PM, the children are awake, later than they
really should be—they will have trouble getting up for school in the morning—but the fathers want it.

They want to see their children for the half-hour that tells them what they’ve been working for.
Nurses, whores, clerks, drain cleaners, and struggling film actors alike live for the moment when they go home and
their little girl comes running up to them, or wakes from a deep sleep and scolds them for not coming home sooner.

On holidays, they sit in the one room, watching their children play with the neighbors’ children, commenting on the
habits and preferences, and eccentricities of each, following their feuds like bards in medieval Italian courts.

In the evening they might take the children, their own and the neighbors’, to a movie, sneak in the over-five-year-old
and put the child on her father’s lap, eat the homemade snacks prepared by the women, and watch Jackie Chan fight
and Amitabh Bachchan dance, those creatures of light, till the child, against her will, gradually subsides, and her
head drops, and the air-conditioning isn’t working, and the girl is six years old, but on her father’s lap she isn’t
heavy; she has very little weight, hardly any weight at all.

Life after all is a series of contradictions. The less you have the more you cherish what you get incrementally. The
more we have, the more we protect.

As a poor laborer once said to me – “Saab, we sleep soundly. We don’t have much to fight for or keep safe”.

I didn’t believe him until years later, I had collected things, stayed awake plotting on how to protect and to
accumulate.
Crazy (04.22.1998)

It’s a normal Monday evening in Bombay. I have just wrapped up an eight-hour shift at a job that barely pays me a
decent wage, a job that I dislike but continue to do because there is nothing else to do. I am walking home half the
distance to save some bus money when I see a man bent down on the road looking for something.

Nobody is paying him a second glance. Everyone is in a rush to reach back home.

I keep walking, but something stops me. I turn back and stand under a tree shade next to a tea stall and watch him.
He is peering intently into a pile of fresh dung, digging into it looking for something. He picks out an undigested
grain from that pile and rubs it against his tattered shirt and eats it up.

“Saab he is crazy”, Looking at me staring at him, the tea vendor chimes in.

I almost ignore him. I have never seen anything like this before even for someone crazy enough to do it.

I want to move on, go back home, put this out of my mind, but I am rooted to the spot. I just cannot walk away.

“Can you get me three sandwiches?”, I ask the vendor as I take out a 100 rupee note from my pocket. It’s all that has
been left and there are still 10 more days to go before the next salary comes in.

But it’s almost as if I don’t care at this time.

I take the sandwiches and walk hesitantly towards the man ready to jump back or hit out if he acts unpredictably. He
is too busy sorting grains to even lookup. I observe him from this close distance.
He would be around 50, built thin from years of poverty, his long hair matted from not being washed or cut for a
while. He has that look of a fierce crazy, the types who even the strongest studiously avoid, knowing that they can
be beaten, but they cannot be put down.

I hold the sandwiches close to his face level and he suddenly looks up. His eyes are brown, and his long beard shows
a lot of white, prematurely grayed by years of toil. He extends his course, dung stained hands, and takes the parcel
unsure of what it holds, but he has an inkling.

He expectantly tears open the thread and picks up a sandwich still looking fearfully at me.

He probably has been beaten by men before, men who do not need for him or his existence.

The tea vendor, the cops, or even random bored teens walking down the road looking for amusement. I watch as his
facial expression suddenly changes. He does not say a word but looks at me with eyes that are pleading. I move
away.

Maybe I want to give him some space.

Maybe I want to give myself some space from this intense suffering.

Heading back to the tree, I still watch instead of walking away. I am hoping he is not crazy enough to throw the food
away. He doesn’t. He just looks at the food and stares at it some more and then looks around, fearful, as if this is just
some trick to lure him into something he doesn’t want to.

Fearful, that out of the shadows, someone will jump out, fearful for the first time that something will be taken away
from him. But then something miraculous happens. He starts to eat and for the first time, I notice a smile. Not the
smile of a crazy man but a smile, nevertheless. He starts to smile, still eating and I then see that he has tears
streaming down his face.

He is crying, but eating, and crying some more, but he continues to eat as fast as he can.

He eats up the sandwiches and scrapes the paper for anything that remains, then looks around. He is probably
looking for water because he moves to the nearby drain and scoops up some extremely dirty water and drinks it.
There is a big container of water at the nearby stall but even in his crazed state, he knows that he cannot drink that
without buying something.

I pause, then take out a 10 and buy an iced bottle of water and take it to him. This time I do not hesitate, and he
looks up and recognizes me. I expect him to take up the bottle, but instead, he starts to shake and cry holding his
head by my feet.

I recoil back in shame and horror and he moves back a bit. I can see on his face, just a single emotion – Joyful relief.

“Saab, I am not crazy Saab. I am just hungry. They have beat me, I haven’t eaten for 7 days now…” he rambles
incoherently, some of it making sense. Some don't.

I understand enough and I don’t know what to do next. Should I give him more money, should I get him to have a
bath somewhere? It’s those times when I wish I had more money, enough to spend on myself, enough to give out.
Instead, I mumble something and start to walk away.

My mind is raging in anger, shame, and repentance all at the same time.

Anger at my impotence for not being able to do anything more.

Shame for not spending enough time to see if I could do anything more, repentant for all those times when I have
thrown food away, perfectly good food just because I didn’t feel like eating it.
I would never do this again - ever in my life.

Every grain of food will be scrapped up,

The ladle will be licked clean,

The biscuit that has fallen on the ground will no longer be contaminated,

A leftover pack of month-old peanuts will still be what it is –

Food for the body.

Nourishment for the soul.

The Trip (11.04.2009)

“ This is the Everest of psychedelics,” she says, portentously, putting a steadying hand on my forearm.
Karen is in her early forties, an ex-professor at the John Hopkins Institute. In these hours sitting next to her, I have
vaguely known she is married with three kids and is into Eastern religion but had no idea she is a psychonaut, too.

We are traveling together on a 16-hour flight on our way from LAX to Melbourne deep into the night.

Stories have always been my currency and it seems she can barter well in those. I am fascinated by her work with
psychedelics and neither of us wants to go to sleep before the dinner rolls in, which should be anytime now.

We are talking about the psychedelic called Toad or 5-MeO-DMT as they call in scientific circles. It is the first time
I have ever heard of it and I am inherently curious to know more.

In its natural form, it’s a secretion from the small brown toads only found in South America.
“They’re not very hard to catch. They freeze in the beam of light so you can just grab them,” she tells me.
The toads, which are small, sand-colored, and roughly the size of a man’s hand, have a large gland on each side of
their necks, and smaller ones on their legs.

“You gently squeeze the gland while holding a mirror in front of it to catch the spray.” The toad is none the worse
for being milked. Overnight, the venom dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals the color of brown dust.

In its natural state, the venom is toxic—a defense chemical sprayed by the toad when it feels threatened. But when
the crystals are volatilized, the toxins are gone, leaving behind the 5-MeO-DMT. You vaporize the crystals in a glass
pipe which the recipient inhales; before you’ve had a chance to exhale - you are gone.

“The toad comes on quickly, and at first it can be unbelievably intense.” I notice that Karen personifies the toad and
seldom calls it by its molecular name even though she is an academic.

“Some people remain perfectly still. Other people scream and flail, especially when the toad brings out traumas,
which it can do. A few people will vomit. And then after twenty or thirty minutes, the toad is all done, and it
leaves.”

As the flight hostess clears our table of leftover grilled salmon and chocolate cake in the business class, she settles
down in her seat, turns towards me pulling her blanket close to her chest, and describes her harrowing onset.

“I was shot out into an infinite realm of pure being. There were no figures in this world, no entities of any kind, just
pure beings. And it was huge; I didn’t know what infinity was before this. But it was a two-dimensional realm, not
three, and after the rush of liftoff, I found myself installed in this infinite space as a star. I remember thinking, if this
is death, I’m fine with it. It was . . . bliss. I had the feeling—no, the knowledge—that every single thing there is
made of love”, she says with her eyes closed, her palm on my wrist, steadying herself.

Frankly, it sounds more like new age blabber to me.

However, her face is serene, but she is not here with me at that moment.

“After what seems like an eternity but is probably only minutes, you start to reassemble and come back into your
body.”

“How can you be sure this was a genuine spiritual event and not just a drug experience?”, I ask her the question that
gnaws at me whenever someone recounts such a mystical experience.

“It’s an irrelevant question,” she replies coolly. “This was something being revealed to me.”

There it was: the noetic sense that the Buddhist monk Adzom Rinpoche had once described to me as a mark of the
mystical experience.

I am now mildly interested.

She looks at me with an expression that mixes an almost evangelical fervor about the “treasures” she had glimpsed
with a measure of pity for her still-hallucinogen-naive fellow passenger.

“I don’t blame you for being envious.”, she says with a laugh, studying my face.

I am not a believer in any artificial drugs, psychedelic or otherwise.

I am terrified of their habit-forming nature and have never had any inclination to partake, but the mystical angle of
this purely natural toxin is, well - mystifying.
The idea takes hold in me. It’s like being shown a door in a familiar room – the room of your consciousness, but
only you can cross that threshold.

I find myself telling her that someday when the time and place is right, I would like to try the toad – once in my
lifetime.

“You need to be prepared, my friend.” I hear laughter in her sound, but her voice is an octave lower.

Startled by her words, in the dim lights of the Qantas flight QF-94 somewhere over the cold Atlantic waters, I turn to
look at her face.

Turned on my side, her green eyes are searching, searing, looking for something in me deep within.

She is dead serious.

The Elevator Ride (06.23.2002)

My friends Avi, Suri, and I are riding up the elevator heading to work.

It's a 19-floor building in LA and the elevators consume a slice of our life riding them up and down.

It's a slow afternoon and we are just coming back from a midday stroll around the campus.

There is a never-ending discussion on software, politics, India, and of course, women - The most frequent topic of
discussion among three bored men.

We stand in the elevator and press 17. Just then a woman comes running towards the open doors. She is tall with
curls of blonde hair over her shoulders, stylishly dressed in a pencil skirt and cream-colored blouse. The heels are
long, and she hovers just slightly below us in height.

A waft of intoxicating perfume follows.

Lady luck could not have written this any better.

As most Indian guys of any age denomination do when confronted with a beautiful woman, we stare at our feet and
slyly eye her through the corner of our eyes. As she presses 13, the elevator suddenly goes completely silent.
We stand rooted to the spot pulling ourselves slightly straighter, looking ahead purposefully, stomachs tucked in.

And then there is a whiff.

Just a slight wave floating through the air at first. It the foulest smelling smell I have ever encountered.

It's a mixture of Sulphur, mustard, and all things bad marinated with a dead skunk left in a dark damp barn for a
year.

It smells like a rotten egg in an old smelly gym sock wrapped in a malodorous smelling baby diaper placed in a
trash dump placed in a third-world country.

I recoil in sheer disgust and I see the woman shifting on her feet ahead of me too.

I pity her. She must be dying of horror, trapped in between these three disgusting men fresh off the boat, uncouth,
unmannered, and lacking any decorum of civility.

I am dying of shame.

We have just tainted a beautiful woman's perception of how desirable Indian men could be, probably for multiple
generations. She will pass this information to her sisters, their daughters, and probably their granddaughters.

As the elevator dings on 13 and she steps out even without a backward glance, we look at each other angrily.

As soon as the door closes, we explode.

"You motherfucker!"

"What the f*** dude?"

"What's wrong with you people?"

The exclamations ring out in unison.

We stare at each other angrily in a three-way Texas standoff.

I am the first one to stand down.

"It wasn't me, man."

"Mine is always noisy and never this disgusting!!"

"Wasn't me either......"

We look at each other stupidly for a second and blink.

As the elevator dings 17, all three of us are blessed with new enlightenment.

Lady Flatula had graced us with her presence.

As much attractive as we are with our Neiman Marcus ensemble, Louis Vuitton shoes, enveloped in a cloud of
Chanel - Indian, American, and Asian.

Stripped down of those layers we are in the end what we all know we are, but refuse to acknowledge -

Walking bags of piss, shit and yes…,

Foul-smelling gas.
Children & Men (11.04.2011)

S
“ ometimes I still think it has blood on them”, he says looking ahead in the distance as we sit on his porch after his
Sunday morning mass.

An old weathered American leather wallet. A broken watch. A wedding ring. Some spare pennies. A ballpoint pen
chipped off and broken.

For 11-year-old Will, this was all that remained of his soft-spoken lawyer father … an assortment of 59-year-old
James’s meager belongings emptied onto the kitchen table.

‘It’s gruesome, I know, but I think they still had himself on them.’

And then there’s the music. Those haunting melodies that ring in his ears he says. Melodies that take him back
instantly in time to those dark places he has tried so hard to run out of.

On 12 September 1980, Will and his brother, Patrick, had just got home from school when there was an unexpected
knock at the door. There were two policemen, solemn-looking, hats removed, asking to speak with their mother.

‘You just think, what’s going on? What’s this about?’ asks Will.
‘Mom goes into another room with them. They leave, she comes back into the kitchen, sits down at the table, and –
I’ll never forget this – she has that clear plastic bag with my dad’s stuff in it.

“Will,” she tells us. “Your father’s dead. He’s killed himself. He jumped in front of a train. Here’s what he had on
him.”’

It was the only time his mother would ever speak openly of his father’s suicide.

‘She didn’t come out and say we’re not allowed to talk about your father,’ explains Will about his mother’s handling
of the situation.

‘But it was made clear that it was a taboo subject, and we were to build a wall around ourselves and forget about it.
It was horrendous because the support just wasn’t there … She went through and burned all the old photos. She just
wanted “it” gone.’

By age 13, Will would find himself battling those dark impulses himself. Identifying more with his quiet and
contemplative father than his matter-of-fact mother, for years he was secretly riven with guilt over his death. His
parents’ marriage had fallen apart two years before the suicide; in desperate straits, his dad had taken out a room at
the YMCA, 10 miles up the road.

‘I’d spoken to him a few days before he killed himself. I’d said to him – not understanding how bad off he was –
“Daddy, I want a bike for my birthday. Do you think you’d be able to?”

“That’s all I remember about that phone call. So, it’s a guilt issue. I think: God, did I push him over the edge,
pressuring him to get me a bloody bike?’

Will remembers the starkest of details from that terrible afternoon in his mother’s kitchen all those years ago. But
that was it. His parents had split up. He was down on his luck. He had asked a man who could barely afford a shave,
to buy him a bike.

‘Because that,’ I remind him, ‘is simply what 12-year-olds do.’

‘I never did feel any anger toward him,’ he replies plainly in response.

‘I’ve always had a sort of – oh god, maybe I’ve always been a sort of dowdy child myself, I don’t know – but I’ve
always had an understanding. I felt sorry for him. Just … sad.’

His capacity for empathy is severely constricted when in the throes of self-destructive thought.

Still, Will longs for that lost connection with his dad.
In his 40s, uncertainty eating away at him, he takes a bold leap by reaching out to the coroner’s office in Watford,
the town near San Simeon in which his father had ended his life.

‘I remembered that somebody had mentioned there’d been a note,’ he says.

‘Whether my mother had intercepted it and not let us have it or not, I don’t know.’

Months later when I meet him, I find out that the coroner still had a copy of his father’s suicide note, all those years
later.

His letter arrived much later than it was meant to, but Will and his siblings are lucky in at least now knowing their
dad’s final thoughts.

But that wasn’t the case for him probably.

Will slowly opens a crumpled double-lined paper from his wallet and passes it on to me. I am almost dreading
opening it, lest I cause any harm to that memoir.

Addressed to him, his brother Patrick, and their sister Jenna, it spoke of existential despair, of his love for his
children, of how he knew that this would undo them… and of music. On-bike, not a word:

“I know this will be painful and somewhat a surprise but, for obvious reasons, I will not be there to take care of you … It has
taken some careful thought before I knew I was not strong enough to see me through.”

“Please take solace from the knowledge that I loved, and love, you all as much as anyone could, and I know that you will think of
me often – I hope with some love – mostly just because we all love music and I hope that there will be many times when a tune
will remind you of me.”

I see Will sitting next to me on those steps in front of his house sobbing slightly on that bright Sunday morning and
suddenly I start to see him in a completely different light.

My friend. My crazy eccentric loveable friend. We have had so many long discussions on our way back from the
airport, those long discussions about life and death as he insists on dropping me back home, every single time.

The man that most people think of as a whack job, volatile, brilliant, but almost crazy.

The one that smashes the keyboard when things don’t go his way and the one who bangs the phone receiver on his
desk hard after a disagreeable call –

That man.

How easy it is to judge?

How hard it is to know the depths, the sources, the reasons, the causes, the rationales, the circumstances.

Of how we turn out to be who we are….

The Breath (08.21.2007)

You meditate at times, right? What does it feel like? - He asks with implicit curiosity.

I open my mouth to answer and I instead stare at a table behind his left shoulder.

I find myself repeating the word in my head so many times it loses its meaning and just sits there doing nothing.

What happens to me when I try to describe the feeling of oneness with the universe?

I find it hard to believe I ever used it to convey anything.

Similarly, after a session of sitting, a very familiar person can suddenly seem alien to me. Who is this man standing
in my kitchen? Do I even know him at all?

And my family members. What a completely arbitrary collection of strangers. Is it not somewhat of a coincidence
that we have ended up being related?

I stand up and walk around and stare for a long time at objects around my house.

Once valuable to me, precious, they are now debris, similar to the ones I walk right past at a garage sale.
I almost want to give it to someone else if they would just take them.

Reality sometimes feels like a dirty sticker that is peeling off at the edges and I cannot decide if I should try to fix it
back or peel it right off.

What if it doesn't stick nicely back on?

What if it doesn't come off cleanly?

My breath is the antidote.

It’s a small gesture of kindness towards myself,

It’s a long slow calming walk among tall trees with gigantic systems of roots that I am certain to exist but will never
see.
Toad (07.03.2010)

Driving down I-5S late in the evening from San-Diego to Tijuana is in itself an experience. The small red, blue, and
yellow paper flags hanging outside every house flutter in the wind as I drive down the now empty interstate. It’s the
fourth of July weekend and coming back from Melbourne, I have taken a very uncharacteristic detour before
heading back north to Boston.

Adriana’s call the other night sets things in motion.

“Karen had mentioned that you are genuinely interested in a spiritual experience and I am free this weekend if you
would like to stop over”.

As my circle of psychonauts from Toronto to Melbourne has expanded, I have learned that pretty much anyone who
I had met who’d had an encounter with the toad had been introduced to it by Adriana. The first time I met Adriana
was when our common friend had organized a small dinner for a group of friends outside Melbourne.

She was petite and fashionably dressed. Her shoulder-length black hair frames her face and makes her look slightly
more diminutive than she is. She looked less of a shaman and more like a working professional.

The night before my meeting with Adriana is, predictably, sleepless.

I am still vexing if I want to try this. I have a basic disgust towards anything even slightly addictive or sensory
stimulation that makes me lose control of my senses, which is why I never consume more than one small peg of
alcohol in any setting.

I fear as I certainly have for decades – What if having gone through it, I would never be the same again? Was this an
insane thing to do? On the plus side, I figure, whatever happened, it would all be over in half an hour. On the other
side, everything might be over in half an hour.
As I toss and turn that night in a small motel on the outskirts of Tijuana, away from the usual touristy destinations, I
have this completely random thought -

‘There are children to raise. And there is an infinite amount of time to be dead.’

As the sun comes up, I decide I would make my decision when I got there. Adriana, whom I’d made aware of my
trepidations, has offered to let me watch her work with someone else before it was my turn. This proves reassuring,
as she knows it would.

The guy before me, a supremely low-affect college student who had done the toad once before, takes a puff from
Adriana’s pipe, lay back on a mattress, and embarked on what appeared to be a placid thirty-minute nap, during
which he exhibited no signs of distress, let alone existential terror. After it was over, he seemed perfectly fine.

Okay then. Death or madness seemed much less likely. I could do this.

After positioning me on the mattress just so, Adriana has me sit up while she loads a premeasured capsule of the
crystals into a glass vial that she then screws onto the barrel of the pipe. She asks me to give thanks to the toad and
think about a good intention.

She then lights a butane flame underneath the small hookah and instructs me to draw on the pipe in short sips of air
as the white smoke swirled and then filled the glass.

“Then one big final draw that I want you to hold as long as you can.”

These are the last words I remember...

I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket.

All at once, I feel a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I manage, barely, to
squeeze out the words I had prepared, “Accept” and “Surrender.” These words became my salvation, but they seem
utterly pathetic, wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storms.

Terror seizes me—and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the
nuclear tests, the “I” is no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head
because it has exploded that too, expanding to become all that there was – a single point of infinity.

Whatever this is, it is not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to
have it. None of those things remain.

Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my “I.” Whatever allowed me to register this
experience, the post-ego awareness I’d first experienced is now consumed in the flames of terror too.

Every touchstone that tells me “I exist” is annihilated, and yet I remained conscious.

“Is this what death feels like? Could this be it?” There is this thought, although there is no longer a thinker
perceiving it.

Words are just words, complete failures in describing the truth of the experience. In reality, there are no flames, no
blast, no thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at synonyms and metaphors in the hope of forming some kind of
articulate and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind.

In that moment, there is no coherent thought, just a pure and terrifying sensation. Only afterward do I wonder if this
was what the mystics call the ultimate force —the blinding unendurable mystery before which we humans tremble
in awe, that some call - God.
Again, after the fact I kept returning to a single metaphor. It is at best insipid, but perhaps the only ones that allow
me to share this experience, to communicate it for my own record. This is the only one that sticks with me and
manages to describe in some semblance what the true journey felt like -

It is the image of being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I’m holding on with both hands, legs clenched around
it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down into a taut grimace, as the great
cylinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering
on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth’s grip, while the friction it generates as it
crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.

It is a little like that. Just completely shattering.

And then as suddenly the dissolution of everything into the nothingness has happened, it reverses course.

One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space
returned first, blessing my still-scattered brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewhere!

And then I slipped back into my familiar “I” like an old pair of slippers and soon after feel something I recognize as
my body begin to reassemble. The movie of reality now runs in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear
blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly
up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach.

The order of things is being restored, I notably included.

I am alive!

The descent into familiar reality is swifter than I expect. Almost disappointing.

The ecstasy – is more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured, less of a divine gift than
the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense of relief so vast and deep as to
be cosmic.

With the rediscovery of my body, I feel an inexplicable urge to lift my arms. Next comes an overwhelming wave of
gratitude. For what? For once again existing. Rather than being necessarily the case that I exist as I do naturally, this
now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolve never again to take for granted.

Suddenly for me, there seemed to be a great virtue in simply being. In contemplation rather than action. To savor
whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. If one always saw this, one would
never want to do anything else.

Even now, many months later, I still don’t know exactly what to make of that voyage I took down south. Its violent
narrative arc—that awful climax followed so swiftly by such a sweet aftertaste.

It lacked the beginning, middle, and end that we rely on to make sense of experience. Its mind-bending velocity
made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey.

A few days after my encounter with the toad when I am safely transplanted back home in Boston, I accidentally
stumble on an old email from Adrianna that ends, uncannily, with this prose:

I hope whatever you’re doing,

you’re stopping now and then.
and…
not doing it at all.
I take a moment to savor those words which previously would have meant absolutely nothing to me at all, now
suddenly making complete sense in a new light.

My integration into the experience had been cursory, leaving me to puzzle out the toad’s teachings, such as they
were, on my own.

Was it as sort of a spiritual or mystical experience? Or was what taking place in my mind merely the reaction of
these strange chemicals or was it both? I simply did not know.

Karen’s words from our first meeting 35,000 miles above sea level echoed somewhere in the back of my head at that
very moment:

“It’s an irrelevant question. This was something being revealed to me.”, she had said.

What, if anything, had been revealed to me?

The Gatekeeper (08.01.2013)

Years later I am having coffee with some very well-to-do people in the 1900’s, a swanky bar in Taj Hotel in
Bombay on one of my trips back home.

These are people who are richer than the usual multi-millionaires. People who have cultivated dining to an art form
where the serving is segregated and courses are announced.

The people I see around who are seeking position or money in India often use this one hotel, this one citadel of
Empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of society.

The Taj was born out of a slight because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel.

When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshedji Tata was refused entrance into Watson’s Hotel in the nineteenth
century because he was a native, he swore revenge and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson’s in
every department.

It is less a hotel than a proving ground for the ego.

The Taj lobby and its adjoining toilets are where you test your self-worth.

Theoretically, anyone can come in out of the heat and sit in the plush lobby, on the ornate sofas, amid the billionaire
Arabs and the society ladies, or relieve themselves in the gleaming toilets.

But you need that inner confidence to project to the numerous gatekeepers, to the toilet attendants.

You need first to convince yourself that you belong there, in order to convince others that you do.
And then you realize that the most forbidding gatekeeper is not the one outside.

…. It’s the one within you.

Adjust (03.21.1997)

Bombay is a fast-paced, even hectic city, but it is not, in the end, a competitive city.
Anyone who has a “reservation” on an Indian train is familiar with this word: Adjust. You might be sitting there on
your seat, the prescribed three people along with it, and a fourth and a fifth person will loom over you and say,
“Psst. . .. Adjust.” You move over. You adjust.

It is a crowded city, used to living in crowds. In our building in Boston, people found it strange when Ana’s mother
came to live with us for six months in our one-bedroom apartment.

“Do you get along with your mother-in-law?” I can barely stand mine; the neighbor says with a mixture of disgust
and awe.

Nobody in Bombay asked us how many people were going to live with us in our apartment; it was taken for granted
that we would have relatives, friends, and friends of friends coming to stay with us, and how we would put them up
was our problem.

I recall a magazine advertisement for an Ambassador car, the sturdy workhorse of the Indian roads, which depicts
what I mean. The car, an unadorned version of a 1950s Morris Oxford, is trundling along a rain-drenched street. The
ad doesn’t devote the usual lascivious attention to leather seat covers, digital dashboards, electronic fuel injection, or
the trim lines of the car’s design.

The Ambassador is actively ugly but lovable in the way elephants are, with a jaunty visor and a wide grin. Instead,
there is a snatch of dialogue from within the car. Three people can be seen squashed together in the front bench seat.
A man crosses in front of the car, holding a briefcase over his head to ward off the downpour.

“Arre . . . isn’t that Joshi?”

“Yes. Let’s take him also.”

“But we are already packed?”

“Have a heart, we can always adjust.”

Car ads in most countries usually focus on the luxurious cocoon that awaits you, the driver, once you step inside. At
most, there might be space for the attractive woman you’ll pick up once you’re spotted driving the flash set of
wheels.

The Ambassador ad isn’t touting the virtues of space. It’s not saying, like a Volvo ad, that it has lots of spare room.
It’s saying that the kind of people likely to drive an Ambassador will always make more room. It is advocating a
reduction of personal physical space and an expansion of the collective space. In a crowded city, the citizens of
Bombay have no option but to adjust.

I am on the Virar fast train during the evening rush hour, possibly the most crowded of the locals. I am clutching the
strip at the top of the open door with both hands, my only other connection the front half of my feet. Most of my
body is hanging substantially outside the speeding train. There is a crush of passengers. I am afraid I may be pushed
out by their pressure, but I am reassured.

“Don’t worry, you will be 65 and you will still be here.” a reference to the safety of this mode of travel.

Someone intones, “The crowd is a little lesser today...”

Alex once drew for me on a piece of paper a diagram of the dance, the choreography of the commuter trains. The
Bombay Central contingent stands in the center of the compartment from Borivali to Churchgate. The people
surrounding them move clockwise around the BC contingent like this: first are the Jogeshwari batch, then Bandra,
then Dadar.

If you are new to the Bombay trains, when you get on and are planning to get off at, let’s say, Bandra, you must
ask, “Bandra? Bandra?”

All of a sudden, bodies will align, you will be directed to the precise spot where you must stand to be able to
disembark successfully at your station.

The platforms are on different sides of the train and there are no maps to indicate where the platforms will come up.
There are no doors, just two enormous openings on either side of the compartment.
 So, when the station arrives, you must be in a position to get off, well before the train has come to a complete stop,
because if you wait till it has stopped, you will be swept back inside by the people rushing in.

In the mornings, by the time the train that starts from Borivali, the first stop, is already full to the brim.

“To get a seat?” I ask.

Alex looks at me, wondering if I’m stupid. “No. To get in.”

This is because the train coming in to Borivali has started filling up from Malad, two stops ahead, with people
willing to loop back just to get a comfortable standing place.

It doesn’t help to travel in first class, which is only marginally less crowded during rush hours. Alex’s brother
Ramesh has a first-class season pass. But when the train is crowded, he’ll go for the second-class coaches.

“In second class they are more flexible. First-class, you’ll have some Nepean Sea Road-type guys. They won’t
move, they’ll stand where they are.”

I mention to Alex a statistic I’d read, about the “Dense crush load” of the trains being ten people per square yard.
He stretches out his arm, says, “One yard,” and makes a calculation.

“More,” he says.

“More. In peak time, if I lower my arm like this, I won’t be able to raise it.”

Many movements in the trains are involuntary. You just get carried along; if you’re light, you might not even have
to move your legs.

When I ask people how they can bear to travel in such conditions, they shrug. You get “habituated.” You get “used
to.”

The commuters travel in groups. Alex travels with a group of some fifteen people that take the same train from
stations farther down the line. When he gets on, they make space on their laps for him and have a potluck breakfast
together; each of them brings some delicacy from home—the Gujarati's bring their khaman, the southies get their
idli, the north Indians balance their aloo-poori—and they unwrap their contribution in the cramped space of the
compartment.

They pass the hour agreeably, telling jokes, playing cards, or singing, sometimes with castanets on their fingers.
Alex knows where the best singers are on each train. There is a group on the eighth-fifteen that sings nationalistic
and anti-Muslim songs very well.

Others specialize in bhajans (Religious songs), and call-and-response chanting. Thus, the journey is made bearable
for those who get a seat and diverting for those standing. When Alex worked for Kamal right at home in Mira Road,
he continued taking the train to Bombay Central once a week, just for the pleasure of breakfast with his train group.
 The trains are a hive of industry. Women sell underwear in the ladies’ compartment, huge abdomen-high lingerie,
passed around and inspected, the money passed back through many hands for those bought. Other women chop
vegetables for the family dinner they are going to cook immediately on reaching home.

The ads on the Bombay locals are the same as the ads in the New York subway, dealing with indescribably private
subjects: hemorrhoids, impotence, and foot odor.

In this safely anonymous mass, these ads can be perused; there is comfort in knowing that these afflictions of the
body are universal, shared by the flesh pressing all around.

They too need these pills and potions, and their minor home surgeries.
Closed Doors (09.16.2005)

The person across from you is hiding something..

Often hiding something is less about deceit and more about keeping things to oneself, for a garden variety of reasons

Sometimes it’s just about not wanting to share that with you yet and at other times it’s just about keeping personal
space.

We all have things to hide.

We all want to appear better, bigger, more awesome, more virtuous, more talented. Cooler. Edgier. More
impressive. Not to others. To ourselves.

We hide things to make others happy, to satisfy something unquenchable, in an attempt to make someone love us
more.

To keep someone else from something we did that we wish we could either take back or keep under wraps forever.
We hide things because it's easier.

We hide things because it saves us from giving long, winding explanations.

Explanations are exhausting, and I don’t know. I don’t know why I did that.

We hide things because we think it's a way to escape the consequences of things we would rather not face.

Everyone is hiding something.

I've stopped looking for signs. I've walked away from living a life weighed down by suspicion.

I accept the people I love as fallible and trust them.

If they are hiding something, I try to understand and let it be.

Because, in the end, I am hiding something too.

I don't need to study subtle and less obvious hints.

I don't need to catch or outsmart them.

I don't need to put in a valiant effort to validate my absence of trust.

Maybe I am just kidding myself. All of these are just words…

I still struggle with hidden agendas.

I still scan eyes looking for slight subtle shifts.

I still worry about people going behind my back in an attempt to nail me.

Thank God.

I am still human.
Energee (05.17.2005)

Becky is a serene baby, a baby who likes being happy. When she smiles, I see the white line of her teeth ready to
break out of the confinement of her gums, like eggs. The other life, the one just worn, is still with her, but it is going
away quickly.

One morning Becky is standing, holding the sofa. All morning she has been giving us signs. She has a fever and a
cough that sounds like a bark. She has been up all night, and this morning I found her on our bed. She had climbed
up by herself. I put her down on the floor and she repeated the feat.

Then there was the second sign: She stood up on the bed, up from a sitting position. Now, standing by the sofa, the
plastic water bottle she is teething on falls out of her hand and rolls away. She watches it go away from her, then
turns from the sofa and puts one leg in front of the other, then brings the other leg forward, and then the first leg
again, till she is close to the bottle.

Without realizing what she has done—a defeat of gravity so casual, so flawless, so roundabout, that it almost looks
accidental—and without pausing to celebrate her mastery, she bends down and then sits down and resumes gnawing
on the bottle.
We see this, me and my first daughter both. For many days now I had been resenting working at home; my children
were disturbing me as I worked. But now I am here to watch my kid take her first steps; I am not away in my office,
and it is a vision that will remain with me for the rest of my life.

Recently I have become conscious that the world is full of children. They were not there when I was twenty-five.
It’s almost noon and I am heading back from my house in Andheri back to Parel where my family lives.

I see an auto-rickshaw parked right outside and am walking to it when I see a group of very young children on the
road. They are being chased away by the owner of the milk booth— “Haaaatttttt!”—a sound you use to chase away
a stray dog.

I stop.

There are four of them: a girl, maybe six, another girl and boy a couple of years younger, and the youngest, a boy
certainly no older than two. Only the girls are wearing clothes, dirty oversized frocks. The boys don’t have a stitch
on, except for some white beads around their necks. They are gathered around the older girl, who is examining
something she has retrieved from the side of the snack stalls; it is a sandwich, two slices of bread smeared with
green chutney. As the other three look on hungrily, she eats the sandwich intently.

The others play with straws found in the garbage of the coconut stand, threading the white pipes into each other. The
smallest child breaks away; it’s obvious he isn’t going to get anything, and he lies indolently down on the road and
rolls over - Exactly one and a half times, leisurely—a movement of the body I know so well from watching Becky—
He is rolling on the road, gathering up the filthy water, the dog shit, the juice pulp, the betel spit, and the ordinary
dust from the road, all over his naked brown body, his little arms, his plump pouty belly. Then he gets up and
wanders out on the road, dreamily, as children do.

Taxis, buses, and rickshaws are zooming by at full speed and he is one-fourth of his way into the middle of the road
and nobody is saying anything, not the girl, not the passersby, not me. He is too close to the ground to be noticed by
the automobile drivers. There is no mother in sight. My heart jumps up in my mouth, but then the boy stops, grins,
and walks back to the side of the road.

The children have sat down around the sandwich right in the middle of the driveway to my building, and the milk-
booth man is halfheartedly shouting at them to get out of the road, cars are coming.

“Where is their mother?” I ask the milk-booth man, and he shrugs and says he doesn’t know. He has asked the
coconut-stall vendor to mind the children, and the coconut man responds angrily that they aren’t his responsibility.

I cannot walk to my auto. I am paralyzed and a desperate sense of malady rises inside me. I can’t just give them
money. The little boy’s head is shaved, just like Becky’s.

Will somebody please do something?

I can’t leave the child here, abandoned, but I want to getaway. I can’t take him home. I think of getting a cop, but the
child will just be picked up and sent to the remand home.

A three-year-old in a Bandra’s children’s “observation” home recently died from prolonged beatings.

A three-year-old.

Who would beat a three-year-old baby to death? How great a wave of anger could she generate?

Then the older girl’s eyes meet mine, and she knows immediately.
She comes over and says, “Saab, something to eat,” and holds out her palm.

I ask where her mother is and she says she’s not here. I ask if they’ve eaten and of course she says no.

At this moment a peanut vendor passes by and I gesture at him.

“We won’t eat that,” the girl says.

Then what will you eat?

“That.” She gestures towards the nearby milk booth.

I go over to the milk booth and the vendor sees them following me.

“Not too close to the shop!” he shouts at them.

“Four milk bottles,” I say abruptly.

His assistant comes over with a large stick, the kind used to chase away cows, and waves it at the children.

“I’m getting milk for them!” I say, a bit too loudly and he retreats slightly.

Four bottles of Energee, pistachio-flavored, are put on the counter, and the four children sit on the road and start
sipping at the bottles through straws.

The little one can’t wait to get at the milk as he puts the straw on the side and just mouths it in.

As I walk toward the taxi anxious to get home, I turn to take a glance at him.

The milk is pouring down his chin and has coated his chest - a sheen of white.

His face is just a shade more than sheer delight.

Fly Bird Fly (01.15.2011)

Selena has worked with me for years at BT.

I love her to death. Her presence is light, her perspective balanced, and her work impeccable. In every way, she has
made my life at work easier.

She walks into my office one day with an offer from another company in her hands. She looks sad.

“I wasn't looking for another job,” she says. “One of my best friends suggested I just talk to them. And now I don't
know what to do, and I need your advice.”

I read the offer she is holding. It’s a good offer in a decent company. She will do well there and be well
compensated for it.

I tell her I need to think a bit. She leaves the conference room and heads back to her cube.
I have two choices. I could think of me. I could tell her she was loved and appreciated here and that she needed to
stay. I was confident I could get her a counteroffer to her satisfaction. Maybe it was best if she stayed….and made
my job slightly easier in return.

Nothing wrong with that.

Or, I could think of her, recognize that this opportunity opened her horizons, would teach her new things, and make
her grow.

“You have to take this offer,” I say.

“I would keep you with me forever if I could, but I think we both know it's time for you to go. Someday, somehow,
we will work together again.”

I am of two minds every day.

Small, petty, grasping feelings present themselves at the same time big, open ones do.

The shades of black and white and all things grey, reside within me.

I can't help the number of times I want the small, petty thing.

My promise to myself is to try to choose the big one, most of the time.

Even if it’s not – Always.

The Antidote (05.10.2009)

Envy is the desperate, bitter, gnawing sense that I want what someone else has.
It does two sneaky things:

It forces my intense focus on the other when the issue is in me. This is like trying to heal my broken arm by setting
the cast on someone else’s arm.

Then, it forces my attention on what the other has, reminding me of what I don’t have instead of what I do have.

It feels like the way to heal envy is to think about how to get what I am coveting.

The problem is that in the presence of this insatiable appetite that is envy, there will always be something more to
want.

Instead, what I need to do is turn the spotlight on myself.

What am I lacking that makes me feel like I want what someone else has?

Then I need to focus my attention on all the things I do have, realize how much that is, how fortunate I am, and how
much better it feels to exercise gratitude for what I have rather than greed for what I don’t.

To many a vexation of the spirit - gratitude is just the right balm, the salve.

The antidote.
Dream & Sleep (01.12.2012)

" Th
e airport sometimes is such a brutal place. I can't wait to go home and sleep".

I am standing in the customs line at the Logan airport. Having just arrived out of a back-to-back 26-hour flight from
Melbourne to Boston via Dubai, the sentiment is shared by me and the ones around.

An elderly lady ahead of me is tired and talking to her husband. She seems frail, genteel, almost delicate.

As I move in line, I smile at those words hoping she does indeed sleep well tonight.

Having reached home, I am a recipient of a warm meal and an even warmer welcome. The kids surround me, and I
bring out the small soft toys for them. Soon they will be in bed.

It's almost 9.00 PM on the east coast while the sun is still shining in my head scrambled between multiple time
zones.

As I sleep, I toss and turn before Ana finally lays down the law. She pulls me in closer to her. My back is facing her,
and she holds me tight. It’s her way of calming me down so that she can go to bed at an appropriate time.

Our legs touch under the blankets and for a second, I settle down. She has an early rise tomorrow, so I want to let
her sleep.

As I sleep, I dream of open skies, green mountains, dark shadows, and brown flags fluttering in the wind.
When you sleep, some insist that the world as you know it ceases to exist.

The world exists because something inside you asserts it is so.

When you are awake, are you no longer dreaming?

Or are you just dreaming another dream?

Going to sleep involves letting go. As any insomniac like myself will tell you that it cannot be controlled. But we so
identify control with waking, is it possible that the uncontrolled aspect of sleep is an equal reality?

Sleep seems so real, and then we walk up, and then, real-life now seems so real. And yet we have to let go of it
every day.

This strange concept is something that I have been contemplating lately, often enough.

If life is a mere shifting of one dream to the other, I constantly catch myself asking myself:

What then is truly real?

Self-Worth (03.21.1993)

You will meet her when you are young, during a period of time when your life doesn’t make sense and it will be
after you’ve spent the better part of your life trying to understand who you are.

She will come into your life like a tornado and you’ll get so swept up in who she is and what she looks like and the
romance of it all that you will lose yourself completely. Her uncomplicated, easy, steady, yet passionate love will
sustain you and fill in the emptiness you feel in a way that caulk fills in all the holes. It will happen so fast that you
won’t even realize that her love was supplanting your love for yourself. She will love you completely and you won’t
understand why.

You’ll ask her seriously, often multiple times, “Why do you love me?” And she’ll answer through a laugh, “Because
I do.” And, what she won’t realize is that you’re not joking. You’re not being cute or flirty when you ask her this.
You are intensely curious, doubtful.

You want to know because you don’t understand. You don’t understand what she sees in you or what she feels or
what she thinks when she looks at you because when you look at yourself, you don’t see what it is that she sees. She
won’t realize that you want an answer, a definitive answer that will convince you, by virtue of her love, to love
yourself.

You will pick fights with her because the only thing you can control is how the relationship breaks apart. You can’t
believe even when she’s next to you every day and she’s kissing your forehead with all sincerity and he’s doing
everything a person in love does, except you find reasons for her love to be false.

What you never realized is that the reason people say you must love yourself before you love someone else is that
it’s true. It’s because you could be encompassed by someone’s love and still feel unworthy of it. You could have
someone waiting for you to love them, but you will deny them because you do not think you are worthy of their
love.
You will watch them go out in the morning and you will pace for hours and you will stare at the computer and not
get any work done because all you can think about is whether or not they are coming back again. You will convince
yourself they are not coming back. Even if they have come back every single time for three months straight, you will
still believe on the first day of the fourth month together that this is the last morning you will see their face or have
them around you. You will live in fear that they will stop loving you because you can’t believe they even love you in
the first place.

You will study your face in the mirror, and you will replay conversations in your mind, and you will try to find the
thing that makes them love you. You will doubt their love so completely and so arduously that they will tire of your
doubts and your jealousy. You will not blame them. You will be the first to call off the relationship. You will feel
down but also relieved each time you two break up because at least now you don’t have to hold out some false belief
that you are worth loving.

You will find a way back to each other again. It won’t take long. But you will see the pattern, the ways your heart
plays tricks on your mind, the way your lack of worth and love for yourself spills over into every conversation. You
will tell yourself that you need to detach yourself from all of this in order to see where your own love for yourself is
lacking. You start to detangle your heart from her and you’ll do this carefully because you will still be with her,
because you know now that it’s not her who’s breaking you two, it’s you. You’re the one breaking everything time
and again because you believe you’re broken.

At some point after much agony and as the years pass by and you get older and wiser, maybe you will someday
realize you are not broken.

You will learn to regard yourself with love and kindness and you will learn to forgive, not others but all the more
yourself.

You will start to see that maybe you are after all worth someone’s affection and that you just simply forgot to
believe.

You will think you are piecing yourself back together, but you will stop to realize at one point that there is nothing
to put back together, that maybe after all you were never fractured.

You will see how simple it was to realize that you are also worth good things. You will realize your love was never
meant to be earned; it was only meant to be seen.

And, maybe someday if you are lucky, you will let yourself feel someone’s love as completely as she had been
giving it for years. You will be able to accept the love she has because you have finally learned to accept your self.

And, this will be so much better than what it was before because this love isn’t a supplanted version of your lack of
it, but that it exists as its entity. This love doesn’t have to be anything or doesn’t need a label or any questions or
doubts about its veracity. It simply is.

It's a flame of eternity that burns without any fuel to supplant it. And thus someday, in being consumed ever so
completely by it, you find yourself reborn – All over again.
Sparklers (09.22.2013)

“ Are you always this effortlessly smooth?”, she asks with a sparkle in her eye.
“It’s easier with good company around”, I throwback as we both laugh sitting there across the water having dinner,
3272 miles away from home.

The interaction is fun. We will both walk away feeling a little bit better about ourselves.

I will be the suave debonair guy. She will be the designated head turner - in our little movie that we are self-
directing.

The movie is called Flirting.

Flirting means “to court without intent.” By the very definition of this word, flirting is harmless.
Flirting is fun. It's playing. It's social interaction with luster, with a gleam.

Flirting is a lot like a sparkler: an innocuous, delightful display of light.

A sparkler has no real purpose. It doesn’t illuminate a room. It barely emanates heat. It’s playful and enchanting and
does not need meaning beyond its ephemeral, radiant dazzle.

It means people can flirt with you - and that you can flirt with people - and mean nothing by it.

Flirting is one of the many beautiful things humans do just because they can.

There is nothing inherently deeply suspicious about flirting. It's not cheating. It's not the beginning of a relationship
although it can very well become one.

It does not express intent. It has no meaning.

It goes nowhere.

I know all this because I'm a flirt at times and my activity is, I promise –

Devoid of intention ...

Unintended Consequences (11.22.2016)

When I was a kid, I was told I could do or be anything I wanted.

As they tell you in motivational seminars, I should have found that encouraging, liberating. The sky was the limit.

Instead, I found that - intimidating. I had no idea what I wanted to be, and still don’t, decades later.

I was a bored teenager and I used to dismantle old watches to peer inside them – to see what made them tick. Once
taken apart, I could never fix them and just ended up tossing them aside. Destructive at best.

My parents mistakenly took this activity as a sign of good things to come. Their son was destined to become an
engineer.

They pooled together scarce resources, scraped loans and scholarships and after four years of cramming for things I
didn’t understand, I end up earning a bachelor in electronics engineering from an obscure college in a remote section
of India.

Summa cum Laude – Cherry on the cake.

Still completely clueless, but an engineer, nevertheless.

I try my hand in research, retail, and even in sales but nothing works out.

It felt like I was too young to start working so I pooled up another list of scholarships, crammed for an entrance
exam, and ended up in a two-year MBA program.

After two years, instead of learning finance and leadership skills, all I learn is how to talk confidently with the
opposite sex. It counts for something, doesn’t it?

I end up as a part-time priest for a while barely scraping ends.

On a bus one day, reading the Times of India Careers section, an ad for a software institute catches my eye. The
price tag is just 3 years of my current salary. They promise to send the candidates to the USA in – Just 9 months,
almost a full-term pregnancy.

My aunt passed away during the same time and her small inheritance is used to pay for my switch of careers as a
programmer.

Java, C#, COBOL. None of it makes much sense. As usual, I try to cram the entire program and then type it out.

The institute suddenly shuts down in the middle of the year as the sponsor takes our money and bails.

Entirely miserable, I start to apply to every open job in the careers section.

I interview for software development (Barely clear the basic written test), architecture (worse, I fail), even
refrigerator repair at a five-star hotel (I am overqualified, they say politely)

The expectations of the parents and possible in-laws are slightly overwhelming, to say the least.

With money running out, I hit the internet cafés once every week, floppy in hand, and copy-paste my resume to as
many open applications as I can, all within 15 minutes.

15 Minutes a week - It is the only time slot that my wallet can afford. I see others sitting there for hours playing
video games and I walk the three miles back home in the baking heat, slightly envious and very very hungry.

Yet nothing seems to pan out.

They say it is the darkest just before the crack of dawn. Life does seem to work that way.

One day, a call comes in the middle of a damp Tuesday afternoon.

I am called for an interview at 8 PM the next day.

“Who takes an interview at 8 PM?” I wonder.

In the interest of leaving no stone unturned, I show up at the designated place, 7.30 PM sharp.

It’s a shop in Dadar, an upcoming locality in central Bombay that doubles as an office for a company called GDI.
It’s a body shopper who imports people to the US, a very profitable endeavor. After all, the Y2K mania is in full
bloom.

At 10 PM after all other participants are gone, I am ushered into a small cube, the size of a phone booth. It is
actually a phone booth, I learned later...

A call comes in from the USA. I am asked three basic questions on programming which I answer easily. Theory has
never been a problem. Practical implementations are another story.

“What would you like to be in the next five years?”, the voice on the other end asks.

Those two years chasing tail during MBA suddenly come in handy. I answer with confidence. The answer doesn’t
matter.

“We are impressed with the way you communicate and would like to offer you a job as a programmer working for
us in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Do you have your passport handy?”

I learned that day that Michigan is a state in the USA. I still don’t have a passport.
Scrapping some money from my father who works from 3 am to 11 am making 2$, I pull in enough to get a passport
made.

Six months later on a cold spring morning, I land in Detroit with two bags, packed with apprehension.

2 months and 28 interviews later, I end up working for Microsoft.

Back then, making a living as a programmer was extremely difficult for me. My manager kindly told me many years
ago that it would only get harder. His words were prophetic.
He sees me talking to his clients engaging them to a point where they even tag me along for lunches without me
providing any value besides listening and sharing some good stories.

I am laid off in the next restructuring, but he offers me invaluable advice – “Switch to becoming a Business Analyst.
You will do well there. Programming is just not for you, but you seem to understand people well. If not, get into
medical and become a psychiatrist”.

The second is a bridge too far. I take the first advice like a drowning man clutching on to the last straw.
The straw turns out to be a solid wooden log. I not only float, but I also start to swim upstream.

I collect degrees and certifications as a prostitute collects a Rolodex of rich clients. BE, MBA, Microsoft certified,
Java certified, and PMP. Even start-up a CFA with years of slugging ahead.

The more I learn, the less I seem to feel I know.

Today, I still work. I work for pleasure and I work for a living – not as a developer, but as an analyst.

I end up slowly liking what I do. Not being a good programmer does not feel like a defeat anymore.

I end up becoming the bridge between the client who wants his requirements met and the programmer who does not
understand what they need him to build.

I talk fluent geek with the programmers, just enough to understand them, empathize with them.
I dig deep into my MBA bucket to talk to clients and I always do good by them. Always.

Over time, I learn that I am good at organizing things, communicating, smoothing out issues, managing
personalities, and at times, actually delivering. However, most importantly - still trying to remain slightly untainted
by it all.

The person I am is still a sham, but I am getting slightly better at what I do. I get paid decently to do it. I try to work
hard, help everyone I can with whatever little abilities I think I possess.

Then I go home and sleep well.

The fact that I make a good living blows my mind. Every paycheck feels like a glorious mistake.

I did not grow up to be what I wanted because when I was young, I lacked the vision and the imagination to
conceive of life this rewarding.

The life I have today exceeds any expectations I ever had.

The Yellow Flowers (03.06.2010)

" The first winter after we moved from Ohio to Portsmouth, a local high school senior lost control of his car on a
winding road as he drove to school with his sister. I learned of the accident only because there were roadblocks near
the village green on the day of the funeral, and ashen-faced cops, probably only a year or two older than the boy,
directing traffic.

Peverly Hill Road — where the accident occurred — is one of the pretty areas around here. At the top of the hill if
you look west, is an old cemetery, and beyond the weathered, simple tombstone, a church steeple soars in the
distance. I’ve driven around it for the last 10 years. When Jenny entered preschool, it was the route we took early
each morning, sometimes stopping for a MacDonald French fries along the way.

It was autumn when I first saw the mother. She knelt in the dirt next to the electric pole the boy had hit. She wore
jeans and a sweatshirt, long hair tied back, hands working the earth. I knew instantly that it was her. I slowed my car
down, worried — she wasn’t far off the side of the road and could easily be hit by a texting driver.

But I didn’t stop. I wanted to but I couldn’t. Her bowed head, those grasping hands seemed to exist on another plane,
a scorched landscape of grief and sorrow that forced a shudder inside me. I had come so close to knowing that
precise sense of grief. I wondered what I could say to her. I feared how she would look back at me, the grief in her
eyes might reflect the one in my own. We both were parents who had children who we worried about — In a way
that was so much different than others did. How would we even relate?

I braked, just slightly wanting to stop. Instead, my little girl and I continued on our way.
Month after month, I kept an eye out for the mother as I drove by Peverly Hill. On several occasions, I spotted her
crouched by the electrical pole. But it wasn’t until early spring of 2010, when we passed a soft blur of yellow one
morning, that I realized what she had been doing in that roadside dirt. Daffodils ringed the pole, encircling the spot
where her son had passed away.

All sorts of flowers now mark the spot, months after, as I pass by there every summer, sometimes even if taking a
long way just so I could see them. At times during the first few years. I noticed her sitting one afternoon in a folding
chair, her back to the road. Each winter, as the bulbs she plans in autumn sleep in the earth, she strings tinsel around
the pole, red and silver glitter hugging its circumference. Once, a nearby tree was festooned with Christmas lights,
green and blue.

I try to understand parenthood and what death does in its wake — The living people that it takes and the carcasses
that it leaves behind.

Ten years.

Our town has changed quite a bit in these years. More young families have moved up from the city—
Telecommuting from Boston making possible a different kind of life. I am now one of them too. I see new parents
sometimes. I know them from the time their SUVs and station wagons, a whole new generation strapped into
booster seats in the back. They, too, drive up Peverly Hill. They, too, stop for MacDonald’s and coffee.

I doubt they notice the one electrical pole set apart from the others — by those soft yellow flowers blooming from its
base.

.
The Layoff (09.22.2008)

National city bank is one of the oldest institutions in the country standing strong since 1847.

I have worked as a Payments SME in their Cleveland office for the last 4 years; a stone’s throw away from where I
live. Every morning I walk 15 steps out of my apartment office, cross the road and enter my office. It has never been
this good. I have great neighbors, the kids are thriving and for once I have this feeling called stability, a feeling of
belonging – Like I am meant to be here, put down roots, buy a house and grow a family.

However, this is not a typical day. The day is quiet, sunny and people outside are going about their business.
National City on the other hand is agog with rumors and whispers. There is talk about takeover, merger, or even
going under. They have made some really bad bets on mortgages in the last year and the due has come home. Who
will be retained and who will be let go?

Being a contractor, I know I am the most vulnerable to these cuts and I am mentally prepared or at least I think I am.
It’s like you are in a room surrounded by bombs dropping all around the house, gunfire, and yet all is quiet in that
room. It is your space and you feel a bit safe as the frequency of those booms go down and the rattle of the gunfire is
no longer frequent and just when you think it's going to be fine, there’s a loud knock on the door and you know what
it means.

I sit there thinking of these scenarios when I see Dean’s number flash on the phone.

I know it’s time and he has asked me to come to see him. He sounds almost apologetic, but he has to do what he has
to. I want to wrap this up over the phone but then there’s a little dance to these things that one has to go through.
Later in the evening as I walk home, I have cleared my desk. I see people going out with big cardboard boxes filled
with belongings from years of existence. Potted plants, paperwork, and even a coffee grinder. I walk home clutching
a 3” Buddha statue that I was given by someone who said it would bring me good luck and I notice Todd loading the
last carton in his car.

“It’s going to be ok my friend,” he says almost as if consoling himself instead of me.

“Yeah. I hope so too.”, I nod not sure what else to say.

“I’ll miss you Z man. It’s been a good run”. Yeah, he is one of those who call me the Z man.

I have a moment of weakness and I extend my hand for a handshake. Instead, he pulls me in for a bear hug. He is 6
2” and the most offensive player on the trading floor but he somehow has ended up with a soft corner for me or
maybe he is just vulnerable in his moment of weakness. Maybe because I never confronted him or maybe he never
saw me as a threat to his career. I would never know. I don’t want to know.

“I want you to have this”.

I pull out the status from my pocket and hold my hands together as it's meant to be offered. Palms joined, extended
out to be picked up. As the Buddha said, the taker is doing the giver a favor of generating good karma by his act of
taking it from you and for that we are grateful. He knows this as we have shared this story over late-night bottles of
Malibu Coconut Rum at his place on game day cookouts.

“Thanks, man. I will always keep this with me. If I find something, you’ll be the first one that I will call ok?” he
says as he turns away.

And so, it’s done.

I walk out of that gate just as I had walked in years ago.

Empty-handed, hands in pocket. I feel good about it, about everything.

I will find a new job soon. Hopefully, it will be close by in Cleveland and we won’t have to move out. I’ll start
applying from tomorrow. I make a mental list of people to call, the recruiters, old contacts, friends, and even cold
call strangers.

When work is involved there is no shame. It will be alright after all.

As I cross the street to enter into Islander apartments, I see two small earthworms wriggle their way on the road.
They could be crushed by the next set of feet or the next tread of tires.

I look around to find a leaf off a tree, slowly pick the two worms off the pavement, and put them on the grass where
they wriggle off quickly shocked at the intrusion.

It’s an old habit. They are probably having a bad day, just like I am. There’s no reason why one of us shouldn’t
catch a break.

Walking home, I see Ana sitting on the balcony on the second floor watching the girls ride their bikes below with
their friends.

It’s all sunny and quiet and the most perfect day to sit outside.
We have no idea of the storm that’s coming.

Blissfully unaware, oblivious to the destruction that’s just around the next corner.
The Prayer (02.14.2018)

” We have an answer, and it isn’t the one we had hoped for,” the doctor looked at us with a professional demeanor.
In his cramped office, he had moved his chair around to the other side of his desk, so he could sit close to Ana and
me. I registered that this wasn’t a good sign.

He laid out several printouts of the colonoscopy report on his desk, flattened each, and then traced the jagged lines
of the colored hues with his pen as if pointing out directions on a map. I leaned forward and studied it like I might be
able to understand.

My thirteen-year-old girl was asleep, still under the throes of anesthesia. She had worried herself to sleep during the
colonoscopy, a single salty line of tear dried on her soft cheeks which she probably did not even recall. Her hair—
those dark curls—was matted down after an hour in the OR.

As the doctor spoke, I sat straight, almost too straight. IBD, Ulcerative colitis – was the prognosis. Rare, but getting
common, he said. I absorbed everything he said yet the words were coming too fast, a torrent. They were
disintegrating, falling apart in my mind. I kept looking down at my perfect, beautiful Jenny. Her ears peeking
through the curtains, the curve of her skinny back. I now have a name for the mystery ailment that plagued her. I
sigh in relief before anticipation and a slight tinge of worry take over.

“We have to work on controlling the inflammation immediately,” the doctor said. “There are a limited number of
medications we can try—the most effective we will prescribe. You can get it from a pharmacy. There are side
effects though—”

“What happens?” Ana's voice sounded like it was coming from a cave. “What happens if the inflammation isn't
stopped?”

“Colon damage from repeated inflammation. Possibly cancer down the road due to the open sores,” said the doctor.
He didn’t blink or hesitate. He said it softly.

On his bookshelf, I noticed, there was a photograph of him with his wife and daughter, at what appeared to be his
daughter’s college graduation.

The bones in Ana’s face seemed to shift. I reached over and held her hand, held it tight. What was going to happen
to us?

“Every single day counts,” the doctor said.

The doctor’s receptionist knocked on his office door.

“I reached the CVS,” she says to the doctor. She hands us a page from a prescription pad, with an address scribbled
on it.

We drive crosstown in our tiny Civic, with Jenny strapped into her seat behind us. She is talking as if nothing has
changed. But our life as we know it has changed, even though we do not recognize it just yet. I am listening but
barely registering.

We pull up in front of a CVS on Islington road. I had passed the building a hundred times or more in the years I had
lived in the town. In what seemed another life, I had speed-walked down Islington on my way to the downtown
library without giving this place a second glance. I had dined at a nearby restaurant during the winter.

Now, I waited in the back of the car with my sleepy girl as my wife walked down to the pharmacy and waited in line
- Something that would become second nature to us going ahead. The queue moving ahead, where a pharmacist was
waiting to give her a packet of medication— Each medication, over the years as it changed, became our next ray of
hope.

I didn’t believe that God had caused this to happen. Nor did I believe that, by praying to him, he would spare us.
Still, every moment of every day became a prayer. Soon, the medication later came in the form of an injection,
delivered via FedEx from a pharmacy in Atlanta. Each packet of injection—into two single doses. The ritual of
opening the box with a knife every two weeks became a prayer.

I searched for reasons—a way of understanding of being on the wrong side of such a statistic. Seventy out of a
million babies. Somebody had to be one of the seventy, didn’t they? Why us? Why not us? I blamed the
environment: maybe it was the water we had used to drink. I blamed modern medicine: maybe it was the DPT
vaccination she had received at her six-month checkup.

But mostly, I blamed myself. I was the father. It had to be my fault, somehow. Maybe it was the shitty food we ate
years ago to save money or the fact that I sent Ana to India when she was pregnant. Or the stress of my last job
before she was born.
It didn't occur to me to blame God—nor did I think of asking him for any special favors. Yet my prayers continued.
Watching my little girl’s face become pale - A sign of blood loss, her nails getting whiter, her breathing heavier due
to iron deficiency.

I watch her face for signs of worry - Things that she wouldn't tell me. I held my breath as if my breath itself were a
prayer.

Each night, I put the girls to sleep—as I had since the day they were born—I told them a story. Now that story was
as long and meditative and devotional as a prayer.

As I told the stories of how the little prince vanquished the giant, my impractical brain tried to find schemes to slay
this disease while my practical brain kept telling me - It's chronic. Learn to live with it Z. The faster you make
peace, the happier you will be.

If I missed even a single word of the story, I had to start all over again. Next—even if she was fast asleep—came
rounds of “Sarosh Yazad Panah baad”, the prayer for the guardian angel of sleep, once for each of them as my hand
slowly curved over their sleeping heads - Afraid of waking them up.

Then I closed my eyes until all was darkness, slow and quiet. I watched her breathe heavily, in silence.

Please watch over my daughter and keep her safe.

Please keep her safe while I sleep...

I whisper over and over again.

All in complete darkness with Mr. Melbourne, her teddy bear, my only witness.

Please….

Never once did I wonder,

who, if anyone, might be listening?

Hot Girl (03.21.2016)

I am taking the usual route to my office. The four miles distance usually takes less than ten minutes.
It’s a ride that I have taken a hundred times, twice a day, five days a week, all year round.

It takes me through a one-lane road off route 1. The road is winding with leaved tree houses on both sides.

At the end of that road, I take a right and merge onto Route 33, a two-lane road, slightly faster which takes me to the
office.

This is just another of those days.

As I drive mundanely barely paying attention to route 1, I see a car ahead of me. It’s a white Mercedes SLK 650
convertible.

However, it’s the vanity tag that gets my attention.

On a silver rectangular plate surrounded with pink trimmings are two glorious words – HOT GRL.

I suddenly perk up in attention.

Keeping an eye on the road I try to catch a glimpse of the occupant ahead. With a one-lane road, I am stuck behind.

I see glorious curls of hair.

The window is open, and an elbow sticks out.

As our cars stop at the traffic light turning left, my excitement grows exponentially.

When the light turns green, I cut across another competitor on the left and hit the gas.

The tiny civic groans and slowly picks up speed closing the gap in the adjoining lane with the Merc.

As I eagerly look to the right, the face slowly comes into view.

The wrinkled 70-year-old woman with her hair flying in all its glory.

The stereo is blaring the latest Nicki Minaj tune.

As she turns to face me, the evil grin on the old bat’s face says it all.

Gotcha – You horny Indian bastid!

Unsatistfied (07.09.2019)
“Do you think you dislike what’s going on around you ?” a lady that I knew asked ,hardly a week into the daily
Boston commute. She had seen me reading a wall street journal article about the upcoming election next year , the
seemingly vast divide amongst the populace and was probably soliciting a nuanced opinion of a brown guy on the
state of Americas – or she was just amusing herself during the long commute.

We had barely settled into a meandering hello a while ago. The commute was still an hour to go.

Coming on strong for an early morning commute, I thought.

Walking back from a training session in Cambridge that evening, I waited for the subway—the living lab, as I
called it. The platform was full of high school kids traveling in packs, yelling and joking; exhausted-looking elderly
people carrying bags of groceries; a terribly thin man holding a sign: “HIV positive, just out of the hospital, need
money for a meal, god bless”. The air was muggy and smelled of days old unwashed clothes and damp socks.

When the train screeched to a stop, I lurched on board, finding a spot between the moms and nannies jostling
strollers into the car, pulling young kids onto their laps, and the well-groomed men in sumptuous suede and pinstripe
jackets and silken ties reaching for newspapers as they found a place at the handrail, their expressions absorbed yet
somehow vacant.

I looked carefully at the faces all around me. Many people were visibly distressed. The woman with wild eyebrows
and coarse gray hair dyed a brassy red, dirty cheeks creased with wrinkles, ranting and muttering. The young woman
with soft, milky dark skin who called quietly up the car, half-singing her plea: “Me and my baby daughter need a
dollar to get to the shelter tonight.” The man in a worn-looking full-length wool coat, his body still trembling with
the effort it had required to sit down.

Other passengers showed no outward signs of distress. They appeared to have homes and money and good health,
they carried briefcases or bags from department stores, tissue paper rustling out of the top. Their faces didn’t cave in
from trouble or strain. But they still had a walled-off look, their brows furrowed, their eyes cast deep into their
newspapers or their laps. They all looked so dissatisfied , burdened - Almost checked-out. As if the weight of the
world bore down on them, and something vital that they had before was now, gone.

The clinical term for this I had read somewhere is called “dysthymia”—the low-grade feeling that life is unfulfilling.
It feels like emptiness. Hunger. Disillusionment. Life is not what you’d hoped. It’s a less severe version of what I
had seen during a visit to a mental clinic years ago - Alienation, isolation, futility, darkness.

And it’s what I recognized in many of my coworkers and friends. We were in our middle age, in our fourties, still
having the energy and professional drive, committed to living and working in a way that contributed to the world.
But sometimes the grind of our day-to-day felt more like treadmill than a calling. I recalled waiting in line at the bus
stop, the way people boarded, raised a hand in greeting, and then looked down at their feet. It was like living on the
two-dimensional rendering of a corporate box set. It looked adequate from far away, but up close the whole thing
was fake—and terribly lonely. We talked with carefully chosen words about our work , projects and house upgrades.
The underlying connotation of every sentence although never spoken loudly was - “If I can just make it through
these things…, then I can advance, then I can rest, then I can be happy”. As much as I was a viewer to these
maladies play out, I was a participant amongst them too.
Among more successful friends, the folks who had made partners, had decent sized houses within spitting distance
of downtown Boston, who had the education, opportunities, jobs, friends, and romantic partners they’d always
wanted, it seemed from our conversations that there was still a lingering sense of emptiness. A near-constant
craving. A sense that life although amazingly good, was not as meaningful or joyful as it might have been. As
though we were on a never-ending staircase toward fulfillment with happiness being, almost always, just slightly out
of reach.

The suffering in the world seemed so pervasive and relentless. It seemed relentless and when viewed from close,
almost unsurmountable. I wondered what I could do to alleviate it, leap over it, into the land of respite.

Night was beginning to fall, the trees darkening to silhouettes. I came out of the south station metro stop and
jogged the steps up to the commuter bus junction to catch the 8.00 PM bus home. I joined the stream of tired
passengers standing in line. A devout man, a Lubavitcher with a black hat and full beard, was praying in the line
directly across, some folks ahead of me.

His eyes were closed, his face full of joy.

What inner mechanisms fueled his joy? Why, on a station packed with people who seemed so burdened and
stressed, this late at night, did this man appear so blissful? It would take me some years to begin to reveal any
answers. But his face stayed in my mind.

“How was your day?”

I heard the familiar voice from behing asking the question – my commute lady was back.

I turned around, took a deep breath and smiled.

“It was pretty good actually. Tell me about yours”.

Street Brawls (11.02.1993)

I have been in street fights many times.

Unlike a controlled martial arts duel in the classroom with your feet bouncing on an inch-thick carpet, protected with
paddings and knee guards, real life is slightly different.

The violence comes at you fast and wide, surprising you. Stunning you, disorienting you completely and it happens
in a flash.

You could find yourself on the opposite end of a knife being asked for your wallet or surrounded by a group of
angry muscles finding strength in their numbers trying to test their manhood.

On being confronted, my immediate reaction is to deflect. My instinct is to diffuse and walk. One has broken
enough limbs to know that ego does not matter. Being able to walk does.

But then when the deflections don’t work and the numbers are not against your favor, there is an immediate change
in the mindset.

At the very moment when you have your hands in the air taking two steps back, the aggression from times ago kicks
in.

A nearest upper lip, an unprotected groin, or even the more lethal version of an unguarded throat.
Most times they surprise you by backing away as quickly as they have come on.

Having been in this enough, you learn that most of them love the idea of a fight. Those movies have fed a sense of
invincibility.

However, as the first contact finally gets to them, they stare at you in shock.

Can this be happening to me? What did I get myself into? they think.

It should be over at this point, but it doesn’t ...

Because then you are running on adrenaline and want to go all out.

The passage of time and repeated visits to the local bonesetters in India have imparted in you some wise lessons on
when to engage and when to walk away.

In-office politics or on the street, most egos are satisfied by a white flag of surrender or your look of fear.

They don’t need to see the ugly side of you.

If you give them what they crave, everyone goes home unscathed.

Discretion is indeed a better-looking sister than its ugly sibling, valor.

At times, in those street fights, your biggest fear is not that you might get hit,

It’s that maybe your adversary will not make it home tonight.
Cab Driver (03.19.2013)

I walk out of the store on West Forty-seventh Street and hail a cab. As I give the driver JP Morgan’s midtown
address, I rummage through my laptop bag looking for my cell phone.

“You’re lucky, you know—Fifth Avenue just opened up again. Traffic’s been terrible.”

Something about the voice: I felt it on my skin, in my bones before I registered anything else about it. The K in the
word "traffic" instead of the C. The soft, almost insistent roll of the R. A very specific accent—equal parts South
Indian and a splatter of American. It was as if a piece of me had come loose. My eyes scale over to the identification
card attached to the cloudy plastic partition before moving to the small rectangle of the rearview mirror where his
forehead is visible.

“Rajesh?” I ask hesitantly, even though I had read the name. I had scanned the face on the plastic ID card. The
picture was taken years before of a much younger-looking man. Years ago, many pounds ago, many happy moments
ago.

“Yes. That's my name.”

“It’s your roommate Z here.”

He tilts the mirror and looks at me. It had been nearly fifteen years since we had last been together at my old San
Francisco apartment that we shared for more than two years. Two years of living together, cooking together, being
in each other's faces for two whole years, almost like a mini marriage arrangement.

“It’s you, all right,” he looks up back at the mirror squinting slightly. His tone is oddly flat. We hadn’t known each
other particularly well as roommates. Different jobs and schedules allowed us to interact less during weekdays.
The taxi stops at a red light.

“Let me come up front,” I say, reaching for the door handle.

“No, no—you stay back there.”

Rajesh looks and feels like a middle-aged man now. He is also overweight and looks tired. The deep purplish circles
under his eyesight help either. I search for traces of the handsome south Indian boy I remembered.

“Do you remember the name of our other roomie?” he asks after a minute. “I’ve been working on getting in touch
with all people, he says waving his hand in the air mildly.”

I try to remember—but I couldn’t go beyond the two names when there were four.

“I think I have their contact info at home,” I said. “Give me your address and I’ll send it to you.

We lapse into silence. Small talk seemed out of the question. Our common ground was an empty landscape, littered
with misunderstanding and loss that had nothing to do with either of us.

As we inch downtown on Fifth Avenue, I think about how life turned out for either of us. As if sensing that he starts
to tell me about the trajectory of his life in the last 15 years. The biotech firm where he used to work as a software
engineer in San Francisco shut down and he moved to Florida to work for a small startup and then investing his
savings into it. The startup went belly up and he lost everything declaring bankruptcy that tainted any further
prospective jobs in the industry.

He eventually bought a cab on loan and has been driving it trying to pay off the costs of the medallion itself for
years. With Ubers making inroads, it became more and more difficult to do that. He has a heart condition, but health
insurance is prohibitively expensive, and he just suffers through it.

As he tells me all this in a stream burst of conscience, I can see he is more defeated than tired. Life can wear you
down in many different ways, some more obvious and simple than others.

Nothing is keeping us together. Has it been inevitable that we lose track of one another? That our children would be
strangers?

We pull up in front of JPMorgan. Rajesh carefully writes his name and address on a scrap of paper and hands it to
me. I reach for my wallet. I didn’t know what to do. What was the etiquette here?

“Put that away.” Rajesh waves his hand. I notice a thick gold wedding ring and hope that he is happy.

“Please—it’s on me.”

I climb out of the taxi and walk around to the driver’s side window. As he rolls it down, I leaned in to hug my old
friend. I wonder if we would ever see each other again.

As I turn back one last time to look already if the cab had pulled away and there would be a space there. Instead, I
see him sitting there - Two fingers on his eyes, his shoulders heaving ever so slightly, his head tilted, resting on the
steering wheel.

I almost worry he is unwell for a second before I realize what has happened. His comparison to where he ended up
vs mine was the tinder that lit the fire within him. I would have loved to tell him that we all have our battles. That I
had seen things he would never want to - even if he was bankrupt, many times over.
Instead, I turn around and walk towards the tall elevator banks.

32-58, the floor sign reads outside the elevator bank.

All is forgiven.
Darvish (02.14.2001)

One day, my friend the poet Avinash was browsing among the books on the sidewalk opposite the Central Post
Office in LA.

A tall lanky Somalian boy who was behind the stall got into conversation with him about a book of French short
stories, and Ashish saw something different about him. So, he invited him to a writers’ salon at an open-air
courtyard behind the Kodak Theater, not far from there. He is a runaway from Mogadishu, Ashish tells me.

I've seen this guy at Starbucks several times. Every time I’d see him, I'd tell myself that I would take him to lunch
but always found an excuse not to. Today was different. It might have been selfish, but I was lonely. I didn't want to
spend the whole day alone. I walked up to him, put my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Do you want to have
lunch?”

He hesitates. I understand. I have been there asked by many to dine at the ritzy swank expensive restaurant and I
never know if I have to foot my half of the very heavy bill.

“It’s my birthday. It’s on me.”, I lie.

A smile breaks out on his face. He nods in assent. His dark face a crescent of joy with all his pearly whites in stark
contrast.
Darvish Umbrae was born and raised in Jamaica. When he was a kid, he dreamt of being a famous soccer player. He
was recruited to play in school but never got the opportunity because he got in some trouble with another teenager.
He moved to the states 8 years ago as part of the Somalian refugee program and has spent the last 12 months living
in a tent by the side of the freeway.

Where do you get to eat? I am curious.

He tells me that he goes days without eating, sometimes living off of the berries he picks, he spends most of his time
alone and has no friends and no family in the states. It’s ironic that in a country that spends 35 million dollars on a
single jet fighter in the name of defense that someone is living eating berries off trees, like an animal. How many
people can be fed, how many lives can be saved instead of being destroyed? What are we defending against and
from whom, I wonder?

Darvish is interested in poetry, a slender man pushing thirty-five with a thin mustache and wispy sideburns creeping
into a beard. He appears very self-confident, and yet a bit hesitant at the same time. He may have come to the group
lured by the possibility of meeting poets, but he may also find a proper job through connections with English-
speaking people. Through most of the evening, he is quiet, looking down at the table. He can’t join in our
conversation, which is in English. When people want tea or chairs, he gets up and fetches it for us without being
asked. It is his station.

An architect-poet asks him to recite some of his poetry. And so he does, a metrical piece about destinations, in
heavily accented English. I like the sound of it. In the end, nobody compliments him as they might have done for
others. There is, instead, an embarrassed silence. The architect asks him if he has any more. He reads another, one
he wrote just the previous night—on the footpath, under the streetlamp—to the same reaction. Then I ask him if he’s
written any in LA. He brings out a sheaf of papers, all written over, every inch of every sheet. But by this time the
people around the table have lost interest in his poetry. He brings out a calendar, and that too is all written over.

“More poetry?” I ask.

“No, it’s my diary. Every day I write it.”

I write down my name and phone number for him. In my notebook, in a fine script, he writes his name, “Darvish.”
He pauses.

“What else?”

There is nothing else. He has no phone number. Tonight, he is going to try to find a patch of pavement to sleep on.
He’ll try Union Street, he says. He has a tote bag with him that contains all his belongings. He is to call me the day
after. I will try to find him a job.

He takes me back to his tent just off the I-405 exit near Canoga Boulevard. It’s small green contraception tattered at
places. It rained hard last night so there are puddles around. He shows me where he washes his clothes, two sets of
shirts, and one pair of pants bought at the Salvation Army. He makes sure he washes them alternately, almost
religious about being clean.
After hearing it had been a month since he had a hot bath, I give in and bring him back to my apartment so he could
enjoy a hot shower. I share a room with 3 other roommates, so they are amused but used to my usual bouts of
idiosyncrasy.

After the bath, he looks almost different. We sit and share a hot cup of chocolate that he savors, sipping ever so
slowly. He tells me about the time in Somalia where his parents were shot by the rebel soldiers and how he escaped
being recruited with them. He says all of this as a matter of fact like he is reciting a story where he is the central
character, almost an out-of-body experience.

“What about trying to get a job”, I ask.

“I have tried and tried again Sir, but I don’t know how to do it. What should I do? What am I doing wrong? Where
do I start?” His questions confuse me, but they sound legitimate. Someone eager to work but can’t find a decent job.
I have heard this story a million times. How can you fill out an application when you haven't eaten in days?

I am not sure why, but I take it upon myself to find him employment. I tell Darvish that I would drive around with
him next week and help him fill out applications and even speak on his behalf to help him land a job so he can get
back on his feet. We agreed to meet that Friday at 9:30 AM at Starbucks.

If I were going to make this happen, I knew we had to get Darvish some new clothes. We stop at Savers, a step up
from Salvation Army, yet dirt cheap so he could pick out a shirt and some slacks.

He insists on paying for it and brings out some crumpled notes from his pocket carefully counting and
recounting$5.45 for the shirt and pants. It’s the half-off day at savers, lucky for him. The gods are pleased, and the
opening omen looks good.

“Thank you, sir, thank you” he keeps repeating and calling me Sir. It’s a mark of respect in his culture. I tell him not
to call me Sir, but he never changes.

He walks into the changing room and comes out a different man. I am blown away at the immediate change in his
demeanor. His smile is radiant as ever and his skin color is still as dark, yet he stands up straighter and even walks
with a bit of newly induced swagger.

I can’t convince him to tuck in his shirt. I tell him it’s a mark of professionalism. He immediately does it and looks
at himself in the mirror. He is not pleased. The next day I see him again and he has the shirt untucked, his smile
slyly telling me he knows I am slightly miffed, and that he cares but likes it that way. I guess some battles are not
meant to be won.

We hit the streets looking for any open positions. For the next two days, I drive him around going door to door to
see who is hiring. We go to the usual circus of the retail chain, Walgreens, CVS, Safeway, Home Depot, Molly
Stones, and Starbucks just to name a few.

As we walk into Walgreens, he suddenly stiffens up and I can tell that he is a bit tense. I tell him to relax and that I
would walk in with him, so he knew he wasn’t alone. It can be overwhelming to walk into a business and ask for a
job.
He goes up to the manager and talks to him surprisingly better than what I would expect. Sometimes our perceptions
taint our minds even more than the color of someone’s skin. We come out after the chat and I am very proud of him.
We have a few positive responses, but the majority of businesses tell us that applications are submitted online these
days.

Easy enough right?

Wrong.

Darvish doesn’t have a computer. So, I take him to the local library and we begin to fill out applications. It strikes
me how we take our computer literacy for granted. I watch him struggle to fill out an application and it starts to put
some things in perspective. Some people judge our homeless as lazy, obnoxious people who rely on food stamps and
drink soda and laze around creating trouble and infested pavements.

We have all heard someone say, “why don’t they just get a job?” or “they’re lazy”. I see firsthand how the system is
set up to fail people like Darvish. There is no way he would have been able to do any of this without my help. Just
like there are many things in my life I have needed someone to help me overcome an obstacle. Maybe in life as in
many others, we all need a hand and a touch of light from time to time.

It’s been weeks and I am busy starting to pack up and prepare to go to India. August is fast approaching and I am
excited to get back. It will be my first trip back homecoming to the USA and I have a bunch of requests from friends
and family to bring in American stuff on my way back.

I completely forget about Darvish and his life.

On a lazy Friday afternoon, as I am staring at the computer screen at work, I get a call in my office. It’s Darvish and
he sounds very excited. After a week of phone interviews, Darvish has landed an in-person interview at Safeway. I
ask him where he is calling from and how he managed to interview on the phone.

He tells me that he asked at the library if they had free phone service. He is starting to get used to some of the
services that the government or the state offers to the needy but obviously, free calls are not one of them.

He mentions that the local librarian, Molly an old genial woman with white hair and an aura of sophistication has
offered him the use of her cell phone and he starts to wish her well profusely on the phone.

We decide to meet up the next day and that I will pick him up from his tent off 405. He is ready as I come around
the corner just at the ramp entrance for exit 22. He has worn his new clothes and they are washed and clean. He has
tucked his shirt in which tells me he is nervous. I remember driving to Safeway feeling a bit worried if he can relate
to the people there or if he will be able to answer the questions.

“How are you feeling bud?”, I ask genially trying not to betray my anxiety, nor expecting an answer but probably
more trying to placate myself.

He looks back at me, his smile flashing, and waves his hand around. “I got this Z!!!” he says smiling. Somewhere
between all the trips and the trials, he has started to call me Z, the slimmer version of my name. I believe him.

I drop him off outside of Safeway and wish him luck. Driving to the nearby parking lot just across the entrance I am
anxious and nervous, two traits that I usually do not exhibit, not often though.
It’s almost been 20 minutes and I am reading a book or attempting to when I see him walk out with a big smile. He
stands right in the middle of the crossing and just flashes the biggest smile ever, this giant of a man, tall as a tree
dancing right in the middle of the street, and people around stop to take a look.

I don’t have that much to take him to a fancy restaurant to celebrate. I ask him if he would like to celebrate by
having an ice cream. He nods his head and beams at me.

“Only if you allow me to honor you by letting me buy it Z”. It’s a semblance of dignity that he wants to maintain,
and I let him have it. He will make it back and will have himself to thank for it.

Like we all are, Darvish is searching for a purpose in life. He yearns for happiness. He craves for someone to love
and a place to call home. He wants to create a better life for himself so he could one day have a family and some
semblance of stability, whatever that means.

He is just like you and me who wants to come back to a warm familiar home and sit in a rocking chair and drink his
little glass of warm chocolate, just a darker version of ourselves with the same fears and aspirations. What’s it with
the skin color, I ask myself.

Maybe it’s the fact that we were reminded so much of how we are darker-skinned and somehow inferior enough to
work more to cover as much ground. I let that thought linger for a bit before letting it float away into nothingness.

It’s almost been 3 months since this incident and I completely forget about this incident. One day I get a call from
the reception desk that someone is waiting for me at the front desk. It’s a slow day at work and I am glad for the
interruption, so I walk outside. It’s Darvish standing there with a woman. She is short, almost half his size but
decently dressed, and has an air of knowing about her.

He sees me and shouts out my name and envelops me in one of his traditional bear hugs. We seat ourselves in one of
the reception sofas and he starts to talk. He looks different, talks differently, and almost carries himself like a man
who is not recognizable from his older self. He has a small rent-controlled apartment in the suburbs that he shares
with 4 other Somalian guys from the same village. He has found a new girl, Wakee from his older village. It’s
almost like he has recollected some of the pieces that were blown away by the recruits of war.

I am invited to his place for lunch on a Saturday afternoon and I walk in carrying a cake and a six-pack of beer. His
place is clean but completely bare. A cloth on the sofa covers the fact that it has seen some good days. A chair.
Some books that he loves to read. He tells me how good the new job is and how everyone treats him well.

Wakee floats around in and out bringing me Indian tea. They have both gone to the library last weekend and
searched the internet to find the recipe for making Indian tea, with lots of milk and some herbs and tons of love. I am
touched by the effort that they have both put in.

Wakee had asked me if I liked my food spicy and I had foolishly said yes. It is the hottest food I have ever eaten in a
non-Indian home. Baby chili potatoes, a spinach lentil dish, and rice. In addition to this, Wakee brings out two
bottles of pickles. She spoons more chilies out of them on my plate, one green, and one red.
I am ravenous, and I eat—first with pain, then with pleasure; in the way, I imagine, any kind of relationship with
these folks would be. I am not shy of spice—my kitchen cabinet in all countries always has a stash of habanero
peppers—but this is beyond me. We laugh as I eat regaled with stories of their childhood, their younger happy days
before the war destroyed it all.

After lunch, as I walk to wash my hands, Wakee follows me. She stands next to me as I wash my hands,
contemplating something. I ask her if she has something to say.

“I just want to say thank you”, she says in her broken English.

“I want to thank you in whatever ways we can, however I can”. Her eyes lock into mine and she holds my hands in
hers and stands very close looking up.

I start to say something that's ok, but then I understand what this implies. Her English is not that broken that I do not
understand the universal language of human behavior.

She is trying to thank me for all my help, but in her world, it always comes with an implied understanding that
something has to be given. Her body is just an asset, a transaction that has to be bartered at times for a piece of
bread, a shred of cloth.

I pull back immediately and start to shake my head. I tell her that I am not looking for any compensation and that
they don’t owe me anything in return.

She suddenly withdraws and is shamed. In some sense, I have rejected her. I thank her for everything and wish her
well. She puts her head down and starts to sob.

“Nobody has ever done anything for us before. Why?” she asks Darvish in broken English between sobs as he joins
her concerned, but his face asking the same questions.

I have no answer for them. Maybe it’s just my selfishness, the need to feel better about one’s self driving me. Who
knows? In the larger scheme of things, it’s completely irrelevant as to why.

As I head out, Darvish comes up to me and hands me a card. It’s a cheesy hallmark card saying thank you and I tell
them both that I appreciate the gesture.

Wishing them well I head out back into the sunshine as I sit in my car, the card on the next seat, and I decide to open
it. It’s a poem that he has scribbled for me or maybe for himself.

Seems like so long ago.

Our family reached these shores.
Leaving behind so much history
And a country divided by war.

Now we`re asking the question again.

Who to keep out and who to let in?
Are we looking for someone to blame?
Believing the lies and talking in circles again.
The man seems to have a gift of poetry. He will do well. They both will, I hope.

Dropping the car into drive I back away leaving them to their little paradise, their slice of heaven away from all the
suffering.
Wretched Labels (12.01.2018)

Recently, at a work-related event, I found myself talking to a senior guy about some not-so-official topics.
Jason and I talk about the good old days, the joys of being single, and how it's a preference that is difficult to defend
in conversations with others, especially once you cross 35.

We talk about how tough it is to have to decide when to have children. Because, what if you make the wrong
decision, have them too early, or worse wait too long and regret it later?

We talk about how far to consider the personalities of people on your team when quirks get in the way of getting
things done.

We talked for more than an hour, and the conversation feels keenly balanced to me. It seems to flow effortlessly, and
I have things to contribute while learning a bit from his perspective.

It was not always this way.

We share our experiences and our initial not-so-great impressions of each other, although we are not sure when that
changed.

When we met initially, he came off as pretty pompous, a self-inflated man, almost annoying. I kind of never wanted
to talk to him again.
He remembers me as someone who asked a lot of questions, some too direct.

“Typical Indian”, he laughs as he tells me in hushed tones, looking around. Political correctness is completely
unnecessary with me, but it’s an in-thing this decade.

“A**hole”, I responded laughing.

We have reached a new plateau of comfort in our interactions.

As I walk back to the office, I reminiscence about how far we have come from our initial days.

It seems like we are programmed with a primal command – Identify.

The earlier I can measure you up and decide where to go from there, the quicker I can determine if I am safe.

I meet people and my brain wants the information it needs to immediately find them an appropriate slot.

Friend or foe? Good or bad? Back slapper or backstabber?

Labeling someone orients me. It helps me find my north back. It’s a way to make a bewildering world a little more
predictable.

In doing this though, it seems like I might be missing out on the Jason’s of the world.

This world does not organize itself to make me more comfortable.

These quick categorizations I make of people are a fabrication, inadequately structured fables that I tell myself.

It is a wall that I build around myself. Then I start working on digging a moat and once done, I sit in my castle with
a label. Reality is damned.

My brain invents these little labels to lend me a false sense of safety.

“Jerk”, “Ignorant”, “Talks too much”, “Talks only about himself”, “Cagey”, “Opaque”, “too ambitious”, “Redneck
Arrogant Bastard “ -

The labels never seem to end.

I dust a new one-off from my bin and stick them to each new interaction and yet never seem to run out of them.

Until I get to know them a little bit better.

The Jerk ends up being the one that I laugh with all the time. We catch each other in hallways, slap each other on the
back, and call each other weird abusive names – all the time, without absolutely a hint of malice.

The ignorant one is the one with whom I end up having deep conversations about the meaning of life.

I end up going to the opaque one for advice all the time. He is reserved and careful with his words, but I have come
to respect his opinions and him as a person. Even warmed up to him although I am not sure if that is reciprocated
just yet.

The ambitious one jumps to a new job and now that we both aren’t running the same rat race; we suddenly open up
to each other. Meeting up over coffees, we openly laugh about ‘those days.
The Redneck Arrogant Bastard ends up being from Connecticut, one of the bluest of states. He is an avid reader, a
gem of a person, and ends up becoming one of my best friends in the firm.

What was I thinking? Am I such a poor judge of character and people at times?

Think about that the next time you feel like you have already decided that you know everything about someone.

See if you can linger around for just a bit longer before closing that door. Maybe take a peek outside to see who
stands on your doorstep.

If you can, you might just end up inviting in some guests who will bring in sweet dark fragrant wines and tender
meats and delicious smelling bread and a good eye-winking above a full glass.

Maybe they will fill your house with sunshine, and joyful laughter will reverberate around the walls of your home,
where there was silence before.

It might be that those labels that you throw around are not what they are. Acronyms and metaphors to describe your
first impressions.

Maybe they are just a reflection of the different facets of very complex machinery - that is you.
What we see, what we don’t (03.22.1989)

“ Damn it! she’s got shit all over her!”

My mother and I had just gotten back from buying groceries and a small crowd had gathered at the base of our
building.

Beyond the vestibule at the entrance of our building, right inside the inner door, is a homeless woman sitting at the
base of the stairs.

“They’ve called the watchman.” Kammu, a tenant on the sixth floor informs my mother that someone was on their
way to get rid of this nuisance.

We are standing about ten feet away, and although too young, I peer through the crowd to get a glimpse.

The woman is wearing a tattered saree that is caked with grime, her hair matted with oil and dirt. She looks as if she
hasn’t bathed in many months. She sits with her arms around her knees, rocking, and kneeling.

But what drew the people’s attention was the poop. The woman has pooped herself. Chunks of feces have fallen at
her feet and the brown mass is smeared and streaked all over the lower half of her body.

Even from where we are standing, we can smell the revolting stench. It is a warm day and flies buzz around as they
follow the scent towards the woman. She must have been sitting here for a while.

“Out, get OUT!” Our building watchman, a short stocky Nepali chap has arrived, and he is waving aggressively at
the lady as he shouts at her to leave.
After a few more menacing shouts from the watchman followed by prodding from the wooden stick in his hands, the
old lady looks at him dejectedly and gets up from the stairs.

She walks through the crowd, head down, and walks slowly up the street as people stare at her in disgust.

Later, as we get home, my mom seems upset.

“She looked hungry.” My mom utters the words in a low voice, almost to herself.

“What did you say mom?”, I ask.

Mom gazes at me sadly. “The woman looked so hungry.”

Mom often gave change to homeless people, and although we couldn’t get near the homeless woman because of the
crowd, she still noticed from ten feet away that she looked hungry.

It was only then, after my mom said those words, that it came to me. I have so much left to learn about the world.

All the other people in the crowd, including me, had only seen that the homeless lady was revolting and disgusting.

She was something to avoid, something we pinched our noses at, and couldn’t wait to walk away.
In our selfishness, we only cared about our discomfort and how she offended our senses. We didn’t stop to think
about how the woman felt, or whether she needed anything.

It happens all the time.

Often, when we see homeless people, we just walk by. Often quickly. Just watching them makes us feel – Almost
uncomfortable.

We make excuses and come up with reasons why we are justified to walk on the other side of the street, to not do
anything, and to not feel bad.

Can’t they just find some work?

It’s such a busy intersection close to South Station, they must be making a killing panhandling.

It’s their damn fault. If we can work, so can they. They look pretty healthy.

They could have done better for themselves. They chose to be in this state.

They must be drug addicts. Look at him, he has such glazed eyes.

Giving them money won’t solve the problem. You are just contributing to the problem.

Just ignore them. What were you saying? Yeah, about that new position that just opened up…

What people forget about others beyond themselves is that - we are all the same people.

Every single homeless person was once someone’s child, someone’s precious wee baby, even if it was for some
seconds, minutes, or years.

No one chooses to stand outside for hours in the cold or sweltering heat because it’s easy living. Standing there
while thousands of them walk by them like they were invisible.
Do we even stop to think about where they go, what they eat, how they survive once the streets go silent after rush
hour?

How do they manage to show up the next day at the same spot as you pass them by and what has happened to them
between those hours?

No matter what the person looks like, or even why or how they got there, those who have fallen on hard times
deserve our humility, if not our humanity.

Think about it.

In the end, maybe we just got lucky.

It could have been as easily, your father or your mother or your sibling standing on that side corner looking at all
those people walking by, without even receiving a second glance…

Or it could have been - You…

Stars of the Night (12.31.1994)

Bobby, a friend from my hostel, asks me to accompany him to Pune for new year’s night and when we make it
there around evening, he decides to take a walk through Budhwar Peth, the collective name for the red-light district.
So much of Pune is a red-light district that the Dalit poets call the entire city Budhwar Peth.

At the end of our walk, Bobby and I are sitting in a bar full of men, open to the street. It is the bowels of the earth.
The whole area has an unclean aura to it. The rooms are advertised on first-floor windows: WELCOME 55. AC”
Men, singly or in twos and threes, walk past the women standing outside the bar in the yellow light of the
streetlamp, mustering up the courage to talk to them, sizing them up: age, complexion, and size. The older women
sit down on the nearest stoop, tired and almost hopeless as the night wears on.

The streetwalkers seem very much in control, both of the kinds of men they’ll take on and what they will or won’t
do. But then a pimp comes up to two women standing by the streetlamp. He pulls out an account book, makes
notations in it. The women give him some bills; he takes them, notes them down, and walks on.

I start walking away too. Bobby is puzzled; the night is still young, the endless city night. There are 3 million stories
about the naked girl.

I have no interest in Bobby’s proclivities. He is insistent so I accompany him down to the apartments, but I don’t go
any further. There are no moral obligations, nor do I have a mental block against what he wants to do. It has just
never made sense to me to pay for someone’s affections.

“Man, you are such a buzzkill…”, he finally says with frustration.

In the end, we decide that I will sit here and have something to eat while he satisfies his hunger, just of a different
variety. I am inclined to judge him, but I can’t. Everyone has their own set of needs and ways of satisfying this.

This is his.

I notice her sitting on the other side of the apartments and catch her looking at me. I look away only to look back
and she is still locked in. She knows the motions and smiles as she starts to walk towards me. I am an inexperienced
novice in these transactions, and I wonder what the polite way is. Should I just tell her to go away or should I walk
away from myself?

I instead sit frozen in my seat, the glass of rose sherbet in hand as she comes by confidently and sits on the open seat
next to me, without needing to ask.

“You can stare as much as you like. It’s free” she says with a smile.

She is somewhere around thirty but looks a bit more than that. It’s probably the years that have taken their toll on
her. The dark circles under the eyes are well concealed with some decent makeup but in the harsh light of the
surroundings, I can see the differences.
“I am not looking for something…. Just waiting for a friend”, I point at the open windows of the apartments a bit
away. She looks back, nods and smiles. She has seen this before.

“I am not looking to make money from you either. Well, not completely. Maybe a glass of sherbet” she points
towards my glass and laughs. I raise my hand to order one, but I am perplexed. This is where everyone’s transacting,
isn’t it? I wonder what agenda she holds, what her purpose is. Maybe, this is the way they reel them in? I wonder.

She senses my hesitation and suddenly gets serious and loses the tone of seduction.

“Look, I can’t take another client. I am waiting for my sister to come by with my son in a couple of hours. We are
planning to take him to the movie and if I just sit idle, my pimp will find me someone for the night, and then I
cannot go. You seem Shareef (decent) so maybe I can sit with you for a bit?”

I suddenly understand her motivations and relax. We start to talk about things around and how things work here.

“I am Mandira”, she says in accented English which isn’t too bad either. She thinks I am college educated, which
automatically translates to sophisticated and rich, both of which are bounds of leaps. I indulge her or was it my ego
that she was indulging?

She tells me about her life here. They work late into the night and sleep all morning. They will wake up at noon and
the needy ones, the ones who desperately need more money will suit up, paint up and work the streets at noon. They
will usually be the older women, women who cannot get a decent income from their evening rounds, they will resort
to walking the noon strip. It’s a time of lower competition.

As we sit there, I look around in a moment of pause. It’s New Year’s Eve, the area is packed with couples. Most of
the songs being played tonight are maudlin, weepy songs from old films, songs that the men and their true loves
think proper to express their feelings for each other, songs they have held each other to, songs that are not urgently
throbbing with need but are about what the great poet Faiz identified as the true subject of poetry: the loss of the
beloved.

All the lovers here in this place tonight will break up, in a month or a year or five, every single one. It is a palace of
impossible love.

We sit drinking the sweet syrupy rose sherbet in silence, engrossed in our worlds.

Up three stories high, Bobby is trying to prove he is the man of the world.
I meet Mandira again after a long time when I am in Pune the next summer for my friend Sandeep’s brother’s
wedding. The wedding is lavish and there is a bunch of drunk Sikhs dancing all around to loud Indian music.

Sandeep is enamored by her and has invited her one evening for cocktails at his place, a large flat overlooking the
racecourse. Sandeep’s brother is a budding journalist for an American magazine, and the guests are diplomats and
lawyers, most of them friends of his fathers, a highly influential chap in those circles.

They interact with her with the manners of the well-bred. Mandira is struck by the fact that even though the people
at the party know what she does, they treat her “like family.” This is going too far; Sandeep has only offered her a
glass of orange juice and made light conversation with her, avoiding difficult topics such as her work.

But for Mandira, any kind of acceptance into these unapproachable society circles is a huge gesture, and she is
grateful to me for showing her this world. Here nobody is pawing her, scattering currency over her head, speaking to
her with overt sexual intent.

She has to go from this party to work at Budhwar Peth, where immediately another girl accuses her of wanting to
steal a client the previous night—she had given him her phone number—and curses her in the foulest language in
front of the other dancers. Mandira gives it back, full-throated, and the screaming match almost turns physical—the
bar girls occasionally bite, scratch, punch, and pull each other’s hair—before Raja, her pimp restrains her.

Mandira is caught between these two worlds, the one she aspires to but can never be accepted in, and the other,
which she wishes to leave but which keeps pulling her back. She is in transit between these worlds, and it's just a
very lonely journey.

She dreams about her kid brother’s wedding.

“I’ll give him a great wedding. I’ll dance all night”, she says looking far away.

I look at her with some amusement.

“No, Really, I’ll dance so much”, she says again.

“What about your wedding? When will you get married?”

“I’ll never get married. My mother taught me that years ago about how things are.”

She says matter of fact, without a hint of sadness.

It makes me think what kind of mother would do that to her child. Maybe a mother that’s cruel to the core or maybe
the mother that is just practical and wants to shield her little daughter from the disappointments of the world. I am
not sure.

I look at her face and look at her eyes for the first time in all of our interactions.

For a second, I am not a man,

Just one human being looking at another.

The Advice (10.15.1999)

“I think I just landed a job today dad”.

I am really happy and want to share it with him first. It’s almost 11.00 pm and I have just come back home from an
interview with a US consulting company called GDI InfoTech.

Things have gone well, and they have offered to process my visa to go to the USA sometime early next year.

I have never traveled that far and although the idea is terrifying, it’s also exhilarating at the same time. Even better is
the idea of working and making an income, but that’s a different matter altogether.

He is sleeping when I wake him up to give him this news. He has to get up at 3 AM but I don’t care about it at this
time. He sits up in the bed, his thinning hair disheveled yet with a wide grin on his face. My mother is still in the
kitchen and I have not told her yet.

He pulls me close and gives me a big hug patting my back.

“Work hard and do the best you can…” he says and then adds “but all the more make sure in whatever you do, you
can come home and sleep well…and when you have children, make sure you find time to play with them”.

“Remember that”, he adds after a pause.

I nod in consent absentmindedly. I have a completely different agenda in my head right now and tuck his words
away somewhere at the back of my head.

He stands up straight, pulls down his white vest, and smiles benevolently. Leading me down to the kitchen, he is
happy so I could tell my mother.

Years down the line, when things got rough, I will pull those words out, dust them carefully lest they be dispersed,
and try to understand what he had meant then.

It would end up being the best piece of advice he had given me yet.
Wanting the Unwanted (04.12.1992)

When I was a kid – maybe 11 – I wanted to be friends with a boy called Sajeev who never seemed particularly
interested in being my friend.

At my inexplicable insistence, we spent a lot of time together, but the effort I put into the friendship was one-sided.

One afternoon at his house I woke up to the fact that he always treated me with a bit of disinterest, even disdain.

I told him it was time for me to go home and never sought him out again.

He never called me either.

Very shortly after I started hanging out with a new friend called Pratap who seemed happy to hang out with me.

The friendship was effortless and natural. We remain in contact to this day.

Trying to force a relationship of any nature with someone who exhibits reluctance or a lack of enthusiasm for me is
likely to set the tone for the entire relationship.

Lukewarm, disinterested, leaving me with the feeling that I somehow will never be enough.

I can’t help but feel I deserve things slightly better than that.

If instead, I invest time and effort in relationships with people who are just as enthusiastic about me as I am about
them, I experience every day what it’s like to be loved for who I already am.

Of course, sometimes I am interested in someone who is not interested in me.

When this happens, I have a choice.

I can ask myself what it is that I want:

To be loved instantly and enthusiastically, or to struggle forever to attempt to show the other I am worthy of their
love.

For life in all its flavors, the choice as stark as it may seem is.

However, life it seems is never that simple.

The Glue (06.20.2003)

Once, with my father, I went back to our ancestral house in Udvada, which used to be a village in Gujarat but is
now a town.

Sitting in the courtyard of the old house with its massive timbers, my father began introducing us to the new owners,
a family of Priests, for whom Udvada was the big city.

“And this is my son who lives in America.”

“America,” said the old priest, nodding.

“And this is my granddaughter, who was born in Boston.”

“Boston,” the priest repeated, still nodding.

“And this is my daughter, who has been to Switzerland.”

“Switzerland.”

“Now they are all going to visit Canada.”

“Canada,” the old half-blind priest dutifully recited.

If at this point my father had said he lived on the moon, the priest would, without batting an eyelid, have kept
nodding and repeated, “Moon.”

Our dispersal was so extreme that it bordered on the farcical.

But here we were, visiting the house where my grandfather grew up, still together as a family.

The family was an elastic that pulled us back together,

no matter how far we wandered.

The Church (09.21.2002)

As a child, I was always afraid to go inside a church. The huge Mount Mary church stood majestically in the
middle of the Bandra-Mahim corridor in the suburbs of Bombay. I was fascinated by its architecture, its grandeur —
the stone steeples that stood erect and almost touched the sky. As a young boy, while traveling on the bus, I would
raise myself towards the window and look out as it passed by, trying to peer inside, looking at the people who
entered those majestic doors. What did they look like? How was it on the inside?

To be honest, I was afraid. I was afraid to go inside a church. As young kids, my mother used to preach — Respect
all religions but follow your own. As a young boy, I was afraid that if I ever entered those doors that I would be
unfollowing my religion. What if they converted me? What would happen if my parents found out? A Parsi priest’s
son converted to Christianity — I could see the headlines glaring in the weekly Parsi rag Jame-Jamshed that
chronicled the highs and lows of the Parsi community.

When I came down to the USA in my mid-twenties, I finally got over my church paranoia. I ended up volunteering
and spending several hours a week at a church in Des Moines, Iowa — the middle of nowhere. I watched slacked-
backed people sit in metal chairs in smoke-filled rooms and heard their tales. I watched the lost, sad, lonely crowd
— The young and the old who drank to excess — who did everything to excess — and watching them in those
church basements I felt safe and cozy, like a wayfarer coming in out of the cold.
 Observing the people at Alcoholics Anonymous as I was sweeping the floor on the side, during those years, I found
my first forage into the voyeurism of human misery. People came from every walk of life. They were rich, poor,
young, middle-aged, and elderly. They were Christian, Jewish, Catholic. (You didn’t see many Muslims.) The only
requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking — and I saw some who had a desire to stop their path of
disaster. I on the other had a desire to stop a lot of things. I had spent so much of my life adhering to a strict set of
rules and then rebelling against them. I had no idea who I was — but I wanted to find out. And to do that, I needed
to understand myself through this crowd.

I had a little problem, though. I wasn’t sure I could deal with the whole God and Christianity stuff. That word —
God — was everywhere in the program literature. It was invoked four times in the twelve steps alone. The third step
read: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” What could
God possibly have meant by doing that?

There was also the small matter of the Lord’s Prayer. Most AA meetings began or ended with everyone shuffling to
their feet, clapping hands, closing eyes, and reciting the most popular of all Christian prayers: Our father who art in
Heaven, hallowed be thy name…I always wondered — What if they wanted to get rid of their excess without
walking into the arms of this Christian God?

Despite these incongruities, I stayed, standing on the side or working as close as possible so I could watch those
people sitting on those metal folding chairs, day after day, week after week. I was a witness to those meetings in that
high-ceilinged room in the Episcopal Church every weekend. Even though I never had an addiction issue (I was too
much of a control freak for that), I felt the way people with strong religious affiliations must, with these people: at
home anywhere in the world.

The people out there, some of them stared at me as if trying to understand what I was there for. If pressed, I would
have said that I was just a volunteer helping out and organizing things. After attending some of those meetings, I
even stopped drinking that single glass of occasional liquor, lest I lapse into that slippery slope, to be sure.
Occasionally I shared this sneaking suspicion as a fellow member would look at me, who would smile at me kindly
and suggest that I keep coming back. The implication was that if I was at an AA meeting, I de facto was an alcoholic
and belonged there. And it was true — despite all my self-doubts and guilt about the God stuff — I was comforted
by a sense of belonging that I had never experienced before. The fear as a boy that going inside a church would
convert me to someone that I am not, never had left me. It was just buried deeper, denied, away from view.

Many of the twelve steps made sense to me. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. You
couldn’t go wrong with that. Make a list of all persons we had harmed and be willing to make amends to them all.
Seemed like a pretty good idea. Living life based on a series of instructions — felt more relevant, more applicable to
my daily life, than the accumulated knowledge from all my visits all these years to the Parsi temple.

That entire summer, each weekend I tuned in, mesmerized by the stories people told. Those meetings taught me, for
the first time in my life, that people’s outsides didn’t always match their insides. A beautifully turned-out, poised
woman broke down weeping over how her drinking had ruined her relationship with her now-grown children. A hip-
looking man with a trimmed beard talked about ending up in a state mental institution, destitute and friendless. The
stories were often harsh and painful, but there was redemption in the very fact that the teller had lived to tell the
story. It was never too late to begin again. The human heart was resilient and slightly more forgiving than this world
is. It could withstand untold grief and still keep going.
 At times, standing on the side, I would pull a chair way behind, just near the door, and sit down because I was tired.
I didn’t belong there — I didn’t have any right to be there, really — but still, I came. I stayed for hours. Sometimes
AA felt like a fellowship. Other times, like a cult — with its language, its own set of rules. But either way,
something was happening in those meetings as I listened to these stories — something I had longed for but couldn’t
have named. I now know it was a kind of grace. A feeling of gratitude that my life was still a semblance of better
than what I saw in those rooms. That I still had a bit of control over this chaos.

As much as I had tried to leave God out of it, once in a while, as I looked around in that dingy church basement, it
would occur to me that perhaps there was indeed God inside that room, not in the steeple above, but this basement
below. Not the Parsi prophet that I was supposed to pray to, nor the Christian God that I was supposed to respect.
But right here, in the eloquence arising out of despair, the laughter out of the darkness.

The nodding heads, the clasping hands. The kindness extended to a cold and lonely brown stranger, miles away
from his home, standing on the side with a broom in his hand.

The sense — each and every time — of me too, I’ve been there too.

Never before had I listened so carefully or learned so much.

Navsari (08.09.2009)

There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. It is the biggest city
on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.

I left Bombay in 2000 and came back almost every year with an exception of a couple when it had grown up to
become Mumbai. It’s been a long time: enough time for a human being to be born, get an education, be eligible to
drink, get married, drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. In all that time, I hadn’t lost my accent. I speak like a
Bombay boy; it is how I am identified in Andheri and Parel.

“Where’re you from?”

Searching for an answer — in Bombay, in San Francisco, in London, in Boston, in Toronto, in Los Angeles, In
Melbourne —I sometimes end up fall back not on “Bombay” but instead “Navsari”, my mother’s hometown.

Somewhere, buried beneath the wreck of a label being a small town—one of underdeveloped catastrophe—is the
little down way down west that has a tight claim on my heart, a quaint little town, an island-state of hope in a very
old country. I went back to look for that town with a simple question:
Can you go home again?

In the looking, I found the towns within me.

I am a city boy. I was born in a city in Bombay. Then I moved to the United States and lived there for all these
years. I started from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Des Moines, Iowa, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Cleveland,
Ohio to Boston, MA. A year, on and off, in Melbourne Australia, sometimes in Toronto and scattered over time,
another year or so in London and Scotland.
My girls are born in different places, not a single root solid home as traditional American kids do or our Indian kids
do too. I live in cities not by choice but by profession, and I’m pretty sure I will die in a city.

I don’t know what to do in the country, but I still harbor ideas of having a small house in a quiet village with a little
kitchen garden where I grow my chilies and tomatoes and watch the birds go by. It’s an idea though, something that
refuses to leave me even though I exist in these concrete jungles surrounded by people with tight-lipped smiles and
even tighter mindsets.

Every year when I get back to India, I cannot wait to go to Navsari with my mother. Just the two of us. We usually
head there the day after my daughter’s birthday during the 10 days that we Parsis call the “Muktaads”. It is a time
when it’s said that the souls departed to return to earth to visit us.

I have a small apartment in an area where the Parsis still live or whatever remains of the dying community. The flat
is small compared to American standards but way large compared to my standards where the entire youth was spent
in a 457 sq. ft. of tightly squeezed but very enjoyable childhood.

It’s been a couple of days since we have been in Navsari. I spend my days languishing, getting ready around 7 am
and then going to the nearby community hall to pray for the souls departed.
The room is dark, without any electric lights but beautifully decorated and the smell of burning sandalwood and
roses permeates the air.

The priest is praying loudly at times and then going down to a murmur depending on the prayers but also his energy
level.

I change into my white priest clothes getting ready to pray. Washing my hands and legs from the well water close
by, I get ready.

The hall has a single file of marble tables along with the corners. Each table has a bunch of vases filled with exotic
flowers.

Sweet-smelling roses, tulips, carnations depending on the financial capacity of the ones left behind.

Sometimes our vanity can cross over into a sort of competition of how we display our feelings.

It is a time of somber reflection.

There is a beautiful red rose in the vase 20 feet from me that my gaze lands on.

I settle down to pray for my father invoking his name from time to time in chants. The fire burns on the dome ahead
of me consuming the sandalwood and incense.

The prayer is mechanical and routine, but done right, slowly ever so slowly one goes deep without even realizing it.

Words cannot describe the process, but the closest resemblance to that feeling is when you are deep underwater in a
swimming pool. You can see the world, but there is an array of silence.

There is no “myself” anymore.

There is just a red flower among the dark green leaves, and I am that flower and the flower is me. I am the fire and I
am the incense and I permeate into every atom of this universe and yet I am still here, sitting.

The movement of the inner has its own action, expressed outwardly, but it is not a reaction of the outer.
Awareness of this whole movement is in itself a wondrous thing and it happens ever so infrequently.

The process goes on mildly.

Beliefs (11.18.2015)

I have a manager who tells me that he doesn’t trust me. He says that he does not believe that I have his or the
team’s best interest at heart, that I have my side agendas, which I am pushing.

He states honestly that he doesn’t feel like he can trust me. He would like to someday, but he can’t - just yet.

He is a bright guy. Hard-working with a solid work ethic and always able to resolve anything thrown at him, one
way or the other.

However, his intellect is rationalizing and trying to find reasons to bridge the gap between his belief and mine and
it’s probably proving a bit much for him to handle.

We have worked together for just over a year now.

On good days, he is extremely helpful and at times, I feel like he wants to solicit my inputs, not just put a face on it.

Then there are days when he is just upset, and I cannot do anything right. I let it go most days but there are days
when our frustrations do intersect.

The trust comment lingers with me long after it’s made. It has struck a chord within me.

I come back from the office after the day is over and am unusually quiet. Ana picks up on it quickly and I have to
give her a brief overview. Mostly, I vent. I feel slightly bruised, wounded.

I would like him to believe and to convince him that I am as loyal as they come.

That there were a couple of instances where people who have an adverse opinion of him sound off and that I have on
those occasions gently steered them away from there, without it seeming too obvious.

That I remember well how he helped me once when I was new and that I carry that gratitude with me always,
irrespective of how insulting he could get, sometimes without even consciously realizing it.
I chalk it up to a brother taking some slight abuse from another and I hold no grudges towards him. They would
have to go through me if they ever wanted to get to him.

I don’t think he realizes this, or he probably does and doesn’t feel like he can acknowledge it.

My mother is very sick, and I am worried about her, a lot. I wonder if her thin frame would make it through this
bout of ravage.

As I sit across the conference table in the large room facing him on an early Wednesday morning, I glance down at
my phone to read my younger sister’s message.

“She is still running a very high fever. Should we shift her to the hospital?”

He is meanwhile telling me how disappointed he is and how I could do a lot better.

I know man... I know.

I see him look at me with naked disapproval and wonder what I should say to mitigate that. Maybe, just maybe he
will know one day, that I am a shield, not the spear coming at him.

I have no way of convincing him otherwise. If this were a couple of centuries ago, maybe I would have knocked
some sense into him.

There is no new message on my phone. It is 5.50 PM in India.

I would like to tell him that I just want to work as best as I can, laugh a little with my people around and go home to
the family.

I start to tell him some empty words and then realize that the more he hears, the harder his opinions get.

He shakes his head slightly, unconsciously. He does not want to hear me. I can see he has already tuned out.

His opinions have solidified in the cold winter of suspicion.

As I watch the ocean out of the window sitting in that conference room hearing him speak, I suddenly realize
something -

The hardest thing to give up is the thing we have decided to believe.

The Rash (07.15.1988)

” Just tell us how long ago?” he asked with impatience laced in his voice.
I stand there in the sand, the ocean behind my back. All I can see are my feet. My toes are buried in the sand, my
entire body is shaking even when I want to stop it with the force of my mental willpower. My head is shaking too. I
don’t want to be here. Suddenly his hand cracks across my face, snapping it back with the force of his blow and
causing my head to reel sickeningly as it lurches back. When black dots and blue colored electric rays stop covering
my vision, I am still standing there on the sand although I wish I could be somewhere else, anywhere but here.

“How long ago?” he asks again.

“I don’t remember. Some twenty minutes?” I ask instead of telling as I try to recollect as best as I can, but it might
as well be a complete lie.

A couple of hours ago I had tagged along with a couple of school friends to go to the 7 stones beach. It’s an isolated
stretch of sand cradled between large houses facing the ocean. It’s a rainy morning in the middle of July. As we take
the bus down to the beach, there is not a soul on the road that is usually teeming with people — which is weird. After
all, this is India.

“Who the f*** goes to the beach in this rain?” Praveen who is almost a foot taller than me asks nobody in
particular.

“Enjoy it while you can. The schools start back up on Monday. This is going to be our last outing”, Harminder, a
lean gangly Sikh kid pipes up from my left. I laugh as I reach out and try to pull him by his hair tied in a bun which
he slaps away easily.

Later, as we fool around sitting on the rocks in that torrential pouring rain, I worry about how I would go back
home and explain these wet clothes. My father would be back home around 4.00 and mom soon after, so I would
still have enough time to get back and change into something dry. It’s not a worry, but I am a Virgo and need things
to be sorted out in my head.

As I straighten a few minutes later and stand, my eye catches something in the sea. There is a head bobbing in and
out of the water. The swimmer is clearly out of his depth — but how is that possible? Not in this weather. He can’t be
more than 10 feet from the shore. On a normal day, you can wade out 30 to 40 feet before your feet can no longer
touch the bottom. I think idly — a big coconut. I scan the beach. My friends are all there.

That morning, as I glanced at the sea as we came, I saw that the current had shifted. The bay was still fairly calm
but a little choppy, no longer clear. To anyone unfamiliar with these waters, the change would be imperceptible, but
I understood its significance. Beneath the benign surface, a treacherous undercurrent was building, doubling the
depth, and sucking anyone out to sea. I had almost been caught in it once before and the force can be startling. “See
how the current’s changed?” I had called Shankar gesturing out to sea. He had cast a glance, but could see nothing,
and had turned his back. We had the rocks to ourselves, so it seemed unimportant, and the thought soon drifted out
of my mind.

Now I take another look at the black round sphere bobbing up and down in the water. It was only seconds ago that I
had spotted it but it was already moving further away from the shore. I scan the beach again when the idea suddenly
shocks me. My gaze snaps back to the swimmer. That can’t be…can it? I squint my eyes in the rain. It can’t be, but I
think it is.

“Do you know where Harminder is?” Praveen asks scanning the horizon. I can see Shankar, my other friend out of
the corner of my right eye, but Harminder is not to be seen.

I hear Shankar shout out loud, yet it’s not clear in the pouring rain. He is flinging his arms violently above his head,
calling on to us. I don’t want to go, but something pushes me ahead. It’s not every day that Shankar is that excited
about something.

“I saw Harminder go into the water for a dip, but I haven’t seen him come back. It’s been a while now”.

As I turn around ninety degrees, I freeze. I see the green shirt a little away in the sand. The white slippers with the
blue straps are just another foot away. At that time, my mind shuts down. I try to remember what exactly happened
after that. All I remember is the fishermen with nets running into the water, and later the stout men with mustaches
and short-sleeved shirts asking questions and the hard slap across the face as I snap out of my dream. The panic
flooding me like ants, my body itching as my hands scratched my chest under my soaked half-buttoned shirt. But
even as I stand, I can’t believe seriously in my fright. Surely this can’t be a genuine emergency. These kinds of
things happen only in movies to clueless people who we already know are actors. It’s just that they don’t know it
yet.

I don’t remember much of that day besides the rain, sheets of rain. My mind has shut it down, erased it over time,
and sanitized it into something vague — Distant, and disproportionate. Yet, in all my daze, I do remember that Sikh
man, just slightly crestfallen standing next to the other men looking at us with those fierce eyes and saying ever so
softly —

They killed my son.

I have often wondered what I was doing at the exact moment of my friend’s accident. I might have been sitting on
the rocks or laughing or dreaming about the day. I might as well have been running close to the water, I don’t know.
How could I not have felt it happening? I was on the other side of the beach, just a short distance away, but still —
how does the fabric that connects us rip into shreds without our knowing it?

The morning of his accident, I had the only allergic reaction I’ve ever had to anything before or since. My chest was
covered with a red rash down to my belly. I had that morning became hot, itchy, irritated — as if some alien force
had become trapped inside me and was desperately trying to claw its way out. Coincidence? Probably.

But it’s hard not to feel that my body knew something that the rest of me didn’t.
Behind Closed Doors (07.12.2012)

“I am scared Z. Will you come with me?”

Melissa is someone that I met years ago in a random walk up and we have been friends ever since. We don’t meet
up often, but when we do our interactions are always – Satisfying.

Not in that sense of the word. To that, we have three very specific hurdles.

Firstly, we have tremendous affection towards each other, but radically different opinions on life in general.

Secondly, I am married, and I love my wife immensely...

And finally - Melissa is, well, bi-sexual.

She has always kept it well concealed and only some of her closest friends know it.

“I am planning to come out to my mom today.”, she says with conviction. I have never heard her say this nor do I
know what prompted the sudden change of events.

I don’t see it as my business to ask but I am such a gossip monkey that I do. She laughs...then indulges me.

We drive through the leafy suburbs of Salisbury, down the winding road, and up the small cliff to the end of the
road where a small cottage sits surrounded by a flowering willow tree.

It’s quiet, almost too quiet and I wonder if this is a premonition of things to come.

A gentle old lady greets us at the door. She is diminutive, full of smiles but one of those that looks like she has gone
through, well - everything. It does feel like she is a flag-waving, bible-thumping conservative and I wonder how
things will go.
I plan to hang back and play the dumb Indian, almost like furniture.

As we enter the house, I look around for guns, above the fireplaces. There is no fireplace, just an old wicker rocking
chair. I make myself comfortable in that corner. Close to the door, just in case…

They both start to chat about here and there. The usual topics – Upcoming family events, the new dress
Melissa brought, even her periods. I dig myself deeper into the ground turning red but I am not noticed.

“So,” Melissa says suddenly. I am sure she has played this moment in her head for a long long time.

“I have a date tomorrow.”

The old woman smiles and rubs her palms excitedly.

“I want details!”

Melissa doesn’t look like she is too sure what to say or how to say it or if she should say anything. She pulls up her
date’s Match.com profile and hands her mom the phone.

The mother props her glasses on the tip of her nose and eyes the screen.

A full-sized frown shows up on her face. I have a hollow in the pit of my stomach, the size of a football field. I
cannot imagine what Melissa is going through.

Her lips move, silently reading Melissa’s date’s profile.

She looks at the phone, then at Melissa, and then for a second at me. I don’t have anywhere to hide.
She looks at the phone again.

“I don’t get it.”

“I, er…”, for once the ever-opinionated Melissa is also at a loss of words. I eye the front doorknob warily.
“She’s a woman,” her mom says.

“Yes.”

“Your date is a woman?” She stares at her over the top of her glasses.

“… Yes.”

“Oh!” She lets out a sigh. There is silence.

The afternoon birds perched on the tree outside continues their conversation.

I am watching her closely, almost too closely.

“I get it. I thought this girl set you up with someone, so I was reading to figure out who. But she is your date!”

Melissa lets out a breath. I am still on pins and needles. This looks all downhill from here.

“Yes, Mom,” she tells her. “She’s the date.”

The mother spends the next hour plying Melissa and me with questions —

When did she know?

When did you know? Did you ever think it was a phase or did you just know?

Why didn’t you tell me?

Is your friend sitting up here gay too?

Age 18.
Just knew.
Never needed to.
Hell, no mom! He is so taken.

Melissa answers confidently, almost as if she is interviewing for a job. Except that she is talking to her mother and
the interview is to earn something coveted – her approval. Retain her affection.

At the end of our chat, she looks at Melissa’s feet.

“If you’re going on a date, you need your toes done. Come over tomorrow and I’ll do them. That is just
embarrassing.”

She then turns her focus on me.

“Are you gay too? You are too good looking to be one”. She is not convinced yet.

I show her an old picture of Ana and the girls. She stares at the kids wistfully, then realizes her mistake and gives it
back to me with a smile.

“They are gorgeous! Taken after their father I presume”, she says with a twinkle in her eye. I quickly dispel that
notion.

We talk around for a bit and then we get up to head back home.

As she is leaving, the mother turns towards Melissa and tugs on her sleeve.

“I won’t text you throughout the date, but you better call me afterward so I can hear all about it!”

Melissa hugs her, then the old lady turns towards me and I get a big one too. In what we have shared in the last hour
– I am family now.

I walk out lightheaded with happiness, for Melissa, for the entire humanity.

I think about those who came out and suddenly didn’t have a home. Who lost their relationship with their family,
who were beaten, who were murdered, who lost everything - Just to retain a bit of themselves,

Today Melissa came out as bisexual and her mom’s biggest problem was that her nails weren’t done.

What else is unconditional love, but that?

Theory of Happiness (11.28.2013)

In 1922, Einstein was touring Japan and he stopped by to dine at a restaurant. After dinner, the bellboy in that hotel
delivered him a message. Einstein didn’t have change for the tip so he wrote a note called the - Theory of Happiness
and gave it to the bellboy who probably didn’t know who the man was or what he was inheriting at that time.

The note recently sold for 1.5 million euros.

What Albert Einstein wrote was this -

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the constant pursuit of success combined with constant
restlessness."

The words resonate in my head as I go about doing things during the day. I come back to think about it…more often
than I usually would. An anchor has been struck within me.

One of the most brilliant minds in the world said that a peaceful life is a real key to happiness. It didn’t sound like a
novel idea, but I look around to see how I and this world identifies the idea of happiness.

We are constantly told "Get this..., do that..., Push yourself harder....Achieve something in life...You can do anything
and the sky's the limit...Work real hard...., and then…only then, you will be happy" and I get that, but probably like
Einstein at that moment did, I am starting to question the validity of that approach to life.

I think back at the moments in life when I was truly happy, and many come to mind.

Waving my hand out of the window on an express train as a kid while I see the stations zoom by.
Sitting on the beach drinking warm beer on the lifeguard stand with my friend Crystal at 2 am.

Sitting cross-legged on the mat waiting for Ana to bring out the sizzling pot of spicy biryani on a Friday night.

Standing on the balcony with my old friend Nigel and a drink in one hand abusing each other or commenting on the
people passing by, things we would never say out loud.

Sleeping with my eyes closed with my head on grandma's lap.

...The list goes on, but none of these are derivatives or products of any achievements. Notice the words – Sitting,
Sleeping, Waving, Standing…

They are rather the product of stopping for a second in my journey of pursuit of those achievements that produced
these moments.

I wonder if there is a purpose to that journey since the moments of sheer pleasure are brought when the journey is
paused. Maybe that journey is essential because without the journey there is no pause or maybe the extension of that
pause induces a larger dosage of happiness.

The urge to achieve more, accomplish more is tied to the question that we ask ourselves every day –

Am I the real deal? Can I do complex tasks? Am I even worth something in your eyes?

The answer itself is relatively simple too when looked at from a different perspective.

When you came out into this world, you survived the adversity of birth.

As soon as you got out, you took some long-synchronized breaths right away, intricate and rhythmic at the right
intervals.

Your heart pumped the right amount of blood and you knew when to cry to get attention.

You proceeded to accomplish pretty complicated things.

You learned to balance yourself, walk and then run, aligning your body with commands from the brain center in
milliseconds all within the first 500 days.

You already come equipped to be amazing at many things. You have already accomplished the many
unaccomplished. The ability to do amazingly difficult things is already part of your original composition.

Trust that.
What about us? (06.26.2017)

What does it feel to be helpless?

I ask myself from time to time. I have encountered the feeling at times in face of some adversity, but there are
always options. If worse comes to worst, I could find a job that pays less, and barring that I could dip into my
savings account or ask my sister to support me for a while.

There are always options. I have always felt that these did not even come close to the helplessness felt by some,
where there are no options, no hope. When you have nothing to gain, you have nothing to lose.

I walk along the sidewalk of the KEM hospital on my way to the grocery store nearby. KEM is one of the few
remaining government hospitals in Bombay that still tend to the poor, the people who cannot afford the 50,000
rupees deposit that you have to post in before you are admitted.

People from around Bombay come here to be treated. Most of them live outside and have no connection to the city.
They have nowhere to live and cannot afford the hotels in town. So they do what the poor do when faced with
diminished choices, they improvise.

The sidewalk is littered with small makeshift tents that contain a scatter of belongings, rarely any people. The people
are in the park surrounding the hospital, hordes of them waiting to be treated. There are no appointments, lines, or a
sense of order.

They have no idea what is ailing them. Some will go back cured. For some, this will be their burial ground.

Life in all its glory of unpredictability unfolds here every day.

As I stand by the iron fences surrounding the park, I try to look inside. I glance at a couple at the far end of the park
under the banyan tree. The man is dark, short, and tough. He is wearing a white shirt and pants which are now
yellow with dirt while his wife sits next to him.

A boy around twelve sleeps in her lap. He sleeps as most kids do, holding the end of her dress in his tight little fist.
His entire head is bandaged in gauze and they are trying to keep him as comfortable as they physically can. His
father massages his feet, rubbing them gently almost wanting to not give up the physical proximity of human touch.
They are looking around, searching, a slightly worried frown on their faces.

I am curious so I walk in towards them. I see the father getting alarmed as he sees me coming. His gaze is locked on
my shoes. He mistakes my military shoes as security or worse the cops.

“Sir, we are only here for some time. Let him sleep for a bit. We will go out by the end of the day," he pleads.

I don't correct him but instead, point towards the boy to ask what is wrong with him. "Dokyat gaath" (lump in the
brain) he says simply. He does not know much about a brain tumor, but he has collected enough to know that it is
serious enough.

The kid was operated on last week and was in emergency for the last six days. They have since shifted him out
which could only mean two things - he has either done miraculously better or his bed has been prioritized over
someone else's. I suspect it's the latter. Shelar does not know this yet. This is probably his first brush with the public
hospital system.

They are farmers who own a piece of small land in Nasik, a small town 200 km from Bombay. Proud and self-
sufficient they had never encountered this feeling of helplessness, a loss of control over their situation. They are
overwhelmed, tired, and lost, as any parent would be in their situation, rich or poor.

Shelar suddenly stops his conversation midway and runs to a short stooping man in a white coat. His wife explains
that he is their doctor and they had been waiting all day to see him. The doctor recognizes him and walks towards
the kid to check on him. He runs a battery of standard neurological tests, pinching his feet, hitting his ankle with a
solid object, looking at the pupils.

He talks to Shelar in hushed tones while his wife and I wait at a distance.

As the doctor prepares to walk away, Shelar comes back to his kid to slowly pull his head on his lap comforting
him, comforting him.

I take this opportunity to walk towards the doctor who is walking out to take a break. My English with a slight
American accent opens the door for a conversation. He has seen me with Shelar and his family. I ask him about the
kid and he shakes his head in sadness.

The prognosis is not good. In a city where there is a severe lack of neurosurgeons, their places are filled with interns
learning to operate. They join a government hospital hoping to get some expertise before they bolt to greener
pastures, the private hospitals that are growing like mushrooms.

He speculates that one of them probably operated Shelar’s boy. He recognizes the angle of cut of an intern compared
to an experienced neurosurgeon.

“Someone like me will never cut below the ear “, he shows me using his finger as the knife.

They probably removed the tumor but accidentally nicked nerve-wracking havoc. When this happens, the patient is
quickly stitched up. There is no accountability. This is rare but happens more often than we would know, he says.
The parents have a glimmer of hope that something was done. They win some and they lose some.

Over multiple cups of sweet strong tea, he explains his day-to-day work.

He gets up at 4.00 and takes the 4.50 fast train from Virar to come down here. He starts to make his rounds at 7.00
and operates in the afternoon unless there is an emergency.

He seems tired, not by the amount of his work but even more with what he has seen and endured.

“I see them all every night”, he tells me of those failed surgeries performed with limited instruments under the most
challenging conditions.

“I see them all. Every night. They scream at me. Horrifying screams. I am not afraid of them anymore.”
He pauses for a second and I see the moisture in his eyes. He stops only for a second, his eyes fixated just over my
shoulder.

"It's the little ones that scare me. They look at me silently with their dark pleading eyes... I could have saved
them...if only I had tried harder".

His voice is barely above a whisper and is cracking.

People around us are talking, drinking their coffee, or laughing on their cell phones unaware of the brevity of the
moment.

The brunt of the decisions he has to take in the split of a second, acting God has taken its toll on him.

“I don't know why I do this. I can easily retire somewhere. "

His brother-in-law is in Texas and has been urging him to migrate. He has a standing offer from a local hospital
there to head their neurosurgery department easily fetching north of 300,000$, easily 500 times his current salary in
the government hospital here where he is paid a pittance.

They could buy a four-bedroom house, buy a Honda pilot and put their kids in a private school or take vacations to
Europe once a year or attend wellness life seminars spending thousands.

His wife can spend her days making decisions on who to invite over on the weekends or when to refurbish their
basement instead of waiting for him to come home at 10.30 pm. However, he cannot make that leap.

“What would they do without me?” he makes a sweeping gesture at the people in the park.

I look up at his face expecting a sense of self-importance but instead see only a sense of overwhelming sadness.

"What would I do without them?" He adds with a wry smile for good measure.

He shakes my hands, smiles, and walks away thanking me for the coffee. As the short dark figure walks away, I
wonder at how many of these real heroes we miss. These people who give their all, saving a life. Saving the world
entire. Making an actual difference. Barely acknowledged, seldom recognized.

I walk back to Shelar and he is happy to see me.

“The doctor has asked us to monitor him for the next 24 hours. I think he will get better “, he says gazing longingly
at his son, and softly rubbing his face as his wife adjusts the blanket shielding him from the dust and flies
surrounding him.
The flies probably have recognized a dying body and they know what I know now but I have no heart to tell Shelar
that his son will never wake up. That he will take the Nasik express someday without him. I fish my hands into my
pocket and take out all the money I have and give it to him.

It's not much. Around 3,400 rupees. He will need much more for the funeral. They are both amazed and surprised as
to why a stranger that they just met today morning would do this for them.

I don't know why I do it either. Maybe it's a way for me to assuage the guilt. They are proud people and keep telling
me -

“Sir if you can only give us your address, we will return every cent someday soon", he says with utmost sincerity.

I know they will, but I don't want to. I am tired, almost physically. I was only out to buy some groceries and I just
want to go back home. Back to my cocoon where everything is fine.

There is no sickness, no death.

Days later, I visit Darius, my friend who is in Beach Candy, an elite hospital in South Bombay, for a sore throat
infection. Darius runs a flourishing ad agency and is doing well for himself. He believes he got the infection waiting
outside his car on the road while his driver fixed a flat tire.

“I should have just f**ing got a cab”, he says with obvious irritation.

His consulting doctor comes in as I am talking to him. He examines his patient with a gravitas commiserate with the
ailment but also in line with his bank account.

A bevy of attentive interns follows him, and the nurse writes down the instructions on their iPad while Darius
regales in all the attention. He is bored and lonely and is looking to get out of here.

The doctor urges him to stay a couple more days and get a full-body scan, just in case, he says.

Darius will easily spend north of 500,000 rupees in these couple of days to cure an ailment that could have been
easily taken care of by gargling with warm saltwater. He tends to his health in the same way as he does with
business, carefully.

I find myself wondering - what would Shelar have done with the 500,000. Would it have made a difference to that
family?

What is wrong with Darius wanting to spend his hard-earned money to ensure his well-being?

Why should he give away anything?

The capitalist and the socialist within me fight the eternal battle that has gone on for generations.

I sometimes wonder how people can be so oblivious of things happening around them. I work in the financial
district of Boston where there are more millionaires per square foot than compared to most places on earth.
Fabulously wealthy people who wear Savile Row suits custom-tailored.

I watch a suit walking down the pathway towards the south station and an old woman sitting on the sidewalk. She is
bent over, her feet clad in battered shoes, probably the same age as his grandmother, but she still has the dignity of
someone who has seen better days.
As he walks by, she extends her hand out to ask for money. The guy almost physically flinches as he quickly moves
away from her and starts to look at his cellphone - the new social crutch. He starts to whistle as he crosses the street
to the other side, almost embarrassed to be there.

I wonder what a couple of bucks would have cost him. What would be the impact if he stopped for a second, looked
at her, not just as dirt but also as a human being? Would he end up helping her a bit?

Would he have walked away as easily if it were his mother instead?

I have seen enough in my life that it has affected the way I think about spending money. I have never developed the
finer tastes in life even though I was closely associated with people who have this trait.

It's not that I don't want to but every time I attempt to do that, I am thwarted back by something - something
concrete yet invisible. Like a hand pulling me back.

My relationship with money is like that of a man with his mistress -

Hidden in the shadows of ambiguity.

"What will you do with all the money?”, they ask me again and again.

Some ask with a barely hidden tinge of sarcasm while some are genuinely curious.

My friend in Boston wants to go out for lunch and I cannot tell him that those 10$ lunches at the local food cart add
up.

I cannot tell him that I need that money, every cent of it. I cannot tell him that even if I add the entire net worth of
myself and then add his - that it would still hardly make a dent in the suffering. I can't give them a good answer.

I cannot tell them about the things that I have seen nor can I erase those from my psyche.

I walk around in the malls at times going through the brand name stores. I run my fingers over the soft material of
the shirt or admire the stiffness of the collar or the cut and inadvertently I look at the 80$ price tag and I walk.

I am not walking away from it. I just don't see the need to own another shirt when my closet is not growing any
more accommodating. Sometimes I indulge and end up buying a 10$ shirt from Savers when it's on sale for 5.

Coming home, I already know they are there and even before I open the door, the LaxmiBai’s or the Shelar’s are
waiting for me looking at me accusingly.

“Do you need another shirt when we have not eaten in four days?”

“Why do you need another leather belt for your expanding waist when our children's bellies are shrinking in
hunger?”.

And so, I exist, as I have been for years now - Torn between these two worlds, neither here nor there.

A bridge in time between these two very disparate worlds who rarely interact with each other.

One safe in their nest of silky materialism, while the other seething with anger born out of hopelessness. I have seen
them both and I cannot unsee either.
When we were young, we heard a Buddhist tale about a prince that was asked by the gods to be granted a wish and
he told them, hands bound in prayer –

"May I be able to alleviate the suffering of every being, small or big, whosoever I cast my eyes on across all
universes. May they be free from suffering and all the causes of suffering”

I sit on my balcony chair watching the setting sun contemplating what it would be to have been granted that wish.
Crushes (12.25.1991)

The first time I fell in love was in fourth grade.

It was Rukhsana, a Muslim girl from the nearby local by lanes of 4 bungalows, a leafy enclave half a mile from the
ocean. She studied in the same class as I was in.

That day I couldn't get the math problem right, was also lagging in my homework and as a punishment our class
teacher made me sit with her for two whole weeks.

We usually had wooden benches of two. Boys sat with boys while girls were on the other side. In a pre - MTV era of
hyper-sexualization, girls were a curiosity, an alien species that could be looked at, giggled, talked about in hushed
tones, but never interacted with directly.

As I sit on that bench embarrassed beyond words, I can almost feel the eyes of my friends boring down into my
back. Shame seeps through every pore of me as I sit tongue-tied, staring straight ahead until the ringing of the final
bell for the day puts me out of my misery.

"Do you have an extra pencil that I can borrow", I hear her words and for the first time look at her almost startled. It
is still day 2. Besides my sister, mother, aunt or cousin's she is the first girl I have talked to and the interaction does
not plan to go down smoothly.
I open my tin box and take out a pencil, but it's broken so I sharpen it, dropping wooden crustings all over the floor.
She thanks me for the pencil, but then proceeds to bend down and pick up every shred of crusting’s dropped. I am
red in the face and my body feels like I am in flames, embarrassed beyond belief.

The next day as we are sitting down, I look at the floor underneath our two-person bench and start to pick up pieces
of paper and wooden pencil shavings, probably in an attempt to gather some affirmation. I am rewarded with a smile
from the piggy-tailed fair-skinned girl. It keeps me warm and glowing till the end of the day.

By the end of week one, I am smitten. By the middle of week two, we both bring a little broomstick from home in
our bag - As she says, we are "Cleaning our house".

Our – such a sweet word.

Right then, I am domesticated in the true sense. I am barely eight years old and learning the rules of coexistence
with the opposite sex.

The week comes to an end and she goes back to sit with her girls back again while I attempt to go back to normal,
back with my boys. However, I am beyond normal. My days are colored with her exploits and I dream of us living
in the same house and sweeping the floors daily. It's all I understand based on my limited interactions. The girl has
set the bar high for cleanliness and for the crushes to come.

Most crushes are seemingly ephemeral and the power that they exert might seem much more than they should - A
childish example of emotions trumping logic and reason.

“Amor Fau”, says the French, or puppy love - A phrase I have always disliked for its dismissiveness, for who loves
more ardently than the young? Others, however, are deep and last a long time. And profundity lurks in something
that takes up all our attention and touches us deep down to our core.

Grade 5 starts up and I am moved to a different school by my parents because of events unrelated and I never see her
again but falling in love becomes synonymous with cleaning floors.

Until the next girl rolls in and breaks that mold, rebuilding it from a different perspective.

"Do you know Collie aunty by any chance?” she asks.

Grade 6, September 14th, 1986, recess time.

I remember the date because it's my birthday. I am wearing a brand-new half pant that's two sizes bigger than my
already chubby self and held together by a very flimsy belt that should have retired from its job a couple of years
ago.

As I peer through my thick-rimmed glasses, still panting from the 50-yard run getting back to classes, I am
awestruck.

She is the fairest of them all, a short hairstyle in a sea of piggy-tailed girls that I considered modern, articulate, and
confident to the core. She is in the top five percentile and is the teacher’s favorite. The boys aren't too behind in their
admiration.

She has one eligibility criteria that trump everything else - She is a Parsi, same religious nomination as myself.
Having grown up in a strictly religious household where Parsis are supposed to only marry into one of their own, I
have already whittled down this one into my fantasy future to-be and have been conjuring fantasies for almost a year
before this interaction finally takes place.

"Umm yeah, the one in building 48?” I ask panting.

We talk for under a minute and that's that.

As I head back to my desk, my heart is almost ready to jump out of my chest. I barely manage to get through the
day. With the school day drawing to a close, I tread home with a dreadful but slightly exhilarating feeling –

I am in love, once again.

The next 3 years of my life are spent trying to chase a one-sided dream. Every song that I hear has connotations
designed to serenade our mythical non-existent relationship.

I lay in bed, flat on my back singing Stevie wonder's Part-time lover or applying pimple cream standing in front of
the mirror listening to Kumar Sanu, a local Indian singer belt out tunes from his latest film - Aashiqui, a saga of
unrequited love mirroring my predicament making it even more real in my semi teenage brain.

Days morph into months and then years. However, I can somehow never attempt the courage to talk to this girl for
the entire 3-year period, even though she sits just one desk behind me diagonally in class.

At the end of grade 10, school has wrapped up and we are on the cusp of starting a 2-year college. At this time, I
finally muster enough courage to settle on a hair-brained scheme to garner her attention or even just talk to her
directly. I am a grown-up moron now, still a moron.

My parents have asked me to collect a need-based aid form from a local Parsi charity trust to pay for college. I
decide to get two instead - One for me and the other for my fair-skinned muse. I have also found out the general area
where she lives by following her and her friend back from school one day. Ingenious at best, stalkerish at worst.

It's a huge apartment complex with six tall buildings in all housing easily more than 200 families. If that was going
to stop me, they had something coming. Dressed in my finest - a leopard skinned cotton shirt of bright yellow dotted
with black and wafting dad’s half-empty bottle of Brut cologne, I step into the complex visiting each building,
looking at the name list below trying to find her household. I hit gold on the fourth, but by then I am drenched in
sweat in the morning Indian sun.

Almost shaking, I ring the bell in her apartment and her mother comes to the door, slightly surprised at seeing this
plump sweating entity there. She is just behind her dressed in a nightgown, instead of her usual white and blue
school uniform, the only attire that I have ever seen her in.

All of a sudden, the practiced sentences go out the window and those years of non-conversation take over - again.

"I have a scholarship form....” I barely mutter as I thrust the form in her hand, turn around and walk out. I am
supremely embarrassed. Red-faced. My entire body is crawling with red fiery ants. The 20-minute walk back home
in the baking Indian sun feels like 2 hours.

The next three weeks are spent just trying to escape crossing her path in college. At the end of the third week, on a
Friday, I have the scholarship interview coming up. Knowing she would be there; I spend hours grooming up - A
peacock spreading feathers.

As I wrap the interview on Monday and head out, I see her heading into the conference room. Our last names being
alphabetically similar, we have been scheduled back to back in the Indian system where everything is
chronologically ordered by that criteria.

I linger outside, not yet ready to leave.

"How did it go?” I brave up and ask cheerfully as she shows up outside after 30 minutes. It is my first conversation
in four weeks and I almost feel relieved. It was just a basic interview, nothing earth-shattering.

"It went great! Thank you for getting me those forms. ", she says genuinely.

As I turn to walk away, she calls out behind me.

“Are you heading home?”

A thousand suns light up immediately. Internal fist pumps. I nod. We decide to go home together.

As we take the commuter train back to Andheri, we stand by the open entrance. She is standing with her back facing
the wall as I am facing her with my hands on both her sides, against her, making sure she is safe from the metro
pervs. I have never felt more masculine.

She is telling me about some amusing incident, and I laugh along with her, although I am not sure what I am
laughing at or with. Her skin is so close to my own. She has grown up this year. Slightly freckled and always
smiling.

There would be a greater sensitivity in a one-sided relationship like this - the timelessness that purifies all things in
its simplicity.

In the imagined moment, we are two simple people walking down the path as countless before us. Nothing will
come of this, we tell ourselves, no burdens of consequences, of the "we could be doing something wrong and the
future, will punish us", and yet the moment is pregnant with possibilities.

And therein lies this great despair ...that without a future we are essential without a present, for we can only give
someone so much now and the rest is just that - a promise of things to come.

It's a 40-minute train ride and feels more like 5 seconds.

I come back home and drop down on the bed with the largest of smiles. Turning on the music to a volume of 10, I
sing internally.

My annoyed grandmother watches her plump grandson laying on bed legs dangling by the side in his favorite
yellow, black cheetah shirt singing away to random English lyrics she could never understand.

Days turn into weeks and morph stealthily into years. I never capitalize on my newfound familiarity and instead
retreat into my shell. The flame of my crush burns brighter with each day of isolation, of non-conversation. My head
conjures up scenarios of how I would accidentally cross paths with her, to talk smoothly.

I wait hours outside her architecture college, but I never see her coming except once when I see her standing and
talking to a boy - A rich trust fund kid whose shoes probably cost more than both of my parent’s salaries combined.

After seven years, my unrecognized, unrequited and unadulterated sentiments finally come to a combustion point
where I decide I need to take this forward - Boldly. I decided that I would finally put an end to this agony. To have
a “talk” with her and get this out in the open. I fancy my chances at 50/50, the wildly optimistic teenager that I am.

I write a long letter explaining my outlook, my dreams, how she fit into those, and how I thought we would be very
compatible together. For a lettre d’amour, it’s way much more practical, clear-eyed, and bland.

Keeping it ready to be delivered when the right circumstances arrive, I tingle all over, for days. I am eyeing the New
Year or just beyond that. With Christmas around the corner, I have a week or two left to execute my decision.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” my friend Chandu calls me standing across the balcony of his apartment.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I am not going anywhere. At 7 PM, I am planning to take a quick walk, eat a couple of
samosas from the roadside stall and then head to bed. New Year celebrations are not something my family has done.
Years are years and days are days - They see no reason to celebrate as such.

Chandu and I buy a couple of samosas and walk towards the 7 bungalows garden. It’s getting dark and we both are
talking about the upcoming exams next month. I suddenly look upon a couple ahead walking. They are holding
hands, fingers entwined as most couples do. The girl is laying her head on his shoulder from time to time and they
are deeply engrossed in conversation.

I suddenly slow down and so does Chandu, in keeping pace with me. I know that shape, that figure, that hairstyle. I
know it all and yet I blink - Once, twice, and again. I keep walking behind them, just yards away with Chandu still
talking, but my head is ablaze. Seven years - and here we are.

All those days and nights of fantasy come to a single crashing halt. There's no repairing a relationship that never
really existed in the first place and yet I am devastated. Desire is a lie told to yourself, again and again about how
things worked out so well for you until the lie comes more easily than the truth until the lie falls apart.

I leave the garden when they walk away, unable to stay in that place, unable to be the one abandoned, left behind. I
walk back home into the belly of aching sadness, and it was the end of fall and that was just a coincidence, but my
god everything was dying around me - The trees, the light, my smile, my pride, my conviction - that no matter what,
I would never do anything bad.

I would. I would.

I would kill to make this story my own, to be the one walking in that garden, next to her, holding her hand, have her
head rest on my shoulder - to erase the memory of that vision in the garden late that Sunday evening.

But back home, that night under the moonlight night, all truth in the story would wither and fall. Over time, the
waves would slowly die down, the passions would subside, and the pain would become just a light dull throbbing
until someone else took that place to heal it.

Time - the things we think it takes from us - allows us the dramas of our lives.

With a single stroke comes a definite closure.

But how many of us are that lucky?

Friendship & Memories (11.28.1990)

My father, once a handsome and charismatic man, lost his friends and acquaintances to kidney failure and
subsequent dementia.

The fact that he had no short-term memory, in the end, made him isolated.

His actions became easy to interpret as a lack of interest or at worse nonsensical.

How long would you remain friends with someone who doesn’t remember anything you talked about?

Who keeps asking you things you just told him? Who never does anything he says he will? Who forgets anything
important to you?
His younger brother who he loved deeply and yearned for a visit from never visited him - To the end. There was no
bad blood there. Just plain indifference crusted over by time.

Friends stopped coming over because he wasn’t the person he used to be. Because it was impossible to keep up any
semblance of a conversation. Because he could not be counted on.

Aren’t these the pillars of friendship?

Being with someone suffering from illness sometimes requires that you redefine your concept of “friend”.

It demands that you forget the person you once knew and be willing to deal only with this new person right in front
of you.

It means you have to decide to show up for something beyond what you shared before.

Or maybe it means you have to decide to show up for nothing.

Compassion would have to overcome convenience.

In this new relationship, there will be no give and take. Just give. And give.

You’d have to flip your logic: rather than invest in a friendship, which implies the existence of a trajectory, a future,
you’d have to show up in honor of what you once were, which implies honoring the past.

If you lose the person you once were, wouldn’t you like to think someone would be there just so whoever you
become doesn’t have to have lunches & dinners alone day after day?

So maybe you show up hoping that someday when the roles are reversed, someone will show up for you.
The Writing (03.22.2005)

I have been writing since I was 14.

"Can you write me a decent love letter for my girl?".

Sure.

"Hey bud, I need to get this job. Can you write me a sparkling cover letter?"

Absolutely.

" I need to break up with that girl. Can you just bang something out where she doesn’t go stalker mode on me?"

You are on your pal.

How is it that you write so clearly, so fluently?

Damn, can you teach me how to work that magic too?

Where do you find these words?

They ask me questions that I cannot answer. Not because I don’t want to divulge a trade secret, but because I have
no appropriate answer that's even close to the truth without sounding completely crazy.

I try to answer it though sometimes. Just for my sanity.

I think back to my teenage years when I was just starting up college. We were always a little short of money and
needed to apply for funds that give out scholarships to needy students. My mother’s uncle had written out a good
application that I used to help copy over, again, and again to apply at various trust funds. Slowly within those
iterations came slight variations. I begin to inject a bit of my personality, a slight dash of pepper to the placid salt.

I also have a voracious appetite for reading. It started with newspapers – ‘The Bombay Samachar’, a Gujarati
language chronicler of everyday news that I used to read daily while having lunch sitting on the balcony of my
childhood home.

By 13, I had graduated to Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, similar variations of detective work by some smart and very
lucky teenagers.

James Hadley Chase came in around 16 with its dark twist on human nature installing a new sense of how
treacherous people, especially women could be. In some sense, I lost my innocence, but it made for some
ravishingly absorbing reading.

Around 18, I got my hands on the first real nonfiction - " The Day of the Jackal", a biography of Carlos the jackal,
an internationally known manipulator who turned assassin for hire. My dad had got it a while back, probably given
to him by someone. He was not a reader by any means and kept himself limited to the daily newspapers. I read it end
to end completely fascinated, refusing to get out from under the blanket for a couple of days as I wade through it.

One night, while studying for my MBA, my roommate brought in Atlas Shrugged, an Ayn Rand masterpiece who
was in a category of her own. I never assimilated the outlook of free will and creative destruction that she so
vigorously promoted, but I was fascinated by the characters. We used to take turns reading it- him from noon tonight
while I slept or chased tail. The night owl took over after 11.00 devouring it all night like a coyote picking at a 500
pound of flesh - One bite at a time.

When I ended up in the USA, in the heart of Silicon Valley I found this amazing store called Barnes & Noble, a Las
Vegas buffet of ideas under one roof – all free.

On a lazy Saturday morning, I amble around and end up with a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Every sentence is a
minefield. For the first time, I am not collecting information. I am actively destroying it. Destroying the ideas, I
have, questioning my preconceived notions of a higher power. I scrape through every corner of my mind cleaning
everything that I have collected over the years, probably over eons.

I leave the store to go home at 10.00 pm still on page 32. A man slightly different from the one that walked into the
store on that drizzling Saturday morning. I still did not buy the book then.

I had spent most of the years that followed wondering what to do with my life. Why did I feel so lost? What was it
all for? It wasn’t until much later that in a moment of despair I turned to read. I read and then I wrote - In notebooks
that I filled up and left in drawers, unread, unseen.

I re-discovered something the little boy I used to already know - that the time that I spent reading was the best part
of my day.

It still is.

Some books mold me, shape me into what I write as a reflection of who I am or better, what I have become.
But all the more, it is the fact that words have a capacity to move me. To make me fascinated by their interplay and
the enormity of their power in making or breaking a psyche.

I vacuum those words and sentences as I read storing them somewhere, to be used later.

When I sit down to write, all I do is slightly crack open that door.

There is nothing at first. I stare inside the dry well and a sense of immensity starts to take over.

Then the first thread of thought flutters by, like a feather floating down just before an impending storm.

A trickle of drops as they fall. A sense of relief washes over. I know now that there are more coming.

And before I know it, the light drizzle turns to a roaring torrent.

I stop trying to write the words. Higher power takes over and pens it for me. Out they come in streams of
consciousness.

I remember the Darvish and his words - If you stand at the precipice and stare too long into this dark abyss, it could
turn you insane. Maybe this is what that insanity of higher consciousness feels like.

I never go back or revisit my sentences, ashamed that they are not written by me. That they are not my ideas but
someone else’s.

But yet they come with a roar so loud it submerges every sound around me. An unstoppable force that threatens to
destroy me and everything around me.

They cover everything in a sheath of luminosity, making things seem slightly glossier than they are.

It's just minutes but it feels like years. It leaves me exhausted as it passes through me.
And then I am done.

I put down my pen or stop typing. I take a couple of steps away from my creation, afraid of what I have given birth
to.

Like a survivor after a storm, I look around at the new landscape in awe. There is complete silence at that moment.

There will be another storm brewing around the corner. But for now, I am surrounded by tranquility.

And this is how I write...

The Trip back in Time (08.01.2006)
S
" ir, Shirdi is still three hours away", the bus driver tells me as I walk up to the driving deck.

I am on my way to pay my respects to a higher entity. I may or may not get to Shirdi but I feel I have already accomplished what
I had come for.
The Camp (04.09.2012)

Do you know that it takes just five days without food that the internal systems start to lose bearing?
That seven days later the heart rate starts to slow down to conserve energy.

or that ten days without a shower and you start to feel that sense of edge creeping in,

that after just twelve days of silence with absolutely no conversation either way that the mind loses its coherence,
the ability to form sentences is slowly but surely corroded,

and that all of this even though it sounds clinical on paper that it's something completely numbing when one lives
through it.

Even worse is that millions of people live through it day in and day out without us noticing it.

I meet Jonathan on one of my flights to Australia. He is an ex-Israeli special force veteran and now runs one of the
top five security agencies in the UK just out of London.

After knowing that I am a third-degree martial arts student and learning weapon defense, we bond over tactics and
things that work.

He invites me to one of his 10-day sessions that teaches extreme disorientation.

I have heard about this from the Krav Maga instructor but am not that interested.

I ask him who his clients are. Most are the usual suspect's ex-navy seals, a smattering of ex-cops and at times even a
monk. It's that statement that catches my ear and I ask why a monk would want to go through that.

He mentions that it's part of their generating true compassion, that when you feel the hunger, the biting cold, the
complete silence that takes one to the borderline of insanity that you start to have a true appreciation of how some
people live their lives.

I suddenly sit up very interested. I have done a couple of low versions of these, but this aspect seems something else
as he describes parts of it. I tell him that I have an alternate life.

A family, a boring job, the usual suspects. That this had to be reversible, nothing lasting can happen and then I throw
in the kicker just to round it up that I don't have the kind of money to run through the course, forget pounds not even
in dollars.

He considers that for a moment, his face registering no expression.

"You have a talent that seems extremely valuable in my business. You can draw people in,
make them reveal things very subtly, asking the right questions but even more - at the right time and in the right
tone. You can wear them down, all with them almost wanting to do it."

I am a church confessional priest without the official decree. I've heard this before, so I nod and listen.

" I might want you to run some of my men through the wringer as part of their training".

It sounds pretty simple, so I nod and agree. He turns around in his business class seat and is now facing me full-on.

For the first time, I see a flicker of expression on his face. Its amusement mixed with a slight introspection as he
extends a hand with a vice-like grip.

"Welcome to the AR34 batch for 2012. We start in 5 weeks if you are cleared physically."

I have no idea what I just signed up for ...

Under the Covers (03.24.2016)

It’s a cold snowy night and it’s been a long day. As I lay down in bed after putting the kids to sleep, I look outside
the window behind me as the snow falls softly covering everything in a sheet of white.

The small Christmas toy shop night lamp shines on one corner of the windowsill providing an ethereal aura of quiet
solitude.

I look at Ana next to me already fast asleep and I smile as I run a palm over her head softly, a long-formed habit that
I can’t get rid of.

Of all the people that I can think of, I am glad I end up sleeping next to her.

When you think of it, you lose an integral part of yourself when you don’t sleep in the same bed. It is far more subtle
and nuanced than anything related to physical contact.

The fact is there is magic about the night that is otherworldly.

The days are busy, tangled, filled with friction, miscommunication, and small lost battles.

You go to bed irritated, miffed, ruffled, grated, sometimes even wounded.

Under the covers, there is a brush of skin, a search for a foot, a snuggle.

It’s a bid, an offering, an opening.

It’s wordless, offered reconciliation. It’s me feeling the safe harbor of your arms, the familiar scent of your hair.

This has the same effect as looking up at the stars: you take a deep breath.

Then, gently and with wonder, it floods you with inevitable perspective.

That small thing that irritated me doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe that argument was distorted. Maybe next time I can work at being more tolerant. Understand you a little bit
better.

This is the component - this salve, this mending, being stitched back whole - that is lost when you are not sleeping in
the same bed.

I turn on my side as usual away from her as I reach out to grab her hand under the pillow.

In no time after I grab her hand, I am gone – carried away in the land of dreams, where everything is safe, mystical,
and wondrous.

Sometimes the most valuable things in life are usually the most invisible.
The Walk (08.23.2013)

I am at City National bank running a weeklong workshop on Payments and transactions. It's been a long hectic
week and I am glad it's almost over. Hotels are great to live in and the travels to exotic places sound great until you
have to deal with the missed flights or find yourself having lonely dinners all by yourself in a drab hotel room at
midnight.

I love LA but I am just glad to go back home to Boston. The season is slowly changing, and the leaves have started
to fall and there is a slight chill in the air, even in LA. I wrap up my final meeting around 6.00 updating the folks
back on the east coast on how things have been. By the time I look up, it's almost 6.45. The red-eye to Boston
doesn't leave until 11.00 so I have enough time to myself.

Taking a cab, I sit back and watch the wave of the crowd’s ebb and flow. The cab driver, a middle eastern old man,
is cursing the traffic and I listen and nod absently. Everyone is in a hurry to get back home, each of them engulfed in
thoughts, in their worlds like bubbles of water in an ocean. Each one distinct yet just one mass when looked from
above. Sometimes we never realize how similar we are even when we work hard to maintain a distinct identity.

The business lounge is packed with late-night travelers getting out of LA so I end up picking a lone chair facing the
window. Flights leave at regular clips and I have always enjoyed watching them kick-off, like excited teenagers
jumping off in the pool on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It's between watching through the window and fighting off the
sleep that I notice her on the side sitting on the ground behind a rolling frame away from the view of most
passengers walking by on the airport.

She is around 20, face littered with brown freckles, slightly plump, and not that attractive in the traditional sense.
She is wearing a red checkered shirt and jeans but unlike most girls who would be seen in shoes appropriate for her
age and fashion, she is wearing slippers. She has her back to me and I expect she is working her phone as any
teenager would, trying to stay connected to her social network. Between the usual bevy of Facebook's, Instagram,
Snapchat we still are amazingly lonelier than we have ever been.

I go back to getting some shut-eye but something about that picture doesn't feel right. I straighten up in my seat and
take a look at her again and that's when I notice that she isn't hunched over her phone and yet she is moving
constantly, almost in a rhythm and I realize that she is shivering.

The air vent from the glass window is right above her head but that doesn't explain the heavy shivering. I hesitate for
a bit not wanting to intrude - Unsolicited walkovers from brown-skinned random strangers this late at night in LA is
a cause for healthy suspicion and I don't see myself showing up in a sexual predator directory just yet. So, I sit and
watch instead. She is rhythmically shivering and cupping her hands, her head between her legs.

As I scan her belongings next to her I suddenly notice the pair of crutches leaning behind the frame against the wall,
yet her leg is not in a cast. Trying to ignore the situation I go back to reading a recent email, but I finally shut it off.

She could easily be someone's daughter, girlfriend, or even a mother and I impulsively get up and walk over behind
her, careful not to scare her.

"Anything I can do for you?"

She looks up over her shoulder and up at me. She is much younger than she looks, brown eyes and I can see she has
been crying. She nods and smiles back.

"No. I am just waiting for the flight to San Diego". It's delayed for now."

"I just saw you shivering...maybe it's just the temperature here."

"It sure is cold today. "

I nod and head back to my seat behind her and try to get back to replying to the emails while listening to music, but I
don't like what I see. Impulsively I get up again, pick up the coat and lightly wrap it around her back.

"I am around for a bit and the coat might make itself useful", I try to be nonchalant, but it comes out as weird.

I head back to my seat and she turns around and looks up to smile. It's a genuine smile and makes her look a lot
more beautiful than she was a minute ago.

She slowly gets up, balances her crutches, and walks towards my chair. As she is standing next to me, she balances
herself on them off the wall.

"Mind if I sit here and talk to you for a bit? You seem ok", she is almost telling herself.

I nod and pick up the book on the chair next to me and she sits down holding on to the coat. I am glad for some
company. The clock across the wall is still showing 8.22 p.m.

We introduce ourselves and she tells me about herself in bits and pieces. She is heading back to San Diego to meet
her father and brother who is going to pick her up at the airport.

"Why were you shivering down there?", I ask blandly, yet curious to know. My assumptions range from something
as benign as having a cold to a drug-related withdrawal. I have seen enough junkies and known them well enough,
but this girl does not fit that pattern. Her arms are clean and she seems well educated and articulate.
She looks down into her lap as if contemplating an answer. She looks up and her eyes are filled with tears, big ones.
She is fighting them hard but it's a losing cause.

" I am getting operated on next Monday." She says shaking and then sits back, straightens up her back, and says in a
flat voice.

" it's my leg. They will have to amputate it."

She lifts the side of her jeans slightly. I can see that the left foot is heavily bandaged. The sides peeking out are red
and swollen, almost angry. I look at her with a questioning look, but I can't manage to say anything yet.

"I am diabetic". She looks at the ground next to me as she says that. I have seen my dad pass away because of it, a
slow painfully lingering death. Shitty things happen in life all the time but not to 20-year olds.

" Could have been both legs ", I blabber out with a smile.

That was harsh and abrupt even for me, especially for me and I am not sure why I said that. Must be the long hours
from the last couple of nights, I rationalize.

She looks at me for a second, stunned, and then starts to laugh. It's an unexpected response and I am surprised by it.
I think she is too.

Her palm is under her thighs and I can see she is still cold. I don't have anything else to offer and I offer my hands
instead, palms open, facing upward. She gives them easily as I rub them gently warming them up as we talk.

Someone watching us from behind could have blatantly misunderstood.

"We should take a walk", she says without preamble after a while and I am happy to go for it.

I help her up with her crutches, but she seemed well versed with it. The top of the crutches that go under the arms is
faded signifying it being long in use. I suddenly feel guilty for being able to function without needing one myself.

We start to walk slowly. She is telling me about her childhood. The happy memories that she had growing up how
she could run-up to the top of the hill, outrun most of the kids in her class and I can see she is collecting those good
memories.

She will need them a lot more starting tomorrow. It's easy for us to not understand what one would go through
losing a limb. Even harder is to have a timeframe on its exit. I wouldn't wish it on my enemy.

She is just a young girl with a long life ahead of her.

LAX is a huge terminal and we walk almost the entire length of its interior. Not once does she mention anything
remotely depressing and as if I wanted to change that, I ask her about her parents, especially her mother.

"She passed away when I was five". She looks off into the distant space.

She is visibly tired. I gently steer her towards a sandwich shop, and we order some food.

As we eat, she suddenly looks up at me.

"Will you like to come to visit me sometime?"

My mouth full, I nod in affirmative and she brightens up with the biggest of smiles. She reaches out and writes the
address and contact information on the napkin. She cannot stop smiling and neither can I.

"I don't get too many visitors. I would like that. Don't send me any roses. I don't like them”, she wrinkles up her
nose in disgust, as we both laugh.

We sit and talk for the next hour like old acquaintances.

It's getting late and the crowd is getting thinner as the pace starts to slow down.

We start to walk back to gate 52. The flight to San Diego has started to board and she is in the business class. Yet
she holds onto my arm for a bit, talking about her father and brother who are coming to pick her up.

It's time.

"You gonna be ok?”, I ask.

She nods in the affirmative and I can see she is holding back tears. I slowly rub her back and hug her. Sometimes
that's all we need. Sometimes it’s all we can provide.

As she almost starts to walk, she looks back, her face a mask of expectations.

"You will check on me sometime, right?"

"I promise I will. Be safe."

She hands me the crutches and wobbles for a bit before standing firm holding on to my shoulder as she wraps her
arms around me and gives me a big hug. I can see she is in a lot of pain, but she wants to and I hold her.

It's an act of defiance against the terrible ravage of the disease. Her last triumph, her f*** you to the one that finally
took away her limb.

She slowly walks away and turns the corner of the flight.

I start to tread back towards my gate. It's the last flight out to Boston tonight and it's usually a packed one.

As I walk back to the lounge to pick up my luggage, I notice the crumpled napkin still in my hand. I look at the
writing on it, hesitate for just a brief second, and then drop it into the nearest trash can as I continue walking.

I know it’s for the best.

UA-1614 is already boarding as I pull out the frequent flier picking the smallest gate in.

The week is almost coming to an end.

Meditation & Itchiness (09.18.2009)

Sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my apartment, I am trying to meditate.

I am feeling pretty uncomfortable. I think I would be able to do this better if I could switch the cross of my legs.

I switch the cross of my legs.

A corner of my eye itches. I will scratch it. I will scratch it and then peace and I will be one.

I scratch it, and as I do my head itches, and my nose. I keep touching it.

My brain is just as unsettled. I begin to go over all the things I need to do right after my meditation.

Come back. Come back to your breath but I can’t yes you can come back.

I want to stretch out my neck. I want to stretch out my neck and then silence will be mine.

This is how I learn what I have now. I need to meet it all as it is – my restlessness and itchiness and my fidgety,
fidgety nature.

I need to sit in joy and pleasure and discomfort and pain and itchiness.

It will not be better later. I will never be perfectly comfortable and as such the time to be perfectly still is now.
Life is just like this.

Things will be perfect just as soon as I figure out what I want. When I lose five pounds and go to India on a vacation
and wrap up my latest certification and get a new job.

Life would be perfect if only I didn't feel so lost or if I can figure out what I want to be.

But the belief that happiness is somewhere else after someone comes in or is gone, as soon as you do whatever, is a
distraction, a decoy, from what I have to put in order, within myself.

If only I can accept now. Find happiness now.

It’s all I’ve got.

Heart & Heartaches (06.05.2012)

“Are you afraid to be left alone?”, she asks with inherent curiosity?

I have been living on the street for the fifth day as part of a twelve-day experiment to understand the life around
here. I meet Mel standing in a soup kitchen line during a sweltering London morning and we have struck up a quick
friendship. She is a recovering drug addict, a mother of two, divorced a couple of years back, and has been single
ever since. Her husband took the kids away because she couldn’t stay sober, court orders and all.

“My best friend just got engaged and now I am left alone as the last of the singles in my group. I fear that I will die
alone, with my little hamster”, she laughs a nervous laugh, yet there is a ring of fear behind it.

I try to find the appropriate words but then I look into her eyes.

There is a hint of immense sadness in them, the feeling of missing out on something good. The feeling of being left
behind.

Everyone dies alone in their own cauldron. Your death will be no more or less gruesome than any others and
happiness is a thing that passes through you, not a thing that you meet and hold in your deathly grip forever
afterward.

You are afraid of being the last at a party without the others, while the others have gone into the woods they don’t
understand.

They are the same woods you stand in, weeping, and the trees look at all of you the same and say nothing.
Stop asking questions you should be answering.

You already have those answers within you.

Give a little piece of yourself to everyone, and in doing so, let those pieces come back to you -

Exponentially multiplied…...
The Sea (04.12.1998)

Ana and I have been going out for almost a couple of years now. She takes me up during some of the darkest days,
those days when nothing feels right, and you are reminded of Murphy’s Law — Day in and out. She is like a bright
ray of sunshine walking into my damp dark existence.

Everything she touches is bright, growing, thriving. She finds every corner of my life, one nook at a time, and dusts
it off, polishes it, cleanses it with her laughter, and lightens it up. I start to slowly pack up my older pieces, heavy
ones at first, pack them up and sneak them away when she is not looking, up into the attic of my head, hoping to
never have to revisit any of it — ever again.

There are some pieces that I make sure I put away even before she gets to see them. I will never talk about them
with her or anyone, especially with her. I don’t want her to be tainted by those in any way.

They are too dark, and I am singularly afraid that having touched them she will no longer be this bright, happy, and
feather-light girl that I met. She is the thin thread with which I hang in balance, tethering, leaning, seeing the drop
below, but pulled back just in the nick of time. I am safe now, my heart still beating slightly erratically at what I
saw, felt, touched, heard but setting in slowly now. I would like to keep things that way.

She comes to visit me from Pune once a month. Her family has accepted our relationship even though my mother
has tentatively, almost grudgingly come around, seeing her for what she is, A decent person. Extremely beautiful yet
unaware of it. Happy and cheerful. Just a good soul — something that’s rare to find these days. Something that I have
never seen. She finds in me someone easy to love instead of someone perplexing and difficult to please

Like a dog visiting the moon for the first time. I blink around wildly. Still not rationing the stroke of luck that I
landed into. I am lost but happily lost, enough that I never want to go back.
We take a public transport bus to Marine drive. It’s one of the most scenic places in Bombay. The arch of the ocean
extends for miles and the air is filled with the smell of the ocean. The road is wide, the traffic is sparse and there is a
wide blue sea on one side and tall buildings with palm trees lined on the other. We walk along the short wall built
across the oceanfront. Rocks are stacked up along the side of the wall to block the flow and the sun is shining
brightly. It’s a beautiful day.

Lovers are sitting on those rocks, facing the ocean, their backs towards the people walking on the roads. Their
anonymity shields them from the social stigma of being associated, two people of the opposite sex interacting
distinctly, just as nature intended them to for generations before, and probably enough of those after.

I walk next to Ana and she is telling me about the different dishes that she could cook learning from her mother and
how the recipes are passed down. She is talking about her grandmother, a rich old cranky lady, and we both laugh-
two people entwined in the intersection of time and space. Young, carefree.

We don’t know what’s coming and neither do we care. We are perfectly happy as our fingers touch and she grasps
mine, boldly and suddenly we are holding hands, looking at each other and smiling.

The world sometimes cannot be more perfect, even if we script it ourselves. It just happens.

A grain of rice can encompass the entire universe. Eternity can be held in a single moment.

A peanut vendor is sitting by the side of the wall and I silently check my pocket to feel the crisp feel of paper.
Money is not yet an automatic commodity for me and it’s habitual to check if I have some. I feel it crumple in my
hand and a smile spreads across my face.

“Would you like to have some peanuts?”, I now ask her, much more confident than a few seconds ago.

“Yes!”, she smiles and looks up at me. She is happily excited at everything and it’s getting to be contagious. I cross
over to buy the 5-rupee peanuts and hand him the cash. The old peanut vendor takes the money and touches it to
both of his eyes before putting it in his pocket. It’s his first income for the day, an auspicious omen. He adds in some
more nuts and lets me know about it.

We both sit down on the rock. She looks up at me and smiles again, holding me close even though I am slightly shy
with this briefest of PDA, yet oddly proud to have her by my side — This beautiful, stunning girl with this jobless
dark guy with a pretty chequered past. A slightly mismatched couple and I break into the biggest of grins.

She has no agenda. She wants nothing from me, not even a commitment to a solid relationship, a big house, or a big
marriage ceremony. Everyone I have met so far has had a motive. My cynicism is like a piece of old leather,
hardened over the years by exposure to people who have taken from me, my pithy fortunes, my tiny opportunities,
and at times even my shred of dignity.

Nobody has shown me the level of affection that this girl has, yet in the subtlest of tones — Like a magnificent
brushstroke of red on a Picasso. In the warmth of her affection, I keep melting slowly, a block of solid ice left out in
the sun. I put my arm around her, and she allows her head to rest on my shoulder. She tries to feed me a peanut from
the paper cone. As I open my mouth, she instead eats it herself and then bursts out into innocent laughter and ruffles
my hair as I look at her, slightly in awe. The world spins just a bit slower.

At this moment all the events of the past are forgotten, even forgiven. The last piece is finally put away into the attic,
the door is locked shut and the key is thrown into the ocean behind slowly sinking to its bottomless depth. Unaware
of the turmoil within she continues to talk as I turn back to her and start to really listen.

As the sun starts to set over the bay, we both start to walk back to the bus stop. She has to be back home in time.
This is still India and our parents still have a hold over us even though we are both old enough to fend for ourselves.
The bus ride is quick, almost too quick and I want to spend more time with her. I drop her at the elevator and wait up
until she reaches her balcony and waves back.

As I start to walk to the bus stop, I suddenly realize that I have no cash left. The peanuts threw the carefully
calibrated daily budget slightly off but I am fine with that. My options are to travel without a ticket or walk for a
couple of hours. It’s already late and I decide to take the bus.

As I hang on to the bar from the footsteps of the direct bus heading home, crushed yet comforted by the peak hour
crowd heading home from work, I start to put things in a nutshell. There is an immense clamor, and I stand on one
leg, watching, despairing.

I think of the girl I had just left, her beauty, her poise, her richness. She is the way I could distinguish myself from
this herd, preventing myself from getting annihilated by the crowd.

At that moment I realize I am in love. Being with her, with a fine woman like her, would make me an individual.

What I have is nothing to my name, no property to speak of just yet. My assets on the page are intangible and
worthless. My coffers are almost empty, and any offer of safety has long faded away. Yet I realize as a wild grin
spreads across my face –

At this moment, I am the richest person alive walking this earth.

Dollars & Cents (12.16.2017)

Everyone has a voice inside that whispers - “Shhhhh. Hey. You are not enough."
The other thing it says is “you don't have enough, and maybe you never will."

These two voices were put there to protect you so that you'd build yourself up and procure those grains for a wintery
day.

But sometimes the voices get too loud and drown out everything else. They cloud your judgment just like a foggy
mirror after a warm bath on a cold Friday morning.

Money is the way to get things. If you can get things, then it must mean you do matter.

This is how money makes you feel …like if you could only make a little bit more you would be able to silence those
voices once and for all.

This idea is just a fantasy. You can't take an outside entity and solve an inside problem.

I like money. Let me rephrase that - I love money, a lot actually.

I like that it makes me feel safe knowing that there is a cushion of it buried in my bank account.

Staring at those numbers at times provides me warmth on a cold winter night. I imagine that soon someday I won’t
need to work, and I will still be good for it…
I like it because I can distribute some of it and call myself a better person or satiate my vastly inflated ego.

...and I like that I can sometimes exchange it for a new shirt at a heavy discount from Savers or an occasional visit to
Jade Palace – my favorite Chinese buffet.

But I try not to confuse it with significance.

Two people within me (02.19.2013)

I missed dinner again — Was too busy wrapping up a late-night meeting with an Australian bank.

I missed the school play — I didn’t think it was that important. Math and Science, now those do matter to my Asian
sensibilities.

I forgot to call my mother to wish her a happy birthday today — Just totally slipped my mind. I swear I planned to
remember it. Even had it in my mind a couple of days ago.

I didn’t know what instrument my daughter played — Something flute-like is all I know.

I didn’t see the sadness behind my wife’s smile — Sometimes she just hid it well, but most of the time I was sitting
6000 miles away from her and the phone was the only connection.

I didn’t notice the disappointment in my daughter’s eyes — I was planning to come in tomorrow and take them to
Applebee’s over the weekend, but some work came up and I had to stay over in London.

But I did take the message from my client asking for updates late at night.

I worked hours of overtime and always made it to the networking parties late in the evening.

While my wife was tucking our children in at night, I was slyly checking my outlook email one more time.

I would probably spend the last years of my life in my mansion wondering why my grown children never visit me.

Mom, how are you today? What did u eat? Tell me about your day.

I added extra vacation days to my leave so I could stay over with Dad and Mom some more.

I changed the diapers in the middle of the night so my wife could catch some sleep. They smelled like hell,
especially at night. I even rescheduled my meeting to make the PTA meeting.

I taped a note to my keyboard so I would remember to look up my client’s request Monday morning.
I valued friendship and conversation. We laughed and drank cheap brandy and stayed up late talking.

I helped my daughter with her science project. We cut and glued until our hands were sticky.

I took my elderly mother to the doctor’s whenever I was in India and I visited her every year without exceptions.

I knew the names of all my daughter’s friends. Even had funny names for some of the familiar ones.

I might probably spend the last years of my life with friends and family between the US and India bouncing my
grandchildren on my knees.

There are two types of people in the world. It seems to me both of them live within me, a very short distance from
each other.

Those who prioritize work, and those who prioritize people and relationships.

Those who live to work, and those who work to live.

Those who look to buy happiness by paying top dollar, and those who end up owning a factory that manufactures
their own.
The Mall (08.19.2003)

Not far from the place where I used to live during my college years stands one of India’s glitziest shopping malls.
By day, the massive building dwarfs every structure around it. At night, a dizzying display of lights cruelly exposes
the surrounding shops and houses for what they truly are — Old and weary from the daily assault of man and
weather.

Inside this shining behemoth called Quest, Puneites with fat pocketbooks spend their rupees on luxury foreign
brands such as Gucci and eat at Michelin-star restaurants.

Outside, life’s cadences remain much the same for people like Rashida. She lives in a slum in the shadow of Quest.
She is part of a faceless, often-cited statistic, people who survive on less than $1 a day.

If you think of India based on the income divide, it is almost as schizophrenic as any country can be. One India
boasts billionaires and brainiacs, nuclear bombs, tech, and democracy. The other is inhabited by people like Rashida.
Faceless, clueless, hopeless -- — Almost nonexistent unless you dig deeper into the boroughs.

I have known Rashida since she began working at the rental apartment where we boarded in college. She walks
every morning — sometimes in rubber flip-flops, sometimes barefoot -- -- — from her room about a mile and a half
away. She arrives around 10.00 am to wash the pans from the night before and the dishes from breakfast. She scrubs
hard, and we often joke that we could taste the grit of Ajax in our fish curry. She dusted the furniture, finely covered
with a layer of dust even though the day was still young, and hand-washed clothes too delicate for our rustic
washing machine.

Rashida was probably then already well into her 60s, though she used to say: “I think I am 50.” She didn’t have a
single piece of documentation, but her family insisted she was born before India gained independence in 1947.
She stood not much taller than my mother, but no one was fooled by Rashida’s small stature; she was steely from
years of domestic labor.

One day when cash is running short and I don’t have much to eat, she comes by to clean the rooms as usual and
accidentally sees me eating a week-old bread with a banana. She knows that I hate bananas, but the situation is dire.
Her motherly instincts kick in.

“When did you have your last dinner?”, she asks without any preamble.

“Last night, of course”, I replied incredulously.

She shakes her head and pats me on my head as any mother would.

“I have a son too and he lies too. I know”.

She goes out and gets her lunch pack and unravels it. Outcomes a bowl of rice and daal and the smell permeates the
entire room. I don’t even put up a fake protest. I eat voraciously, everything, scraping the corners, the curves, the lid
— Everything. A couple of days of hunger can do that to you, especially when you are young.

From then on, she cooks and brings me a small batch every single day. If I am not around, she leaves it right in the
middle of the bed. I adore her as I would my mother and even after I pass out of college and get a job and go to the
USA, I seek out Rashida on every trip home.

On one visit, I learn that her husband, Sheikh Fazlul, had died, and as she grew feebler, she had a hard time keeping
jobs. I always tried to slip her a few rupees, but she never takes the money without insisting on “earning” it. She
asks for some work, this frail lady in the sunset of her life, but I have none to offer. I sometimes invent it. I send her
to my friend Darrius carrying a week-old sealed letter and tell him to accept it and pay her a 100. He is amused but
doubles it and pays her. This trick lasts for a while until she catches on.

“Don’t ever do this again baba. Our dignity is the only thing we have and it’s much more expensive than 100
bucks”. She is serious. I never pull that stunt again.

I visit India often, partly because I am different from many of my Indian American peers who arrived in the United
States as young immigrants and did not look back. My family is still in India through the years and my connections
to my homeland run deep. But there is another reason. I tend to see poverty in India through the prism of my own
experiences.

I am aware, too, that a Westerner’s view of India is often clichéd — it’s a land of corruption, bus crashes, pollution,
arranged marriages, and colorful festivals. It may still be all of that, but there are so many new dimensions to that
mass of the population, suffering in the sewers yet so richly alive. The changes force me to reacquaint myself
constantly with the land of my birth. It’s a never-ending exercise in futility, enriching but still in some ways futile.

This afternoon, I am eager to see how Rashida has fared since our last meeting a year or so ago. I navigate a dark,
maze-like alleyway that leads to Rashida’s one-room abode.

The air is smoky from coal-burning stoves, the sulfuric smell colliding with the perfume of onions, garlic, and garam
masala in the woks of women cooking lunch. There’s no indoor plumbing, and I see teenage girls fetching water in
red plastic buckets from an outside tube well. There’s a common toilet, but men and women bathe out in the open.
Dignity is the first causality in these neighborhoods. To learn that is to cross that threshold of no return.

I walk through the slums looking at those people. To my ego, they seem to be beneath me, yet they invoke a
powerful sense of helplessness deep within. They just want to fare better than their neighbors, move up a notch,
however small, in the money ladder — not unlike any of us who strive for a better house, a shinier car, a good
education for our kids. But Rashida never moved up and that is perhaps her great sadness; that she was widowed by
a man who she believes had neither the verve nor the physical strength to improve his lot in life.

I spot Rashida’s granddaughter, Manisha, and she takes me to her. Rashida’s room is cave-like, with no windows. A
wooden cot sits up on bricks to keep it dry when the monsoons intrude. An old black and white television set
perches precariously on a shelf. Scratched aluminum pots adorn a wall facing the bed as though they are priceless
works of art. For this privilege, Rashida pays $2 a month, about what she used to earn cleaning our house. Rent
controls in the slum are the only reason her son-in-law, who lives nearby, can afford to keep her here. She shares the
space with her grandchildren and, sometimes, a daughter who lives in Delhi.

I take off my shoes and walk into Rashida’s room. She is on the floor and cannot stand up by herself to give me her
usual warm hug. Arthritis has taken hold of her body and limited her mobility. I sit down on the cement floor to
meet her eyes. I had told her ahead of time that I would be taking her on an outing.

“It’s so good to see you,” she says. “Where are we going today?”

“To another world,” I say jokingly.

Rashida hobbles to another room to get dressed and returns wearing a new orange and white printed cotton sari, the
kind I know will run for at least the first dozen washings. She is barefoot, the cracks on her feet blackened by dirt.
We walk to the road and get into a chauffeured car I have borrowed from my old friend Darrius. She is hesitant at
first. She has never sat in a car before. Always wanted to — she said. She is excited and apprehensive all at the same
time. She looks up at me for validation. She starts to take off her shoes.

“It’s Ok. Go ahead “, I tell her, but she insists. She carries her sandals in her saree-clad lap and enters in haltingly.

The car meanders down the road that Rashida traversed on foot every day. Finally, we arrive at Quest, the latest mall
in that district. The area suddenly changes to a better-quality road, the cars that line the corners. The juxtaposition of
old and new is jarring.

Outside the mall, I watch the street vendor Baburao crack an egg at his roadside food stall, as he has for the past 15
years. He recently raised the price of his omelet to 10 rupees or 14 cents. Inside the mall, a veggie quesadilla at the
American chain Chili’s costs 25 times more.

Quest hasn’t hurt his business that much, Baburao laughs because his customers can’t afford anything in there. It’s
beyond the realm of most people, including Rashida.

When we try to step out at the main entrance, a security guard rush toward us.

“No entrance for her,” he says in Hindi.

I see the sign on the glistening glass doors: “Rights to admission reserved.”

I tell him Rashida requires a wheelchair and press a 100 rupee note in his hand and pat him looking straight into his
eyes. The old trick works, and we foray into the mall without Rashida’s feet touching the sparkling Italian marble
tiles. Her eyes grow big and her head swivels from side to side, as though she were watching a tennis match. The
mall was another world to Rashida. She’d never been inside.

“Where have we come? It’s so clean,” she asks. She has seen the new mall from the outside but never dared go near
it.

It’s mid-afternoon on a weekday, and there isn’t the normal crowd at the mall. I see mostly women and teenage girls
bobbing in and out of stores like Vero Moda and Michael Kors.
I wheel Rashida into the Gucci store. The salesclerks look at us in wonder: Why is a middle-class man catering to a
poor woman?

“How can I help you?” asks a woman behind the counter. Her politeness barely conceals her scorn. She is the same
woman who at 9.00 PM when the mall closes catches the hard-packed commuter metro to Virar, drenched in sweat
with the same commoners she scorns all day. Such is the irony of life.

I ask her to ask Rashida. For a moment, the woman glares at me, but then asks politely: “May I show you a bag?”

Rashida points to a silvery, buttery leather concoction.

We ask the price. “It’s 1.25 lakhs,” the clerk tells us. That’s 125,000 rupees or $1,865.

I wait for Rashida’s reaction, but there is none. She cannot even fathom the amount. It’s as abstract as “gazillion.”

In America, few people can afford to drop almost $2,000 on a handbag. But poor people there can at least walk into
a mall and grasp what it would take to pay that amount. They could even possibly save enough to buy it one day.

It would take Rashida at least 25 years to earn that amount. In a way, I am relieved she cannot comprehend the price.
I worry she might have felt humiliated otherwise, and that is far from my intention.

It’s too late anyway for her.

I take Rashida to the mall’s food court on the top level, and she orders a heaping plate of chow Mein. She’s never
seen chopsticks before; nor has she used a fork.

I tell her it’s OK to eat with her hands. She eats haltingly.

Again, I feel the burn of many eyes upon us.

“What do you think of this place?” I ask her.

“I have come from hell to heaven.” She says as she wolfs down the food. I know that feeling. I have been there. As
we nibble on our dainty salads, I know exactly how it feels to be given a plate of food on an empty stomach. She
was the one who did that once. It’s my time to pay it back.

After a few minutes of silence, she says, “I suppose now you will have to take me back.”

I nod. I don’t have any answers for her, yet.

In the car, Rashida places her hand on mine. It’s her way of thanking me.

“I will die a happy woman now and will remember this day for a very long time”, she says with genuine candor. I
am touched.

She tells me about her childhood over cups of sweet tea. Her parents died when she was a child, and an aunt brought
her from her native Allahabad to Kolkata to Pune. She started working at an early age and toiled her whole life until
her body gave in. Now she lives every day at the mercy of her daughters and sons-in-law.

“Ami garibmanush achi, dada.”

I am a poor person; she says in broken Bengali.

“And I will always be a poor person,”

She says this as she looks out of the window avoiding my eyes.

“There is no way out for people like us, for our children.”

I hear those words, but I am slapped by the hopelessness and despair behind them, all the more. Her words make me
sad for no apparent reason.

We make our way back through congested lanes teeming with street life. Here you can buy almost anything you
need, from syrupy fried sweets called jalebis to the blood pressure pills you’ll need if you eat too many. I look at a
stall selling leather handbags.

They hang from hooks on a wooden pole, their black leather dulled by sun and dust.

These are cheaper than Gucci, only $3 each. I ask Rashida if she would like one.

“I can afford these,” I say.

“What will I do with a bag?” she responds simply without any bitterness.

After a lifetime of hard, bone-breaking work, she has nothing.

Not even some money to put in those handbags.

I drop her off at the entrance to the slum.

“Are there poor people in America?” she asks before getting out of the car. Her mind is somewhere else already.

I tell her there are people everywhere who are in need.

“Do they go shopping at malls?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” I respond.

“See you next time.”

“Maybe,”, she laughs and pats my shoulder.

“If I am still here.” She says seriously, but then seeing me curious, she breaks into a toothless smile.

“Baba, I’ll always remember today. Especially on my deathbed. You made me very happy today.”.

It has not taken me much. Just a couple of hours of my time that I could have easily spent lounging around or
playing a game or watching a movie.

Time as a commodity is a never-ending equation.

Sins of Our Parents (07.04.2006)

" My daughter saved my life,” she tells me without any dramatic flair.
Ron and I have been friends for a while now and I have been invited to the July 4th party at his place deep down in
the conservatively red district of Rochester, NH.

Since my family is in India, I figure I would take the American culture immersion lesson this year and I show up
with a six-pack for us and a bucket of ice cream for his kids.

We are having a beer and talking in the kitchen when she walks in. Ron’s wife makes the introductions.

“This is Kourtney, my sister”.

She looks to be around twenty-five, with dark hair and pale, freckled skin. All those freckles marking her face like
paint.

Most women around these New England areas are so bland that your eyes would slide off them. This one is
different. She has a way around her that tells me she knows her ways around men, for a long time, probably since
she was young.

“What do you think of her?” Ron asks me when the sisters go back into the main room.

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a mess.” I am not sure why I say that, but I do.

We both laugh.

An hour goes by as I talk to the other guests on the lawn outside.

After a while, as usual, my social batteries run dry, and I find a quiet corner near my car in the parking lot and check
my phone.

The crowd has moved into the hall to watch the game. I just need a break from all the talking and smiling.

“You too eh….?.”

I look up to find her sitting in her car parked behind me with her legs outside, a smoke in one hand and a beer in the
other. I wonder why I didn’t see her beforehand.

‘You want one?”, she asks casually, waving the square packet.

“No. I don’t smoke but it’s all good”, I smile.

She relaxes again and we talk a bit, about her, mostly.

The evening passes by slowly. Most of the crowd has retired inside to watch some big game on the flat-screen TV. I
can hear the occasional shouts and grunts and cheering. I don’t understand the game, nor do I have any interest, so I
hang back.

She stays back as well, and we talk. Somewhere along the line, we forget about the game and exchange stories in the
evening twilight. Stories about our lives -- -- — and she has such interesting stories to tell.

She laughs a lot, and at times complains about her ex-boyfriend — -but in a self-deprecating way so that you didn’t
get too fed up with hearing about it. Still, listening to it, you get the impression that the guy had caused her some
grief.

And she talks about drugs, too, about doing them before she got pregnant.

“My daughter saved my life,” she says. “I probably never would have stopped if I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

I nod while she tells me this as I check her arms, an old habit. They are clean. I have never taken drugs, but I know
about their addictive power. Having seen too many people lose themselves that way I had stayed away from them.
Nothing about them ever ended well.

She talks about her daughter, now asleep in the second bedroom and she tells me about her car which needs a fuel
pump and doesn’t run; she talks about being so broke she couldn’t afford cable-TV anymore, so she just watched the
same DVD’s over and over until she had them memorized.

She doesn’t have a job.

“It’s hard to find daycare for the baby,” she explains.

I feel bad for her. Almost guilty. I am not sure why a twenty-five-year-old whose entire life is ahead of her is in such
a state without almost any hope. Was it the circumstances or was it a choice of her own making, I wonder looking at
her?
Her life, as I see it, is and will continue to be a circle in hell — Bad boyfriends, limited options to work without a
good education, a looming addiction, stranded with a baby before 25. I know I can’t do much except hope things
work out better for her going ahead.

A few minutes later, the baby starts to cry, and she goes back into the bedroom and brings the child out.

As she walks into the kitchen holding the baby, I glance up.

In the light of the kitchen, I see it. Something isn’t right. Her baby.

She holds the little girl and rocks her.

“Shhhhh,” she whispers as the baby slowly quiets down.

With a face like pinched dough, ears small and wrinkled, and a dark mark across one eye. Not monstrous. Nothing
like that. Just skewed, stunted. Subtle. Like a baby whose mother only did coke a few times during her pregnancy, a
characteristic mark— like maybe before she even knew she was pregnant.

‘My daughter saved my life- she had said. But women are pregnant for weeks before they find out.

I am suddenly sick. I have seen babies like these before. I look at Kortney and wonder if she even realizes it. It was
subtle after all, and it would be easy to pretend it wasn’t there. I am aware of all the lies we tell ourselves. The ones
we do to get by.

I watch her sitting across from me at the kitchen table. This girl who I had felt sorry for, because of her bad times
with guys, and money, and cars — -this girl who I had felt sorry for up until the instant — after which I only feel
sorry for her daughter. I slowly rub the little, almost bald head and I wonder how life would be for her growing up if
she even makes it that far.

As I stay late into the night with Kortney and we talk, I try to like her. I try to feel sympathetic, but I don’t. I don’t
judge people because I have seen a thing or two and life can be hard — but that doesn’t change me not liking her
anymore. I look at her, and all I see is what she has done to her daughter.

“What’s wrong?” she asks her face partly glowing from the light of the TV in the main hall as we sit by on the porch
again.

“Nothing,” I hear myself say.

She sees me watching her daughter and our eyes meet as she suddenly understands. Her shoulders slump a little and
for a second the smile evaporates from her face revealing the tiredness and unfairness of it all.

“Z, can’t you see that I am more than my mistakes?”, she asks softly, looking straight ahead.

I shake my head and avert her eyes.

“I’m just tired.”

And I am tired.

Something inside me is tired where even being around them is too much.
At thirty years old I suddenly feel ancient and world-weary that night and I hope I never see her, ever again.

I know she would take it the wrong way and I hate myself a little for that. Another hate is thrown on the pile with all
the others. But I just want to be home and hug my daughters and hope they are ok.

I stand up and put my arms around her and we hold each other there, in the middle of the room, two strangers who
had the answers to nothing.

As I start the drive back on I-95 heading home, I can’t wait. Stopping in the breakdown lane I turn the emergency
lights on and dial internationally to India. It's 10 AM morning there.

“Ana”? I hear her familiar voice and yet I ask.

There is a red and blue light already flashing in the lane behind me. I pull over slowly reaching into the glove box
for my registration.

“Hey, isn’t it late? You aren’t asleep yet?” She doesn’t know.

“Can I talk to Jenny or just hear her voice?” I ask. There is a plea in my voice that doesn’t escape her ears.

“Everything ok with you?”

“Yeah” …
Reflection in the Mirror (12.18.2018)

“Maybe you do it subconsciously, without the intent to cause harm?”, he asks gently.

My manager and I are sitting out in an arena with Christmas carols in the background at 8.30 in the morning. It’s too
early to have this discussion, yet never too late either.

The topic is — Trust or the lack of it herewith. We have had some difficulties in our relationship over the years and I
have always worked with him surrounded by a fog of distrust looming in the background. It shrouds everything in a
thick white veil, and I feel like we have never managed to get past that.

In the end, I decided that it’s time to tackle that beast. I see it as his issue where I have managed to try to do the right
thing by him always and yet it somehow hasn’t worked out that well.

As we sit across that table, I have a litany of possible causes, grievances, and possible explanations. I see this as his
problem, for him to resolve with my help.

Does he feel like I have stabbed him in the back sometime?

Does he just have an aversion towards me that has tainted his perception?
Or is he just a distrustful person in its entirety?

I don’t know the answers, but I do know one thing — There is some event that has triggered this and I plan to
understand it, offer him an explanation based on what I recollect & from then everything will be well. He will
understand and he might probably regret his decision.

It’s a naïve outlook on human nature.

We settle down. As always, he doesn’t skip around the core.

“So why do you think we are having this issue of trust?”, he asks.

We talk around it, here and there. He has a way of throwing open-ended questions, hoping you would talk. Knowing
that I do the same with most people, I usually indulge most times, but not today. This time, I want him to talk.
Letting him be opaque is getting old.

After a bit, I throw it back at him as to what he thinks has brought this rift. After all, I feel it more from his side than
mine and we probably both acknowledge that. I am expecting a beat-around bush routine.

Instead, he comes out amazingly forthright.

‘You have a way of talking down members of our team and that has circled back to me at times. It undermines the
confidence not just that I have in you, but also the team has in you”.

I have heard of it before. Nothing specific. Very generic. I refuse to believe that. I know that I love the guys. I do.
Each one is quirky. One is slightly passive-aggressive, the other is almost naïve, another one is quiet. But they are
all amazing. Brilliant and helpful when need be and I seem to work well with them — for years now. Actually, better
than I work with him. I don’t speak ill about them. Don’t need to. Don’t want to.

He seems to sense my disbelief too and tries to articulate it nicely. Packaged. Professional.

We are getting nowhere. It’s just fair talk, but nothing fruitful would come out of it. I have a feeling that we will be
walking away from this unsatisfied — A stalemate.

With around 5 minutes to go, it suddenly happens.

“Do you remember when we were just friends years ago and used to travel together on the train? How did you use to
tell me about the manager you reported to then and how lame she was at managing the team? I always thought she
wasn’t that good until you told me that she is thriving at her new job…..”

I open my mouth to argue, but there’s nothing to push back. It just was simply true.

“You used to address another guy with mean slangs. He was the one I almost didn’t choose to be on this team
because I was wondering if I am missing something.”

He mentions both incidents with precise clarity. I remember them too. There is no disputing them.

My ex-manager is a lovely person and after she was let go, we still meet almost every month. We have met each
other’s family and I adore her. Then why did I have to say something negative about her, especially to someone
completely tangential like him then?

The other guy, I so used to jokingly disparage him as a south Indian, as we Indians at large tend to semi-jokingly do,
all the time. But was it just a joke or did I have a subconscious mindset?
It felt like while I was using these as a bonding exercise, he was observing quietly. Discounting, calibrating, filing
away for reference.

It felt like this was so inconsequential. We, humans, do that all the time, or was it just me?

Because of my words, someone might have lost her job. Someone almost didn’t make the cut, to where they could
have progressed well in their career.

There were consequences to my words — Beyond my rabid understanding at that very moment. The words being
spoken had no idea what I had set into motion until years later when they were thrown back at my face, like a rotting
corpse.

I recoil in disgust, in shame, at the ruefulness of it all. All my explanations suddenly come to rest.

There was nothing to explain. The binary nature of those examples has enough said in them. I could refuse to
acknowledge them, but then it would speak about the nature of myself rather than anything else. I know when to
stop fighting it.

He doesn’t preach, doesn’t tell me things on how to improve or change. Doesn’t even look like he is judging me.
Just a clean observation and a slight attempt at hiding his disapproval. An understanding of why he behaved as he
did, all these years.

It makes sense now. I would not like myself either if I was in the opposite place. I would not blame him for his
behavior anymore.

I think back to my childhood to the days when I used to hang out with the rough crowd. Being mindful of others'
feelings was the last thing on our minds. We were the exact opposite. Making someone look bad would be
considered a badge of honor. Addressing each other with nicknames designed to diminish them as individuals would
be considered — normal.

We just grew up like that. In an era where flying under the radar meant survival, blending with the crowd meant not
getting beaten up to a pulp behind the old school building — It wasn’t considered wrong in any sense. We weren’t
maliciously evil. We were just kids in a rough neighborhood, in a school not known for its finesse or instructors who
would hone us on these basic human interactions.

Looking now, it sounds more like a cop-out rather than an explanation of how I turned out to be this way. But it’s
the only explanation I could come up with within my head. I don’t plan to explain. He wouldn’t understand it either,
not without knowing the childhood struggles of that hungry, self-constrained, spectacled boy trying to blend in.

I was not a boy anymore. This is not the rough neighborhood either. I have crawled my way up that Maslow’s
triangle long ago.

Those things are long past. It was time to learn to bring myself out of that mindset.

You can blame your problems on anything you want. You can lash out at who you are, at your parents or your
upbringing or your tough life or your impossible situation.

But in the end, finding a way out or a way to change is right here and related to defying your thoughts, your own
beliefs, negotiating with the very things you are convinced cannot be changed.
As we walk outside in the morning cold, I feel a lot lighter and not entirely sure why. We have reached nowhere on
our trust issues, but I suddenly don’t care about it anymore.

Some people have a way of handing you a gift. Without making you feel obligated to return the favor.

I went into the interaction wanting to change someone’s opinion of me. To make it slightly better.

I came out with a new understanding of myself. Slightly tarnished.

Amazingly, I don’t feel the guilt as much as a deep resolution that I need to address it. Myself.

It has been my way of communication for as long as I can remember it. This will be a tough one to rectify. There
will be slippages, but it has to start somewhere.

As they say in any AA meetings — The first step starts with acknowledging what we already know but refusing to
accept.

I am a recovering slanderer.

This is day 1.
The Burden of Relationships (07.14.2009)

Toronto downtown is a mass of people at 6.00 PM. Everyone is trying to get out, take the train and head back to the
suburbs, back to their homes. I am still new to this metro life in the northern hemisphere and have always stayed or
worked in small-town neighborhoods.

With nothing much to do I decide to hit the gym for a while. I noticed a blonde woman on the stepper. She is around
30, tall for an average woman, and in shape from the hours spent at the gym. She is a regular and having seen each
other before we exchange nods as our headphones stay plugged in.

An hour later after taking a shower, I head out to grab something to eat. It’s a dull Tuesday night as I stand outside
contemplating the earth-shattering decision to either go with Chinese or stick to the local Indian joint across the
street.

“Thai would be a good choice tonight”, I hear a bemused voice behind me as she laughs while busy tying a ponytail.
She has changed into slacks and there is no hint of makeup. Just another night out.

“I am Mary”, she introduces herself. She works as a consultant at an investment bank and we share the same hotel
having stayed there for months, on and off. On that footing, we both seem safe to each other and I decide to take her
up on the offer as we walk the pier navigating the homebound crowds. It feels like we are the only two people
swimming upstream against the current.

As we settle down and give our orders, we get acquainted. We talk about the long hours and insane schedules of
consulting. Scraping for things in common we discover that we both love traveling and living in hotels as much as
we love to go home.
I notice a large rock on her left finger. Fascinated by the sheer size, I reach out and touch it. She does not flinch and
instead looks at me, amused.

“Richard works in private equity”, she explains gently. He is on the road most days just like her and the kids stay
with his parents who come over when they are both gone. They are both high school sweethearts who got married
when they were 19. She was already 3 months pregnant with Jane, her elder one.

“Do you like what you do for work?”, I ask as we dig into the green chicken curry and pad Thai, both excellent
recommendations from her.

From someone who seems to know what she wants; her answer surprises me.

“No”, she says flatly and does not elaborate. She waits for a minute to let that sink in.

“The money is good”, she adds looking at the dissatisfaction at her answer written large on my face.
I understand. Having worked for the dollar if anything else, I relate to her in that sense.

“Then why do you do it?”, I can see she doesn’t need the money.

“I need to get out of my house at times, my city…”.

I wonder if I should go any further. You never know what lies underneath and having dug deep you cannot undo
that. We eat in silence and then head back walking towards the hotel.

This becomes a routine once in a while. The receptionist at the Marriott Renaissance knows us and makes sure to
inform me when she is in town.

It’s been a while since I came back to Toronto. Work has been busy with other clients and I have been traveling to
either London or LA to meet with the other banks.

After a while, I return to Toronto for a week. The leaves have started to fall and there is a slight chill in the air. As I
check-in, Jack who runs the reception desk comes up with a smile.

“Mary is here. She was asking for you yesterday and I told her you will be in this week.”

“Thanks, Jack. I will call her”.

“Room 327”, he says as he turns back. They have a rule against revealing room information, but Jack has known us
both for more than a year now.

Between work and calls to the west coast, it completely misses my mind to call her. She doesn’t either.

On Thursday night, the day before I am leaving, I head back to the hotel late in the evening. The sun is already
setting, and the daily crowd has thinned out for the upcoming three-day weekend. After a quick shower, I decide to
just eat at the complimentary evening social on the 2nd floor. Thursdays are usually Chinese food nights and I like
their selection.

As I walk in, I see her sitting by the 2x table close to the window overlooking Roger’s stadium. It’s a slack day and
most of the tables are empty. I walk up to her and she smiles, gets up, and hugs me.

“It’s been a while.”

“It sure has. How have you been?”, I ask as we order a drink and settle down.

She smiles and I notice it doesn’t reach the corners of her mouth.
We talk here and there for a bit and then I just put it out there…

“What’s bothering you Mary?”, I ask slightly hesitant. We know each other but we aren’t childhood friends either.

She runs in circles around the topic and I drop it. We talk about work, a new upcoming client, and the new book that
we are reading. We never talk about family.

She suddenly turns around on her side, looks beyond me, and says without any preamble.

“Have you ever felt completely lonely Z, like there is nobody to turn to just when you need them?”

I know that feeling but there is nothing to say. She tells me about her marriage, the isolation, the long hours, and his
indifference.

“I just want to be touched, maybe sit down and have a chat – to feel like I exist in his world. Is that too much to
ask?”, her anguish suddenly flows out in a torrent.

Sitting there I just watch her beautiful face contorted in pain.

“I was hoping he would love me forever but with the way that I am feeling he’s killing everything that I have
inside.”

“I tried to make it work. I did! But we seem to have a fundamental shift in opinions. I don’t understand what I can
do to make it right. We did talk and for a while and things seemed better, but it broke down again, and now, I don’t
know what to do…”, her voice trails off in silent agony.

As she is telling me all this, she takes a sip of her favorite blue label scotch, shutting her eyes, lightly rocking, and
viewing the scene outside.

I don’t have a good answer for her. Everyone has their cocoon within which they exist, some larger and can
accommodate two of them, some just small to barely hold themselves.
I want to tell her things. Instead, I say nothing. Just sit there and watch her pour herself out.

We stand up to leave and walk back to the elevator. She is on the second while I am one above.

As the elevator comes up to the second, on an impulse I turn around towards her and give her a big hug.

I am not sure why I do that but it feels like the right thing to do.

Maybe I am consoling her, maybe I am consoling myself. We stand there for a second, her head downcast. She
steps out. As she looks up to wave goodbye, I see tears, big ones and she just nods and wipes them away.

The elevator dings and the doors close.

It is the last I see of Mary.

Man On Fire (06.13.2004)

It’s been a year since I last met Rashida and I fly down back to India. After a couple of days, I decide to check up
on her when I go to Pune. I have been busy with the family and it almost slips out of my mind... I drive with a friend
down the lanes of Kothrud and see a completely changed landscape. The guys and chawls are gone, flattened out. A
skeleton of an upcoming high-rise building is already in place. "Himalaya Towers", the name reads.

I walk by to the nearby tea stall. There are a bunch of people chatting animatedly with the owner who is a Bihari
man, around 60.

"Do you know about an old lady called Rashida who used to live in chawl 32?”, I ask slightly loudly. I am already
agitated by the surroundings.

The group suddenly goes silent. They all stare at me for a bit, complete silence. Finally, a big guy steps out of that
group looks back at the owner, and then nods.

" How do you know her?”. He asks with naked suspicion.

I tell him about my connection, and he nods. He scratches his beard for a second. Finally, he clears his voice.

" She is in Pimpri now". His voice is flat telling me to leave. He has nothing more for me.

I stand there. I am not leaving. He stands a foot taller than me inches away and yet he sees the look in my eyes. He
finally sighs and pulls out a chair and dusts it with the handkerchief from his shoulder. The other guys form a circle
and close in. I am not sure what I have got myself into. He tells me about the goons who came in December to
vacate the chawl. Rashida's son, Mehmood, a tall well-built chap who resisted was pulled from his house by the
crowd and knifed 10 times, right in front of his mother who watched helplessly, pleading with them, this thin 70-
year-old woman against a crowd of men with weapons. Those old eyes watched as they made an example of him by
dousing him with petrol and burning him alive.

"They burnt him Saab (sir). His screams will haunt us to our graves. You couldn’t bear to see it. It is horror. Oil
drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white, you touch his arm like this”, he
flicked his arm — “the white shows. It shows especially on the nose”— he rubbed his nose with two fingers as if
scraping off the skin— “oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over. He was still alive, and he
tried to get up but they kicked him back into the fire”, he says as he vigorously scratches his nose, trying to wish that
thought away. The big guy who tells me this is a 6"5 Pathan, solid as they come. Yet he is shaken, just at that
memory as the others watch him, slightly dazed.

"As if that was not enough, they picked her up from her bed and threw her on the concrete floor and broke her back.
She was paralyzed from her neck downwards.". He points to his legs and then up to his neck.

These were the same guys who were friends of Mehmood, who used to visit her home during the festival of id,
feasting on mutton biryani at her place every year, laughing with Mehmood, and hanging out every night. She
beseeched them, begged them, asked them to spare him in the name of god. Gods never existed in slums.
Transactions have no friends or alliances. The entire chawl is vacated in a week.

The Pathan finally stands up tall and puts a hand on my shoulder. He calls for a paper & pencil and draws me a
crude map and writes the name of her chawl, in Hindi.

I take the next available metro bus to go visit her. The city is a blur of activity. The sun beating down in the
afternoon does not slow it a bit. The bus picks up speed on the outskirts of the city and so do my thoughts.

“You will never be able to take care of the women you love”, the old astrologer’s words ring in my ears, his white
beard slightly flowing in the wind as he looked up at me with aggravated sympathy. I never understood then what he
had seen, until a long while after.

It takes me a while to figure out the address until a creative well-versed rickshaw fellow lands me at the right place.
I bend down to enter the shady-looking chawl, navigating through their open gutters, the naked children, the bored
housewives washing clothes. A jobless man in a dirty vest points me to an old broken hut.

I am about to knock on the door until I find there is no door. Just a curtain hanging in its place. Rashida's daughter,
Rukhsana recognizes me and drops the plate from her hand. She rushes over to hug me as a sister would after a long-
lost brother returns home. She is half crying, half laughing. I am too.

"She is inside", she says almost in a whisper.

I lean down to enter the low door frame. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see her thin frame in the corner. The
stench of feces is overwhelming. She is lying there and as she opens her eyes to look up at me, I can see the flicker
of recognition, of excitement. She cannot speak anymore but she holds my hand - tightly, her thin frame showing
superhuman strength. She was always a tough one.

I get a wet cloth and start to clean her gingerly. Her skin is starting to show signs of developing deep sores. I work
my way around it for the next hour. I slowly change the sheets with the help of her daughter as she steps out to fill
water from the nearby local tap.

I remember what she had said when I had taken her for the first time to the nearby mall on the first cab ride of her
life. "I'll remember this day until the day I die Saab. This is the best day of my life!".

I doubt she had any good days after.

I look at Rashida and see the pain in her eyes. She stares back at me and tears stream down, faster than I can clear
them before mine too mingles with hers. Those eyes, like mine, have seen things she cannot erase. I am wrapped in
my hell while she is lying there, wrapped in her filth, wrapped in her memory of her son burnt alive in front of her
eyes while she was helpless, wrapped in a world she cannot escape from, not yet, her mind as sharp as a blade even
though her body has given over, awaiting death, for days, months and years, but even that refuses to come by.
Suffering like no other.

For a faint second, I eye the pillow next to her and I eye the closed curtain that acts as the door. I know where my
thoughts are headed, and I step back. I have to leave now, and I pull her grip off my hand. She holds me tight, but I
wrench free. I lightly run a hand over her hair as I kiss her forehead lightly.

"You can close your eyes. It's over now”, I whisper to her and she looks up with blank eyes for a while before she
breaks into a toothless smile, and then her gaze is stuck over my shoulder.

It’s a picture of Mohammed smiling on the wall.

I blink as I step out into the sunlight. Rukhsana is still out yet.

I don't wait up for her either. I'll not be coming back.

Three days later Rashida is dead.

The Seer (01.29.1998)

” You will either become a wandering saint or go completely crazy.”

He looks at me with kind eyes as he sits across his desk covered with marketing material.

I am sitting with Sarosh, my boss who I report to at Godrej. Godrej is a multi-product conglomerate manufacturing
everything from condoms to carbon fiber, from ribbons to real estate.

We work in the home security division and my job is to sell home cameras to the ultra-wealthy in Bombay. It’s been
a month now and I haven’t sold any. Every morning, I pick up a sample system from the office and carry that 30 lbs.
monster around the city.

I have a modus operandi in mind. I walk around the cuff parade, an uber-rich area of Bombay, and find tall buildings
in the area.

Sneaking past the watchmen half in a daze in their food coma, I climb the 20 floors evading the elevator operator,
and make my way down each floor. Some just shut the door in my face while some threaten to call the building
security. I tell them this is precisely what the system would help with — weeding out intruders who disturb your
afternoon siesta and do it from the comfort of your air-conditioned bedroom.

A few are kind enough to invite me in and hand out a glass of water to this dark disheveled-looking boy. A bored
housewife even propositions me as I escape muttering vain excuses.
After a month, Sarosh sits me down to look at my sales numbers. It’s zero. Bull. Zilch. Nothing. He asks about
upcoming prospects. I learn what prospects are that day. Possible client conversions. He looks at me and pulls out a
piece of paper. It’s a sales form.

“Fill it”, he says as I dutifully scribble it out.

I learn later that he has transferred one of his sales under my name essentially extending my longevity in the
company for another month.

The next day, I go to his office to thank him for his kind gesture. He waves me away, almost embarrassed at it. It’s
just how some people are — Decent, generous, and quiet.

Now that I understand the consequences of not making my targets, I run around with added vigor. However, it has
no bearing on the results. I still have no sale. As I will learn later, I am not cut out to sell anything well, besides
myself and my non-existent abilities.

It’s the end of the month again. As I report to the office in the morning, the peon comes up to my desk.

“Sarosh sir has asked for you”

I walk to his cabin. He is sitting there as usual among his raft of papers and marketing material. As I sit down, he
asks the peon to get a cup of tea for me.

“You couldn’t make the sales numbers this month”, he says matter of fact. There is no admonition. Just a touch of
sensibility.

“Do you enjoy what you are doing?”, he asks looking at me.

My hands are on his desk as I explain my strategy for the last month and walking him through some of my
prospects. I look up to see him suddenly disinterested, his eyes fixated on my palm trying to look at something as I
gesture wildly.

“Can I look at your hands if that’s ok?”, he asks as I stop talking.

As a managing director of the entire division, he has very limited time. I had been allotted 10 minutes in his
schedule and they are almost over.

His secretary walks in.

“Sir, your 9.15 is here.”

“Cancel it Reena”, he says looking up at her from over his glasses, his white beard a tangle of hair. She stumbles for
a bit and he nods again at her for emphasis. I fail to catch the tone of his voice. He has not just postponed it. He has
canceled it. I am too young to make a distinction of that importance.

As I spread my palms in front of him, he opens his drawer and brings out a magnifying glass. The handle is rusted
from use and time, but the glass is immaculately clean. He hovers the glass over my right hand from different angles
and scribbles out notes.

He asks me for my date and time of birth which he jots down on a piece of paper.

Taking a red ink pen from his desk he maps out a horoscope. Looking up in a thick book that has suddenly
materialized on his desk, he jots in numbers and signs. There is complete silence in the room, and I can smell the
slightly damp odor of the stale air conditioning running behind him. The clock slowly marches forward.
After almost twenty minutes, he looks up at me brows furrowed, eyes squinting as he sighs and settles back into his
seat and drop the pen as he stares alternately at me and then at the horoscope he has come up with.

I don’t know what to make of this, so I sit silently, almost afraid to move. I need this job. It’s how I plan to collect
enough money to repay my parents, give some to my younger sister, get married. My ego does come up with the
thought that maybe he finds me amazing enough to keep me, for a long time.

“I am going to have to let you go, young man, but don’t worry, you don’t need this job”, he says softly as I look at
him with glazed eyes.

I don’t comprehend what he has just said but I understand the implications of his words.

I am in a slight shock as his words sink in. I have lost another job. This one especially hurts because my father had
gone to some lengths to get a recommendation to land me this job.

What will I tell him? What will I tell myself?

As I wind through these thoughts, a sense of calm spreads over me. I have lost this one. He is no longer my boss. I
don’t have to pretend anything anymore. I couldn’t have sold one even if I wanted to.

I relax slightly. I smile, just a little.

He tells me later that I protested a little, cajoled a bit, even asked the dreaded why. I don’t remember any of that. As
usual, my mind glosses that over.

Sarosh’s fascination with hands is compelling. It may have reached a peak five years ago in a delivery room at Parsi
General Hospital when the doctor brought his daughter Katy to him for the first time, a tiny bundle wrapped in
white.

‘’I didn’t know it was a girl until someone told me,’’ he says, ‘’because I was so busy studying her hands. My eyes
were filled with tears, but I saw she had a short index finger, which is low self-esteem, and she had a short heartline.
That meant to me we’d have to work extra hard giving her the support she needed even if it meant I’d stay home and
spend more time with her.’’

“I never created her horoscope”, he says slightly tepidly.

I can understand a father’s perspective of not wanting to know anything untoward of his only child. I don’t fall into
that category for him. My life, as it was, is and will be is in front of him on that chart inked in red, if things were to
be believed.

As he lets go of my palms, my natural curiosity of knowing the upcoming takes over. The truth is out there. I want
to believe.

‘’You’re still independent, eccentric, not practical at all until things go south. You are still battling between being
responsible and wanting freedom. You have trouble letting things go, even when they’re not working.’’

‘’Tell me something I don’t know,’’ I say, dripping with slight sarcasm. I know how to read palms even though my
knowledge is rudimentary. I however have never studied astrology or read horoscopes. That’s a different ball game
altogether.

He doesn’t take this as a personal affront. Instead, he smiles and nods as he thinks about his words.
Hesitating ever so slightly, he starts to speak, then stops for a bit, looking at the clock on the sidewall, and then turns
back to me.

“You will be in the USA by the end of next year. It will happen ever so suddenly. Don’t be afraid of it. It will turn out
well for you even though you will have some hiccups initially. You will make money, more money in a single day
than I will ever make in a year…”

There is a slight tinge of wistfulness, not jealousy.

I laugh openly. This is the most outrageous prediction I have ever heard, not that I have heard many. I don’t care to
go to the USA. Don’t even have a passport or even any skillset that makes me eligible. I have a bunch of friends
who would give an arm and leg to get there. As for me, I have long accepted that I am not so special. Always liked
to sell me short.

He is not done yet.

“You will reside in a very cold place, somewhere north”,

He says pointing upwards towards the ceiling as he laughs. I will end up living close to Boston — Northeast.

“Make sure you bring your father in to visit you as soon as you settle”.

He stresses the “As soon as” part again for emphasis. I don’t understand why; he never tells me and it doesn’t occur
to me to ask. In some years as I settle down in the US, I will find out that my father has kidney failure and there
would only be a short window when I can get him here before his kidneys fail. He would eventually visit, not once
but twice, and fall in love with this country that I have grudgingly learned to love and admire.

“I have never seen someone as stubborn as you. Keep away from the stock market but if you ever get into it, persist.
You will make some good money”.

It takes me 9 years of straight losses before I break even and then recoup back my losses quickly once I get the hang
of it. Almost gave up on it.

“You will have experiences that probably takes another person 10–12 lifetimes to experience. You will live all over
the world and get to know some very famously rich people. Richer than me at least”,

He says this with a laugh. I laugh with him and end up living all over the US, Toronto, Melbourne, London,
Edinburgh, Singapore. The magnets on my refrigerator of the places visited keep adding up.

“You and your wife will never agree with each other — about anything. But you will both be amazingly tight”.

He interlocks his fingers for emphasis as we both laugh. I will marry some years later and learn how correct his
words turn out to be over several years.

“You will either become a sanyasi or you will end up going crazy”, he finally says slightly portentously winding
down his list.

I am young and have a whole life ahead of me. I don’t even believe him and his crazy predictions. They seem way
out of the normal. Being the practical Virgo that I am, I need directions, pathways, and predictable outcomes but this
is amusing even on a day when I just got fired 20 minutes ago.

We laugh. Talk a bit about the good days we had and the amazing food that the canteen serves up at Godrej. Lord, I
am going to miss that, I say with mock ingenuity.
His time with me is coming to an end. The receptionist outside is getting edgy. It’s time to go. He walks out with me
into the open. The wind is blowing ever so slightly.

I thank him for all his help and his kindness, but I see him looking at me with a sense of awe, almost respectfully.

“I have never seen a hand that shifts fortunes so drastically for the better — Ever”, he says with emphasis. Then he
stops short and adds — “But you have a hand of someone who has the potential to leap away from this cycle of life
and death”, he says envy written all over him, even if it’s just for a second.

As I start to walk out, I feel a hand on my shoulder.

Turning around, I see him with a completely different look on his face. A look of a serious man. Almost remorseful.
This man who runs the entire plant with a velvet glove and an iron fist is staring at me with eyes that have almost
glossed over from overpowering emotion — I just don’t understand why.

As he turns to shake my hand, he pulls me in closer, ever so slightly, and makes the final prediction that stops me
right there in my tracks –

Since that day, I have tried to ignore it but life as it is — has not reciprocated that favor. I refuse to acknowledge it
yet have already known for years.

“You will never be able to take care of the women you love”,

He says this with finality, in almost a whisper as he turns around and heads back into the office leaving me standing
out there in the bright sunlight.
12 Days (06.02.2012)

" Are you sure you want to do this?”, Jonathan asks with his usual non-flippant attitude. It’s 75 degrees and he is
still dressed in his slim suit.

I am surrounded by a beehive of activity. There are 7 guys of different shapes and sizes in various modes of
preparation. Shawn the ex-seal is calm and watches his surroundings closely. The ex-cop, I believe his name is Jack,
is beefy and red, looking around and struggling to get his boots on. The monk sits in the corner quietly, his eyes
fixated on the wall ahead of him. He is mumbling something and nodding his head in a steady rhythm almost
oblivious to his surroundings. I am sitting on a dark wooden bench drinking from a bottle of cool water. This might
be the last time in a few days that I would be able to afford this luxury.

The clock on the wall is counting down to T-20 minutes.

“Yeah. I am ready.” I turned towards Jonathan who extended a hand. I start to shake it but realize he is not looking
for a greeting. I instead hand him my passport, the ID, some basic cash, and the gold ring that I wear at times. I have
no possessions besides a cream-colored khaki shirt, brown pants, and shoes, big heavy shoes. He takes those and
hands them over to the guy behind, turns towards me, and extends a hand on my shoulder.

“Keep your wits around you and make sure you survive. There are no safety nets so be careful. You’ll figure it out.”.

He turns around, points me to one of his guys, turns around, and walks away.
The van is speeding towards London east side. The scenery slowly changes from one of the affluent neighborhoods
to one flanked with boarded windows. You stop seeing suits and instead start to see bare torsos, dark ones, skinny
almost emancipated ones trolling down the neighborhood.

“Time to go brother”, the beefy guy next to the driver says as he turns towards me and opens the van door. He is
Nate, David’s right-hand man. His point person for all things that run within the organization. He is 6 5", built like
an oak, and a man of few words. He and I have got along well during the physical tests. He seems to have a soft
corner for me once the tests end and we bond over the mutual love of spicy biryani served in Lahore, a small hole-
in-the-wall restaurant serving the delicacy.

As he drops me off at the corner of the road, he waves at me. The van speeds away. I am expecting something more,
instructions maybe…But the van is long gone.

The first thing that hits you is the heat and the smell. The smell of poverty, the smell of failures, of heavy and stale
sweat. It’s all-pervasive and there is no way to escape it. It’s mid-noon and I want to get away from the sun. I take a
stock of my surroundings.

There is a bakery on the corner, the house across from it is broken and looks like it hasn’t been inhabited for a while.
I settle down in the shade near the sidewall across from the bakery. The wall is filled with graffiti but it’s relatively
quiet around. I sit there for a couple of hours until the sun decides to cool down a bit before I realize that I am
hungry. I walk to the other end of the street and meet a guy who is hanging out there with nothing much to do…

“I am looking for some work. Do you know anywhere I can go?”.

He looks at me like I am crazy and just stands there. It takes me a while to figure it out. There is no work to be had
around here. Most shops are barely open and there is nothing to sell.

There is a McDonald’s around the corner. It’s an old seedy joint but it’s filled with people even at 8.30 PM. I walk
in and look around standing in a corner. I am hungry and for the first time, I find myself wondering how I would pay
for it. The automatic action of pulling out the credit card is cut off this time.

I stand and watch the people as they eat mindlessly, big bites, little nibbles while leaving the rest. An oversized
English woman orders a 3-piece fish sandwich and one more for the kid. She eats little nibbles from one and leaves
the rest as is, wrapping it back in the paper, and gets up to leave. As she takes her tray to the bin, I walk quickly
intersecting her just in time.

“Let me help you, Ma’am”,

I am hoping to pass by as an employee helping a customer, but she looks up at me with disgust filled in her eyes.
She knows it — and, in that instant, I drop any pretense of dignity as I scoop up the two remaining sandwiches. I still
refuse to eat the nibbled one. That pride will melt in the days coming when food gets harder to find, but for now, I
still have my rules. I settle down outside on the curb and eat it in slow bites. It’s the best meal that I have eaten in
the entire year.

The day is almost over. I find myself at a small corner on a by-lane. There is some cardboard in the bin and enough
of a place to sleep but I am somehow terrified. It’s almost 1.30 AM when I wake up to a sudden sound. I see a man
sitting next to me, uncomfortably close. He seems unaware of my presence or just doesn’t care.

There is a rubber tube tied to his left hand, while he is shooting up using the other. I have never seen a junkie in real
life and watch in terror as he goes through the motions. In the darkness of the night, the street lamp shines on the
syringe and I see the dirty brown liquid as it travels in his veins. He slumps and relaxes; every pore of his body gives
in to the momentary calm. He will need to find enough money to do this again soon, but for now, he has settled
down in his nirvana.

Meanwhile, I settle into mine watching the rats scurry by under the garbage can. It’s a vantage point that stays with
me long after it is over. As Edward had mentioned, the well-to-do have a vertical vision. The not-so folks have a
horizontal perspective.

I never understood what he had meant until now. You would never understand it either until you live through it, a
life looked at, horizontally, sleeping on the pavement, through the eyes of poverty, almost like an animal.

The world looks different — The feet as they come towards you induce terror, the rats and roaches scurrying around,
the dust as it swirls, you see the world through a completely different set of angles, the angle of poverty as I call it.

I settle down, pray, and drift off to restless sleep.

One down.

11 more days to go.

The End of Laughter (06.12.2005)

I
“ didn’t like Crystal the first night I met her. She’d turned up at a house party of a common friend where we lived
in Portsmouth where I had been doing pretty well — maybe I was holding court with some people relegating them
with stories about something vague from work, I can’t remember — but the moment she walked in, everyone’s
attention sort of shifted and the whole room just looked at her, including me — gawked.

I eventually got used to people looking at her, but that night it pissed me off. She was wearing a white t-shirt, short
shorts, and high heels. I remember the flaming red hair cascading around her face, and she was wearing barely any
makeup. Next to her, most girls looked slightly dull, like the black & white of ole days yore.

Later, when she came up to my group and introduced herself, I remember being standoffish and distracted. I
remember her glancing up at me for some kind of recognition and looking slightly bummed when I didn’t give it to
her. She was smoking a joint that night, but so was everybody else, except me -- — A witness to that mayhem. That’s
just sort of the way it was.

Around midnight, as I start to say my goodbyes and head out, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

“Ok if you drop me home on the other side of town?”, she asks appearing out of nowhere.

I hesitate for a second. I am entering dangerous territory here. I don’t have a good gauge on what she is looking for,
the games that she plays.

“Sure”, I hear myself say.

As we drive across the Kittery bridge, she puts her right hand out of the car and a leg up the dashboard as she turns
up a song on 107.9 FM. It’s a gesture of familiarity like this is almost her car. She owns everything she touches.
Cars, houses, people. There are no exceptions.

“Come in for a beer”, she says as she exits the car. It’s not a question.

We sit out on the porch under the starlit night. I look up at the sky, wondering if I’ll catch a glimpse of something
amazing there, but I don’t. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the ocean. And they have nothing to
say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn’t be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is
inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my nature.

We talk about her six-year-old niece sleeping inside, about her sister who is in the army and currently stationed in
Iraq, her parents, and her childhood. She tells me about her boyfriend but in past tones. I take it that they have
separated although the way she talks about him makes me believe she has something there — probably more than
something.

“Steve died last month of a drug overdose”, she mentions this matter of factly scratching a scribble on the adjoining
wall. She tells me how his mother called her up when he passed away. He had asked for her multiple times during
his final hours, but they could not get in touch with her. She didn't tell me until days later that the reason she was
unreachable that night was that she was high on oxy and had thrown her phone in another corner of the apartment.

I don’t know what to make of it. To sympathize with her or to feel disgusted by her lack of control.

Later during the week on a late lazy Friday night as I am sitting in my apartment baking in the summer heat, I get a
message on my myspace account.

“Z, I can’t sleep. You care for a ride?”

I almost say no but then I am curious. Curious about her life, what makes her tick, the stories she might have.

An hour later, as I drive up to her house, she is sitting on her swing outside on her porch.

We talk late into the night until we hear the birds chirping again and a slight glow of dawn falls on the horizon
across the lake.

As I go inside to get some water, I come out to see that she is fast asleep, finally, her mouth parted as if mid-
warning.

I have always woken up before the people around me into the blank space of midnight. This is a dangerous hour.
Our minds are not yet beholden to one another. I can think anything until she wakes up. I think I might have laughed
too loudly last night, told her stories like a fool, hoped for too much that she will get well again soon someday. I
think the shiner the joy, the darker the tarnish.

I am disappointed that I can still have thoughts like these, even after all this time has passed. That I still hope, almost
against a barrage of conflicting circumstances that she will return, return as she was before and I would get to sit
next to her and tell her that she almost didn’t make it.

I think maybe I need something else from her just yet that I don’t know. Must she take away my silver foil gift —
when everyone else has forgotten? Must she become one among the others?

This is not her fault, but someone needs to be blamed for nights withering even before the mornings can even dawn.
I pat her head softly. Then I walk outside intending to drive away. Instead, I find myself walking down the path and
sitting under the great banyan tree near the lake.

I hope someone will pull the pin so that I fall into sleep- like hair tumbling from a bun.

Years later as I ignore her to maintain my sanity, I get a call. The voice from the other end of the line is a stranger
but the southern accent is familiar.

“Is this Z?”

Yes

“Crystal passed away today morning at 5.30. She had asked me to call you.”

I nod, exchange a few empty words, and put the phone down.

My manager tells me something, but I just look at him — Blankly.

As the people at work around me continue to function, I walk out the doors, down the stairs, across the pier until I
stand close to the water.

“You will not be able to protect the women you love”. The words don’t seem to leave me.

As I stare at the water, I want to cry — To mourn her passing, to tell her that I will miss her, my dear friend, but there
are no tears. There is no emotion either.

I am singularly afraid I am again turning back into someone that I had left behind a long time ago.

I go home and my beautiful wife, my rock comes to pick me up at the bus station.

“How was your day”, she asks gently as always.

I hesitate, but I am not ready. At least not yet.

“It was great….and yours?”

Hunger Chronicles (11.14.1996)

“ Man, there are roaches in the kitchen”, my roommate MP jumps out from the 8X8 space that we call the kitchen.
There is a small electric stove on the floor connected to a thick wire that’s plugged in. There are no shelves or
counters so the best place to have the stove is right on the floor.

We always had a roach problem, but that year the intense heat had brought on an unusual bloom of those evil
bastards. MP has cooked some soupy noodles for dinner. It’s almost 10.30 PM and we just got back home.

He and I are staring at a dead roach floating in our pot that we are calling dinner.

I looked at the noodles for a few seconds.

“Pick it out. I’ll be back in a second”, I say quietly before I turn and go back to the restroom.

The food is delicious. Hot noodles sautéed with onions, garlic, and chilies.

Hunger wins out, and we get over the ick factor pretty quickly.

When the choice is between having the first meal of your day or not, the choice seems very easy.
The next day is a weekend and an Indian holiday. All shops are closed — including the one where we both have our
daily breakfast — A small pie called Kachori costing 2 rupees each.

“What do you have in mind now?”, he asks. He knows my options are pretty limited.

I am still mulling it over when he provides the most obvious solution of them all.

“I am planning to go to the mess at around 11.30 for an early lunch. I can get you a couple of things from there for
tonight, but I think you should go see Ana.”

Of course.

Ana is the girl I have been seeing for a couple of months now. She stays in the other part of the city in a locality well
known for its beautiful houses and shopping areas. She lives there with her mother and an elder brother and I go
visit her every alternate day after college in the evening.

Her mother is one of the kindest and gentle persons I know. Mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and extremely decent, she
has embraced me into her family when I have barely known them.

As I visit her home, she slowly retires to the kitchen to dish out some delicacy or the other, thus giving us young
souls some much-needed space. Her food is one of the many reasons why I keep visiting, as selfish as this may come
to be.

Her brother who is 10 years elder on the other end is just slightly intimidating. He comes back from work around
7.30 in the evening, when we both are sitting below her apartment talking to each other. He sees me sitting there and
walks back to the elevator giving me an evil eye.

All conversation ceases and I stare at the dirt or make a lame attempt at smiling and waving at him, an action that is
seldom reciprocated. He is just a protective brother who probably doesn’t understand what his younger sister sees in
this unemployed boy that shows up often at her door and eats up half their kitchen.

I stand in front of the closed shop mulling MP’s suggestion.

Having just visited her yesterday, today is supposed to be our time off — which is the reason for my hesitation. As I
run through the various options, I know this is the only viable one if I am going to eat today.

Walking to the yellow and black public phone booth next door, I take out the 2-rupee coin from my pocket.

The cash meant to be used for breakfast comes in handy to make the call.

I dial.

She picks up on the third ring.

“Hey, you…” she seems a tad surprised.

She probably isn’t expecting a call until tomorrow. This is slightly out of routine. Even though we have both barely
dated a couple of months we both know we are creatures of habit.

What she doesn’t know just yet is that the daily budget of 2 rupees can either be used to eat breakfast or make a
phone call.

It’s a binary choice on most days.

“What are your plans today evening?”, I ask cheerfully.

“Not much. You plan to come to see me?”, she asks without breaking a beat.

“I am going to be around camp at 4.30 for some work. I can stop by if you like. I do have to leave early though”, my
self-respect still exists somewhere.

“Absolutely! We can sit downstairs and talk”.

“Sure. I’ll come up first and we can then head back down…if that’s ok?”.

The whole purpose of the visit there. I hope I am not making myself too obvious.

“Sounds great. See you then”.

I am smiling and already a little less hungry.

DNA (12.04.1997)

What would she have wanted me to do?

In the years following my friend Hetali’ s death, any time I had an important decision to make I asked myself: What
would she have wanted me to do? What would she recommend? Would she be displeased by my actions?

These questions became my liturgy, my belief system. I was just twenty-three years old and aware that my friend
had died disappointed in me. Was I going to be okay? Was I going to pull myself out of my downward spiral?
Would I find my way in the world? She had no idea while she was alive, nor did I. In my early twenties, I had
constructed a new identity for myself. I had shed the obedient, good, observant boy I had once been as if stepping
out of my skin and into another. I stopped reading books, going to the temple, spending time outdoors, going to the
beach—all the things that had kept me grounded. I became the angry, hard-edged person, interested only in the
surfaces of things. If I sensed an air of danger, I would run towards it. I figured that I would hang in there for as long
as I could until it all ended for me—if something ever did.

Well, it was indeed a hanging that stopped me. Only it wasn’t the hanging I had imagined. It wasn’t my hanging.
Her sudden suicide destroyed her life, her parent’s lives, and in a devastating bit of symmetry, saved mine. What
would she want me to do? Over and over, the question became a beacon in my personal darkness, lighting the way.
It seemed I couldn’t go wrong, as long as I listened to my dead friend. She would have wanted me to stop getting
into those needless fights. So, I finally did. She would have wanted me to go back to college. So I did that too. She
would have wanted me to take care of my parents—and I tried. Oh, how I tried. There was no getting around the
Fifth Commandment, Honor your father and mother. Not sometimes. Not depending on their behavior. Not when
you happen to feel like it. Honor your father and mother no matter what, she used to say in one of her serious tones.
The wisdom of it all – We were just twenty.

Now—Years after my friend’s death—she haunts me. She stands over my shoulder as I write, as I scrape and throw
away those scribbled papers in the nearby bin and I write again. She is the young girl I see on Marine Drive, walking
with a hand in her coat pocket, clutching a khaki bookbag. At three o’clock in the morning, if I am startled out of
sleep, it is she who waits in the darkness looking at me with those kind eyes that knew everything that I was feeling.
She lives in my hips and is lodged beneath my solar plexus. The pain that she left has carved a deeper memory. The
deeper I probe, the more I find parts of her inside me, buried artifacts. Closure is impossible. Yet I stay silent. I
never mention her to anyone – ever – lest that in the act of mentioning it and the opposite person not understanding,
that it be sullied - her memories.

Honor your father and mother, she said. But I was unable to honor my friend, nor protect her. I fought her, avoided
her, and pushed her away.

“But don’t you see it Z?” - She used to sometimes say quietly looking at me as we sat under the afternoon shade.
“Don’t you see it?”

She is my Mriyate—she circulates within my DNA, every moment that I am alive.

She will die only when I take my last breath.

The Doll (10.29.2009)

It's a beautiful sunny evening. Just that period when the sun is not bearing down on you, but the chill of the winter
night hasn’t set in yet. In this twilight zone, the sky is painted in hues of red, white, orange, and black.

I have just got back from the gym. It’s a lazy Saturday evening and I have nowhere to go. Standing on the balcony
holding a glass of cheap brandy I look on to see at the canvass painted in the sky.

There is a shadow moving across the garbage bin sitting on the opposite end just behind the birch tree. At first, I
ignore it. Cats and raccoons usually haunt it at night, but never at this time in the evening. I look closely and I see an
old guy bending down rummaging through the trash looking for something.

For a second, I think he might be someone who threw away something valuable by accident and is trying to get it
back, but this man has no urgency. He is going through it without knowing what to look for and then I see him
finally stop and pull out something. It’s a stale loaf of Italian bread, one of those long ones that you can buy at the
local market basket.

He looks at it, dusts it a couple of times with his free hand, and then takes a bite out of it right there. I look closely
and I recognize him suddenly. I have seen him once walking down the street with 4–5 trash bags tied to the front of
his bicycle. I look around and I see his bike leaning against the wall. It’s an old bike, rusted in most places with its
paint peeled off, but it seems functional.

I keep sipping on my brandy watching him. He seems to be in no hurry as he chews slowly, his back against the
wall. A couple of birds flutter by picking up fallen crumbs and swiftly flying away. This attracts some more of them
and soon 5–6 insistent birds are flying around in unison. He stops eating and watches them silently. For a moment, it
looks like he is planning to catch one of them. Instead, he chooses to amaze me. He drops a few more crumbs down
and watches as more birds come flying by to pick them up.

He smiles as he does that and keeps repeating it with bigger and bigger chunks until the bread is gone in a matter of
seconds. He suddenly realizes it himself as he looks down at the birds picking crumbs by his feet. He navigates
carefully around them and starts to rummage the trash once again looking for food. He finds another soggy piece of
bread and stuffs it directly into his mouth without even cleaning it.

At this point, I have seen enough. I turn back inside and head directly to the kitchen. I look around for any available
food and start to pick random items off the shelf. A brand-new loaf of bread, a half-eaten pack of cookies, a pack of
carrots and I run down the stairs with my stash, two at a time.

I come back from behind startling him. He looks up at me and then back at the bread in his hands. He is not afraid
and seems confident enough of handling himself.

“Would you, maybe, like this?”, I ask as I hold out the food in the plastic bag, keeping a fair distance from him.

He looks at me for a couple of seconds. He is assessing me, his safety, and his hunger all at the same time. It’s a
closely packed equation that I have seen people like him run through. I wait.

“Yes”, he nods his head slowly and holds out his hand. I take a closer look at him now. He is not that old, around 50,
white hair, unshaven and unkempt. He has a wild air about him, slightly untamed but yet he has an air of confidence
rarely seen in people of his social status.

He twirls his little salt & pepper beard with his left hand as he holds the bag of goods with the other. This act
reminds me of my grandfather from years ago when we were small and we used to sit in his lap while he twirled his
beard, sometimes deep in thought.

I turn to walk back to the apartment, and he holds out a hand with a smile.

I have many thoughts rushing through. My late grandpa, of the simple goodness of this man, of the hardships of life
many people go through, of old age when every person should have basic security, food, and shelter. Something
clicks inside me and I instead extend my arms and give him a light hug instead.

He is a bit taken aback. He is used to people who keep their distance from him. He suddenly drops his bag to the
ground and hugs me back with the biggest of grins, his semi toothless mouth split open revealing a cacophony of
bad teeth, but a face that is still magnificently alive.

I end up inviting him back to my place for dinner and he accepts simply without any big flourish like it’s the most
natural thing in the world. I hear him wash his hands in the bathroom sink as I cook a simple Indian dish of lentils
and rice from my limited knowledge of recipes taught by Ana from years back.

We sit by the kitchen table and eat mostly in silence. It’s probably been a while since he has had a warm albeit
tasteless meal and I let him savor that for a bit. He eats in big chunks looking around after every bite gauging his
surroundings. I know that trait from years of meeting homeless people and I sit silently, almost ignoring it.

After dinner, we sit on the plastic chairs of the balcony looking at the lights across the sky.

‘Were you born and brought up around the area?’, I ask.

‘A couple of miles from where we are sitting. There used to be a small cottage right around ocean road. I graduated
from UNH’.

I want to ask him the most obvious question — How does one end up like this? I can’t bring myself to ask it.

He senses the next query and nods in understanding. My too transparent look of dismay has made it painfully
obvious.

‘I worked at the Noble mechanics shop down the road for 20 years. The pay was good, and I had a small house, a
kind and gentle woman as a wife, and three great kids. Two sons and a daughter …. Great kids. Straight A students.

The boys were great, but little Nicole was my absolute favorite. She was 10 years younger than her elder brother, but
she was wise beyond her years.”

“Then the machines came. The automated cutting lathes, the CNCs, and suddenly my skill was no longer useful.
They tossed me out without my last pay…like a piece of garbage. I planned to retire from there. Never happened. I
just sat day after day hoping to find a good job, then any job, but the times were lean. Nothing came up”.

He stops there and hesitates for a bit as if contemplating what he should say next. I try to change the topic.

“It’s a cold evening. Do you need a blanket my friend”, I ask as I stand up trying to go back in to get a blanket.

He completely ignores my last question.

“I was called into school when she overdosed.”, he looks up at me. I am rooted there standing.

‘She was a great kid, a star athlete. She wanted to be a doctor…. I could never have seen that coming in a million
years, he pauses.

I can hear the dog bark on the ground below.

‘She ok now?’, I ask with a slight feeling of dread.

‘She never made it through the night. Never woke up. Not even to say goodbye to her papa’.

He stares straight ahead into the dark. The darkness of the night is only matched by the emptiness inside him. I sit
back down in silence comprehending his grief. There is nothing I can say. For someone who prides himself on being
articulate, I am at a complete loss of words.

‘Have you ever lost someone suddenly even before you could say your goodbyes?’, he asks, still staring ahead.

He is sitting here, but he is a million miles away.

I continue to stare ahead, almost afraid of what I have unraveled. I think about the many people who I could tell him
about. They never stopped to say their partings. The sister who passed away when I was 10, the girl who hung
herself before I could find her, the friend who died in my arms after he drank a bottle of rat poison, the one who
never told me about her cancer and just went away silently. The moment wasn’t about me. The question wasn’t
directed to me either.

I rub my feet against the ground and stare at the number plate of the car in the parking lot.

KL3–0954, I keep repeating to myself.

‘Jenna never could get out of the shock of losing a child and she went within 8 months. She was a good woman,
very good with embroidery and she could make things better, but somehow, she stopped. I couldn’t get enough to
drink, and I raided everything we had or saved. Lost both boys to child services and they never forgave me for it. I
still don’t know why. I was just trying to survive too. In a year I went from being a great father to being homeless.
All in one year….”, he says, almost breathless with grief. I don’t think he can believe it himself even after all these
years.

I ask him if he ever visits his sons or if they come down to see him.

‘I tried to go see Tom a couple of times. He has a house in Pennsylvania. I don’t fit in there. Their wives don’t want
me around the kids. Maybe I am not such a good influence ‘, he isn’t sure himself. He sounds defeated.

The death of his daughter has just broken him down, piece by piece. He loved her the most, his princess. Of all the
three kids she was the one he had the most hopes on. She was going to be his legacy.

Sometimes the things in life we care about the most are the ones that are roughly yanked away, like a giant swiping
away a toy from the hands of a kid. Helpless, irrelevant, and powerless, we stand in front of that kind of force until it
bends us down into submission.

Few of us are unlucky enough to bear the brunt of it. Even fewer get swiped by it multiple times. We have both been
there. It never gets easier though.

It’s time and he knows he has to go. He gets up and puts a hand over my shoulder and thanks me. I have packed him
some food which I hope he can put to better use than I could. I walk him down the stairs to his rusty bike parked
against the wall. He puts his bag on the bike and stands there, slightly lost in thought.

‘You are a good kid. You almost remind me of her, but she was much prettier than you, We both laugh, and the spell
is broken. He gives me a warm hug and pats my shoulder before picking up his bag again. He hesitates for a bit
before putting his hand inside his bag, ruffles through it, and takes out a soft toy. It’s a small doll.

‘Give it to your little girl when they are back, he holds it out in the semi-darkness. I take the soft toy and thank him
again. It’s a small gesture, almost irrelevant, but it means the world for him. I don’t deny him that satisfaction.

He slowly starts to peddle away. It’s dark and he doesn’t have any blinkers on. I wonder if I should drive him
somewhere.

As he is gone from my sight, I start to walk back up the stairs. Almost at the door, I look down at the doll I am
holding. It’s slightly used, frayed at the edges, a small handmade piece probably made by someone years ago. The
two pigtails are neatly tied, and it has a small jacket embroidered in bright yellow.

I flip it around to look at the back and I stop dead in my tracks.

The letters ‘Nicole’ are embroidered in red.

Notes to my 19-Year-old self (09.14.2014)

Damn it Z, Really?
I know. I know.

We vowed never to grow old but now here we are. The bones creak a little and those white hairs seem to sprout out
of nowhere, in all the surprising places.

We vowed not to be cynical and we did end up being that anyway. Now we look for an agenda in every action.

We promised that we would never be like our parents, not even remotely, not ever and here we are. We so are.

We assured ourselves that we would once take a ride in that 89 silver Honda Accord, we saw passing by on the road
once.

We promised to have the gusto to talk to one white-skinned woman in our lifetime even if ended up being the crazy-
looking oldie on the goa beach.

We promised to stack up 300,000 rupees in eight years so we could marry without our parents having to bear the
brunt of paying for our day.

And we said we would only marry the college beauty queen, but we didn’t.

We were always curious about what was all that fuss about sex. Now that I am having some, I can tell you it’s two
thumbs up to sex, to all that kissing, and to the ferocious snuggling. It really is all that.
We thought we could jump from the second floor with an open umbrella and float to the ground just like Jackie
Chan did.

Having broken a limb, I am now jaded enough to think that it doesn’t work that way.

Nor did we buy that small cottage with a kitchen garden, but I do have a lovely balcony and I did grow some herbs.

We never ended up retiring by 40. I love the money too much and I still have no idea what to do with myself.

I am sorry about that.

But hey, we did end up in America and we made way more money than we thought of.

We lived from LA to London and from San Francisco to Melbourne to Edinburgh and we traveled to more countries
than we could ever name in our geography class.

We met some wild women and found out that white-skinned women are just like us and we loved them for it.

We still like our eggs scrambled and we still add the ginger and garlic. And we still hate those damn veggies with
undiminished fervor.

We still pray when s***t hits the fan and yet we still wonder if there is an afterlife.

But we are much more comfortable with ambiguity.

The beauty queen put on a 100 lbs. and we dodged that bullet.

We ended up buying a brand new civic and it smelled oh so nice. We still keep the plastic on the car seats after all
these years. We just cover it under a faux leather cover and just you and I know that.

We have three credit cards now and we still are as apprehensive of spending 5$ as we were then, but then we know
that we don’t need anyone to buy it for us anymore.

And even though we ended up slightly jaded, it never turned us cynical towards the goodness in our fellow travelers.

We still get along with our siblings and even though we still have our arguments they have diminished in their
feverishness.

We never ended up smoking, we rarely drink, and we love to eat biryani with a little bit of mayo and a lot of chilies
on the side which is a newly acquired habit that we credit Ana with.

We still call mom every single day from 8000 miles away and come away a bit happier after.

I do wonder if there was a specific moment when our life turned from violence to plain neutrality towards
everything.

Z……She is gone now, and you were the one who had to pull her down and untie the rope. Her legs were already
cold, almost pale.

You are probably the only one who knows this and understands what we have just lost.

You know we will never talk about this with anyone, that we buried all that we felt then long ago in that room that
smelled of vomit.

You at times wonder how we survived those days and how we lived without the ones we lost…
And when we suddenly grew up…

and parted ways with innocence.

The Circus (01.15.1986)

It’s a beautiful summer day. School is finally out for the summer and we are glad to be done. It’s been a grueling
year of studies and I still hate math with the same vengeance as last year. Nothing has improved in that sense but it’s
a great day because the local circus has come to the town and we are excited to go there.

“What is a circus?” my 5-year-old younger sister asks with curiosity.

“You will see tigers and huge elephants and of course the clowns.”. She nods as if she understands what I just said,
and I don’t care. I am just too excited myself. This is the first time we are going there ourselves. It’s just two rupees
per person and kids travel half price with parents yet it’s expensive in our world. Just slightly so. I have never
considered us among the poor. We are so much better than that.

The atmosphere is festive and there is laughter in the air. I can smell the fresh batch of popcorn as we pass by the
stand. It’s a luxury in my world and I know when not to ask. That does not stop my little sister from tugging on my
hand and pointing at the stand. She is six but she understands that such demands should not be made of dad. Kids
are very perceptive, and they internalize the situation very quickly even faster than we think they would or should. I
make stern eyes at her and shake my head in a negative as my dad walks ahead of us and he has already made it to
the ticket line.

The line is long but there is still an hour before the show starts. There is one family ahead of us. They have three
children. A boy my age, a girl around 7, and the younger one are still in her mother’s arms. We start to play with the
two elder kids as kids our age usually go. There is no formal introduction, no sizing up each other, or the
apprehensiveness that comes with the lack of trust. We just simply play. The adults are standing in line and we
continue to kick around.

One could see that they belong to even lower-income strata than us. The father’s shirt is slightly tattered in places
and the mother’s green saree has seen better days. The children were well behaved, all of them standing in line
behind their parents, holding hands. They are excitedly jabbering about the clowns, elephants, and other acts they
would see that night. Even as a young boy I could sense they had never been to the circus before. It promised to be a
highlight for their young lives.

As the line reaches close to the ticket counter, we are the second one behind them. My sister and I quickly gather
back behind our father. The man ahead bends down to talk to the clerk behind the ticket counter.

“I am looking for 2 adult and 2 children tickets for the next show “

I don’t hear what the clerk says but I see the man standing back up for a quick second looking at the currency in his
hand before bending down and asking again…

“How much did you say it was?”. He is expecting a different answer for the same outcome.

“8 rupees. Make it quick”. I hear the clerk behind the window this time. The annoyance in his voice is even more
apparent.

The man stands up tall again and looks at his wife. She just stands there staring at him. She has never decided in her
life and is happy to tag along with her man.

I see my dad’s hand reaching into his pocket and slowly retrieve a 10 rupee note. Even before the man realizes he
has put that in his hand and pats him on his shoulder and with a nod of the head gestures towards the ticket window.

The man looks at him and breaks out into a smile. He quickly buys the tickets and moves outstanding on one side
waiting to thank him. It’s dad’s turn next as he looks down into the open arc of the cashier’s window.

“One full, one half”, he says very softly. I am standing right next to him and I hear it. For a second, I think he is
mistaken, but then I realize what has just happened. He slowly pockets the change and walks out of the line. The
man is waiting right there, and he starts to thank him profusely.

“Thank you, thank you, sir. This means a lot to me and my family.”, he almost bows down in gratitude.

My father gives him a half-annoyed look but then breaks into a slight smile.

“Go now. It’s almost time for the show”, he gestures towards the tent as his family looks by.

With his pale white skin, a mustache, and a crisp cotton shirt he almost has a regal air about him. The man is slightly
chastised, thanks to him once more, gathers his two kids and scurries off towards the tent.

I see my dad talking to my mother and she nods slowly looking at me over his right shoulder. She then holds my
sister’s hand, comes towards me, and plants a kiss on my head.

As I look up to her she is already walking with her towards the entrance while we both wait out there. He is waiting
to make sure they go in safely whereas I am waiting for him to dictate the next course of action.

“Have you ever walked the beach just before sunset?”, he asks me with an amused smile.
Even before I answer, he wraps a hand around my shoulder and turns my direction away from the tent as we start
walking.

I don’t comprehend this completely just yet, but at that moment a seed is planted in me. It will grow over time,
nurtured in the shade of his warmth and the light of the circumstances.

I am taught something that will stay with me for a lifetime to bloom into something that will carry me through for
eons to come.

It’s a profound moment that couldn’t be replicated by a million words, but only by a single action.

I just don’t know it yet…

...
The Toothbrush (06.22.2015)

“ No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”,

She says upon the death of her husband even after many years have passed by.

When true love first takes hold, it also feels like fear – the dawning, dizzying realization of a new level of
vulnerability. We are sitting in her living room surrounded by the elegance of an old era, as she sits across from me,
a cup of cold coffee on the table still untouched.

“I’ve lived long enough to know that loss is often very close to love,” says Barbara when I visit her one Monday
afternoon on my way to the Logan airport, heading to LA. She is 78, white-haired, smiling, impeccably dressed, and
always unfailingly polite. The two emotions are fresh to her after her loss of her husband Jack.

Six weeks later she is home in her apartment on the upper west side of Boston dealing with the arrival of a bad cold
that coincided with the patch of raw spring. She walks into her husband’s closet, adjacent to her own in the
bedroom, and contemplates the hundreds of ties Jack had collected since the ’60s. from time to time she would open
his closet drawers and look in its contents, shirts, and sweaters from decades earlier that he had worn beautifully for
so long. It was fine clothing meant to be worn by someone who knew the better living. Even his toothbrush was still
in its rightful place on the sink, still almost touching her own.

For Barbara, grief is like muscle memory. She had already lost one husband before she married Jack. With Jack’s
death this spring, all of it comes rushing back – her rote moments, her failure to focus, the sense of time stretching
interminably until sleep. One loss does not instruct a person in how to better weather another one, if anything, she
finds that this one was summoning the pain of all the others.
When it became clear his time was ending, he gave her instructions on how they would spend the remainder of it. He
told me “We are not going to do the dying part, we are only going to do the living part”, her voice cracks as she
recalls the conversation – his intelligence, his grace.

But strangely, nothing, not even Jack’s long decline, not her previous loss has prepared her for the shock of his death
when it comes – for the heaviness of his absence, the startling pain when she sees a small restaurant at the street
corner that they visited every Sunday where they shared a moment. Now the memories were hers alone, echoes
where there had been joyful communion.

I sit by her and listen to her recount the joyful days, long before dementia set in that sent Jack into an abyss from
where he seldom returned. There was hope, a day here and there where he would recognize her, remember her
stories, or at times even add to them, but they were far few and fading. She wonders what her days would look like
going ahead.

“I used to spend my time just being around him as he did for me. What will I do now Z”? she asks without expecting
an answer. I don’t have one either, so I sit in silence, the warm soup and bread that I have brought from Olive
garden, long gone cold on the marble table between us.

I want to leave soon, not because I have some pending important work to attend to, the flight to catch, but to just
escape, escape this sense of loneliness that has surrounded this space. It’s an escapist view of the world where
everything is good as long as nothing bad happens to me. I understand it, acknowledge it, and have come to spend
time with her only to assuage that sense of guilt that at times overwhelms me.

“What if something like this would happen to me someday. What if I end up being as alone as she is? Will someone
come to spend time with me? Will they also want to escape as I do, back to the world where there is hope, a sense of
purpose, a ring of laughter, things to do, tasks to complete”.

She sits there nodding her head, watching the large-sized picture of Jack on the bedroom wall. It’s her way to
measure the precise state of love on earth in a very specific place and time.

Before I leave, I pull out the little ball of woolen thread and two sewing needles.

She had asked for it so she could start to sew again. Her face lights up as she looks at the bag. “I have a very special
boy here,” she tells Marta, her maid who is here for her weekly cleaning session.

Embarrassed, I look at my feet and shuffle around a bit. I had bought this the day before at the nearest Michaels
stores. I didn’t want to forget her. Maybe, I didn’t want her to forget me.

‘Z, you are one of the good ones,” she whispers, admiring the wool. Then she hugs me. I feel her thin arms around
my back. I am taller than she is, and when she holds me, I feel awkward, older, as if I was the parent.

She asks if I will stay in touch, and without hesitation, I say “Of course”. I don’t know what that means, promises
unkempt, like untended weeds in a kitchen garden.

When she steps back, I see that she is crying.

I hold back as I hug her making sure it was tender enough for her to bear it. Waving Martha, a quick goodbye, I step
back to take the cab to Logan Airport on my way to LA on a Monday in late August when the air-conditioning at the
Logan Airport terminal is not working and people are fanning themselves and wiping sweat angrily from their
foreheads, and every face that I see looks ready to kill someone.

I restart my blackberry and the buzzing of the collected incoming emails just doesn’t seem to stop. ‘

I scan to take a look at the ones that need the most affection.

It was time to make some money.

The Drive (02.18.1998)

The drive is long. It's one of those few instances that I have sat in a car – A nice old ambassador that has seen
better days. The road is wet and winding.

It’s starting to rain heavily in the Lonavala valley, and the ominous clouds are not going anywhere.

The call last night was unexpected.

"Would you feel all right coming in to visit?", she asked.

It was years since I had been there. I never wanted to see that place again. I have worked long and hard to get away
from it, as fast as I can.

The car rolls through the valley at a decent clip. The highway is coming to an end as the apartment blocks of the
town start to come into view.

I am familiar with these roads having walked them for hours on end, always with two people walking on each side
of me. Never alone.

Maya is waiting for me outside as the car comes to a halt. Her hair is grayer than what I left her with years ago,
although the serene dignity surrounding her is still the same.
She seems happy to see me and notices the look on my face taking it as a not so welcome sign of things to come.
She instead moves ahead and gives me a big hug and I finally relent too and hug her back. I have always had a love-
hate relationship with this woman.

As we walk in down the long passageway, I see the glass room just behind the next corner. The door is still the same
metal door with a rusted handle. I look for marks on the door, the ones I remember but they seem to have been long
painted over.

She is sitting on the sofa right around one corner of that room, like an animal on exhibit in a zoo as we watch her
from the outside. Her legs are tucked underneath her. She is a frail dark girl wearing an oversized sweater, too large
for her size, the sleeves dangling longer than her thin hands.

The room fills me with a familiar dread. I remember it vividly, its details made sharper by every nightmare that has
slowly faded away from my memories. It's the room with the gray padded walls stripped bare except for a sofa and a
chair, both screwed firmly to the floor.

I am familiar with the smell inside. It smells of shit, vomit, and … many, many lost battles. The padded walls are
littered with scratches reminiscent of its occupants, their lives scratched, suddenly uprooted.

I am with Maya outside watching her from the glass window. I have no idea how to do this.

"You going to be ok?", she asks looking at me with concern. She can't decide who is more at risk here, me or the one
inside.

I nod in affirmative. She pats me on the back, and I turn around and push the door open.

I have never been this terrified.

"Can I join you?"

I don't get an answer. I am not expecting an answer. I sit down in the chair away from her, my hands visibly steady,
even though I am not so from the inside.

The stench is overpowering, but she seems to be oblivious to it.

"Down here, did they tell you who I am?"

She keeps looking down towards her hands, pulling and twisting on her sweater.

"You're the patient. Maya asked you to talk to me."

I nod.

"That’s right. I was here for a long time."

"How long?"

"2 months. It felt like 2 years."

"You must have been crazy..."

"Yeah... I had a lot to work through. Maybe a little like you"

"I go home next week. Parents can't afford this" she says her eyes firmly implanted downwards, not reading the
magazine, yet turning its pages over and over.
"Are you looking forward to going home?"

“Why do you care?”. The voice is cold and silent. She continues to look down, scorn written all over her face. She
doesn't even pretend to hide her disdain.

"What was his name?"

There is silence. She continues to pull at the sleeves of her sweater. The clock on the wall high above continues its
slow march.

"My friend's name was Hetali... They named her after her grandmother."

She stops pulling on her sleeve and yet her body visibly tenses up. She is listening. I am watching. I am waiting.

"You know I went to visit her room, her room at the hostel, surrounded by all her things. The sheets still had her
smell and I sat there and wrapped them around a pillow and held it, pretending it was her. I sat there, for hours, until
they finally dragged me away…."

For the first time, she looks up. She has big brown eyes, distant, without a hint of emotion. They are the darkest,
most empty eyes I have ever seen.

"My mom put all of Ram's stuff ..in a storage....as soon as he died".

"No. She can't do that", I see myself shaking my head vehemently in the glass window across the room.

"You have to tell her to get them out. You need it with you. Trying to erase his memories is not going to help.

She fumbles around with her old sweater her eyes downcast. She starts to say something, then stops and
contemplates for a while. I sit there silent. Then it happens.

"I just....", she stops again, and suddenly her body goes into heaves of sobbing, the sudden outburst.

"I just miss him so much", she says between big heavy sobs. I sit there. Never claimed I knew what to do. I try to
give her a napkin. She refuses.

"I don't care...", she shakes her head softly. The dam has finally burst. The floodgates are open, the rush threatening
to overwhelm everything, everyone around her. Including her.

"My mom, she just wants me to be better. She wants me to be myself again."

"Well, you are not going to be better for a while…...and you won't ever be the same again. She has to understand
that "

She looks up at me when I say those words. They come from my heart and are a product of my experiences. I am
suddenly very calm.

"I spent a lot of time trying to figure out...figure out a way to kill myself and make it look like an accident."

She looks up suddenly chastised. "Please don't tell them I told you that."

"No... I won’t. I get it though. I came close a few times too.

"Why not? What did you do?"

"I smashed someone's head with a beer pitcher."

She looks up glaringly for a second with the unexpected answer and then suddenly starts to laugh. We both start to
laugh. She has a lovely smile, and it lifts the dread hanging around the room.

"Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that. It didn't end well. I have stitches to show."

I sit next to her and slowly take her hand in mine as I look at her.

"But you do whatever you have to do. Dying is not the answer. I know that it feels like a good solution right now,
but you want to live."

She looks up at me almost challenging. But she holds on to my hand, slightly tighter.

"How do you know that?"

"Because it's incredible to be alive. ...Where everyone assumes that life is a given, but you and I both know, that it's
not. You and I know that breath can end. That life is a gift, maybe a gift worth having”.

I nod to myself, sitting straight up. The time is coming to an end. As I stand up and, she does too. I hold her close
while patting her back.

"You will miss Ram, but you will keep him with you...and you will live now, for both of you."

She cries softly. They are no longer heavy sobs, but tears just flowing freely as I hug her, as I would my sister. I
know that we will never see each other again.

Maybe it’s for the better, for both of us.

The car moves back down the road where the leaves are green and washed clean from the rains before.

The fog has settled into the valley. The birds are still hanging on to their branches trying to shelter themselves.

As the car picks up speed rolling down the curve, the driver is humming some tune from the local radio station.

I hold my hands out slightly. They are shaking. I cannot ever do this again. It still cuts too close, too deep, even
after all these years.

I wish I could lock those memories and throw away the key or just erase them from my psyche. But I can’t, even if I
wanted to.

I will never forget her limp body hanging from the rope. Those cold pale legs will always haunt my dreams. I will
replay her words over and over in my head. The regret and the anger will never just go away. Maybe I could have
saved her if I had just listened to her, to what she was saying rather than what she was speaking.

"Those boys are going to destroy my life”, she had kept saying again and again.

Why did I not listen? Why?

I lay down my head against the headrest in the back seat and close my eyes. Bombay is 3 hours away.

Plenty of time to get back to normal.

The Other Family (08.09.2013)

“Hey, Good Luck. You will do well”, I say with slight anguish.

Kevin is standing rooted to a spot behind on the stage. He is about to go live in 5 minutes.

“You were pretty smooth too, almost natural”. Nicole smirks standing on the other side says about my performance
some time back.

“Bitch!”, I mouth out silently to her as we both laugh.

I have just wrapped up a speech on the security protocols of online banking and trading. It’s a mundane subject that
is not meant to arouse any spirits, especially on a Wednesday afternoon.

We are almost similar, this man and I. We are both banking analysts with the hustle and parallel struggles. He is a
west point graduate, an ex-marine, and all the more — My immediate boss.

The day I join his unit I walk into his large office to meet him. Other companies covet his unit of 30 some bankers,
technology specialists, and Operations. They specifically ask the recruiters to poach anyone from that team, at a
lucrative price.
He pushes his papers aside, sits there, and looks up at me for a long moment.

“Mike says you are one of the best he has hired. Let’s do six months. Ok with you?”

He is 6 2”, thinning hair, a strong handshake. Mike is my current boss, the SVP at the corporate unit where I am
now.

“Yeah, works for me.”, I say. If it doesn’t, I can always go back to Mike.

“Great. Let’s see how this works out”. That’s it. We shake hands. His gaze never leaves me. Intimidating. Slightly
annoying.

As I start to walk out, he looks up from his papers one more time.

“I am trusting you. Don’t fuck it up. If you have anything, come to me first. “

I don’t have much to say as I head away from the office.

“Keep the door open”.

It’s been almost 5 years since that day.

We have worked late nights together, spent late nights in hotel bars drinking together, been frustrated with each
other, talked about our family, almost fought each other at times.

We have traveled together across the world cramped in evil-smelling flights and sat in many meetings together,
sometimes me sitting next to him, always on the left, or at times across from him, depending on the audience.
Watching them, gauging reactions. Knowing who needs to be taken care of.

When he is in those meetings, I always keep my sentences to the minimum. Two identical drums don’t sound good
playing together — I have always believed that.

One of my guys messes up once deleting 8000 wire accounts from the system accidentally. Everyone is getting their
head torn off.

His boss Eric, the CTO is in flames standing around.

“How the f**k did this happen?”, he asks around. Everyone is scattering. Eric can be a volcano.

“Don’t know yet Eric. We will take care of this”. I hear his voice behind me.

He comes up to my desk and calmly says — “Don’t worry about everyone. Just fix it”

I do. Late in the evening, I walk into his office. He is going through the daily transfer reports.

“Kevin, I am sorry…” I start to say.

“Don’t worry about it. I know it wasn’t you”.

He never asks who caused it, knowing he will not get an answer.

“Everything ok with you?”, his eyes are fixated on mine, probing.

“Yeah”.
He nods and I am out the door.

I will double and triple-check things next time. So will my team.

We serve each other well. I manage everything around him while he brings in the new contracts. When he does, I
run them all the way through. Run the development team. Run the requirements with the banks and translate them,
all the way to delivery. I always take care of our clients.

“Do well by them, even if you have to f**k me up sometime. It should not be a difficult decision”, he says to me one
day. The lesson stays ingrained in me for a long time to come.

He tries to pay me well and always, always watches my back.

The money is just not enough. In tough times, the company is shedding consulting staff and he saves me by making
me a full-time employee. Going from consulting 70 hours a week to be a full-time employee has cut my pay by
almost half.

After all these years, I do learn to relax around him, and sometimes on those late nights, miles away from home, he
too drops his guard.

We talk about the family, we trade small secrets, we bitch about some common perceived enemies, women from the
past and we bond over petty gossip. The empty bottle of Jameson sits between us, our only witness during the cold
dark evenings.

We never talk about trust again.

As I see him head to the stage to deliver a presentation to 200 people. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan is sitting
in the first row.

Kevin opens strong, looks prepared, and delivers amazingly well, but is also funny and personal. I sit in the second
row on the left side and whisper to Nicole who is sitting next to me — “Damn, He’s killing it.”

He is doing it but somehow, I am the one feeling the pride.

When it ends, I am the first on my feet to clap and the first to hug him because I have witnessed first-hand precisely
how far he has come. How far we both have come in our working and personal relationship.

I am his proudest protégé and also his most consistent cheerleader.

As we sit in the restaurant later celebrating with the team, I look around and watch Kevin and Nicole laugh with
others about something and I have this thought -

It is an important day for us. Yet our family is not here. Our spouses are not here. As circumstances would have it,
this has fallen on us.

We are here to see this through with each other. Our failures, our mundane, and our successes.

We have been busy blurring the lines between work and home.

All this time, coworkers have become the new family.

The next day I fly back to Boston while he stays over in Melbourne for another meeting with a bank.

Later in the day, he sends me a note on IM.

“Let’s talk about getting you some stock options from the management when I get back.”

I take a moment to compose my thoughts.

“Don’t. I wouldn’t want you to look bad”

I see the “………” on IM before it is deleted. Then it stops.

He understands. There is a long pause.

“When?”

“3 weeks”

It is a moment that I have relieved many times and I have come away with only one reaction — Shame.

I did not have the courage to do it face to face. Such a coward.

Was the money worth it? I ask myself.

The clinical answer is — Yes. I have many mouths to feed, beyond the immediate family.

But it’s not so cut and dried, is it?

To this day, I do not attempt to contact him. Neither does he.

He will always be someone I look up to.

We will never talk again.

Somewhere but not here (02.01.1990)

" There is always an alternative to killing someone” ….

The voice whispers just softly behind in my ear.

I am facing the window in the biology lab overlooking the green pond. I haven’t turned back yet and I don’t
recognize the voice. I don’t talk to very many people in the class, barely even show up once in a while.

The lab is a dull dreary place. Long aluminum tables line the corner walls with wooden stools as designated seats for
each student. Before us is a petri dish with a frog splayed on the back. On the left is an array of surgical tools
waiting to be used.

I have seen them jumping up and down in the big glass jar before a lab assistant picks one each and drops them in a
jar of white smoking gas rendering them unconscious. The bio lab is a dissection class and each of us is now staring
at an unconscious frog, its heart still beating. We all will be taught to cut them open deftly, without killing them at
first as we cut the skin, then slowly examine each organ. As science students, this is our initiation into the world of
biology, but also the world of life and death. Some of us will go on to be exemplary surgeons saving thousands of
lives. Some of us will end up being killers. Most of us will find our lives somewhere in the middle. We have a whole
world ahead of us. We are barely 17.

I look at the frog that I have sliced open in front of me. Its heart still beating outpaces the beating of mine as I look
at each organ, lifting, probing, watching. However, I am consumed by a question that I have been meaning to ask
someone around here for a while now.

I see the lab assistant pass by and stop him for a bit.

“What happens to them once we are done?”.

I am half hoping to hear that they will be stitched back close by students who are more senior to us, restored to
whole. A mythical fantasy of a young idealist, at best.

“We toss them in the ditch behind the building. They will be used as fertilizer soon”, he laughs. I laugh with him but
internally I am screaming. I look at my frog with a new-found urgency. How much will he suffer once he is back to
consciousness? How long will he live in that ditch before the inevitable takes over?

The lab is almost coming to an end as I imagine myself instead of the frog- left in a ditch, sliced open, waiting for
what will be coming. The legs are moving slightly as the anesthesia is wearing off. I look at it in dismay as I will it
to go to sleep.

Then, I suddenly decide what I need to do. I pick up the splice, look around the lab where everyone is heads down,
and with one stroke pierce the heart clean. The beating heart stops as dark red blood gushes out covering most of the
organs in a pool of red. A fleck of red drop splashes on my white shirt and becomes dark immediately. I stare at it.

I pick the frog, throw it out of the open window, walk outside the lab, and stand there breathing the fresh air. Every
pore of my skin is permeated with the smell of that frog, slightly pungent chloroform…. and death. I want to go
home and take a shower. The career option of practicing medicine has reached its logical conclusion.

That’s when I hear the voice whispering inches away from my ear. She is standing right behind me, as tall as I am,
wearing a knee-length coat in the summer covering an above knee-length dress underneath, risqué and conservative,
both at the same time.

As I turn my head slightly, the first thing I notice is her silver bangles.5, 7, 10…I lose count as she stands there in
my face, inches away from me. Most Indian girls would maintain a distance, look at boys with an oft practiced
disgust or avoid any form of eye contact lest it be misconstrued as unwanted attraction and yet this girl is different.
Her brown eyes are looking directly into mine, watching, probing, questioning without making any overt attempt.

“What do you mean?”, I ask, slightly dazed.

She laughs easily.

“I saw what you did in there”, she points an elbow in the direction of the lab. Her hands are still in the pocket of her
obnoxiously improper coat. It's summer, 102 degrees, and no Indian girl wears a dress cut above her knees along
with a long coat. I would have classified her as weird except she is stunningly beautiful, way above my league in
terms of money or elegance.

“You didn’t have to kill that thing. There is always a way if you could look to find one.”

I laugh nervously and follow her as she circles the lab, walks to the window, and looks at the dead frog on the
ground, and then back at me.

Chastised, I stand there looking at her. I am not used to talking to girls, least of all someone like her who is in
complete control of herself and her surroundings.

“Let’s pick him up and give him a proper burial”, she says as she stands there looking at me, her hands eternally
glued to her coat pockets. I am spellbound as I comply, picking up the little frog, carry it to a corner under the big
banyan tree next to the pond. The soil is wet, easy to dig as I lay it down and cover it with leaves as she towers
above looking at me with an amused look.

After the semi burial, we walk slowly along the length of the pond, a path less traveled towards the college
entranceway. The slight wind in the afternoon sun provides a much-needed relief as the leaves rustle while we walk
by.
She asks me about my major and tells me about hers. I don’t think she cares about it either way. She talks as if we
haven’t met 10 minutes ago. Then she suddenly stops.

“I know why you did that in there. It was a kind deed. You just didn’t want it to suffer and I understand that…but
there are always different ways”.

“What do you mean?”, I ask.

“It’s so quiet up here. So peaceful”, she evades my question easily.

I look at her as she starts walking again, her back straight, chin up looking straight ahead, balancing her feet on the
rocks as the afternoon sunlight shimmers in the pond just to her right. Her silver bangles continue making music.

I am still slightly confused as to what we are doing while we cross over closer to the pond before I suddenly realize
that the path that she has taken is an almost dead end.

We are standing inches away from the water, green and slimy, the algae floating along its periphery.

“What would you have done if you were in my place instead?.”, I have finally found my voice.

She stands facing the pond with me on her left as she looks at me straight in the eye. This girl is tall and has the most
beautiful brown eyes that I have seen. I would never get used to that.

“As I said, there are always alternatives”, she laughs, bends down, and finally takes her hand out of her coat pocket.

The frog jumps from her hand and glides off into the water as she stands up and lights a cigarette. Taking a deep
puff, she stands there leaned against the tree, lost in thought.

For a minute I don’t exist.

She finally turns towards me, shifts the cigarette on the other hand, and extends a wet handshake.

“I am Hetali Champaneria”.

My life, as I know it, will never be the same again.

The Trip Back (07.01.2008)

"I think it’s time for you to come back now”.

I am on an international call to India with Ana who is out there with the kids for the last month. She is staying with
my mom helping her with Dad’s illness. We have discussed this before she left that she would let me know when
things get really bad.

The irony that I am going back to visit him when he is no longer in a condition to talk anymore is lost upon me at
that time. It’s 11.30 in the morning, sitting in the office listening to her say it, while people normally walk around.

I want to take the next flight out.

After booking the flight later for that night and sending a quick note to Dean that I wanted to talk, I head to his
office. Dean is the senior vice president overlooking the entire operations with almost 140 people reporting up to
him. His secretary ushers me in with a look that I know well. I probably have less than 10 minutes.

I sit in his office and wonder how I should start. He takes one look at me, gets up, and closes the door.

“I need to leave tonight. Dad’s not doing well”

It’s a statement. Not a request. He knows this. We have talked a bit about this before and he knows the lengths I will
go if it comes to that. Yet, I run their ACH and wire transfer operations and it’s a bad sell for him.

“Any idea when you can get back?”, he asks looking down at the daily transfer status report.
I shrug. At this point, I am not looking beyond one day. Many things are running through my head. None of them
pertain remotely to work or coming back.

“Ok. Do what you need to do. Just leave me your cell number where I can reach you.”

“I don’t have one. Never needed it “.

He looks at me for a second, then scowls and nods. He calls someone, barks out some orders, and turns back to me.

“Pick one up at the desk in an hour. It will cover the international calls”.

I thank him and start to walk outside. There are things to be wrapped up. I’ll probably have an hour to pack up after
I am done.

As I open the door, he is already reading some papers. He suddenly lifts his head, comes around the desk, and
extends a handout.

“Jake will pick you up at 8.00 and take you to the airport”, he says, and then softly adds almost to himself, “It’s
never easy”.

As I sit back in the car watching the traffic, I have mixed feelings. It feels like the last four years have taken their
toll, not just on me but the entire family. I remember it was 2003, almost four years ago when he fell on his way to
the fire temple where he worked every morning from 5 am. He came back home dazed and confused and the family
attributed to him being hurt but when he continued to sleep for extended periods over the next few days, they took
him in for a routine checkup.

Both of his kidneys were down to 10% and routine dialysis was the only alternative. Dialysis in India is not a cheap
affair and the thrice-a-week session along with consulting fees, medications, and monthly hospitalizations quickly
added up.

The fact that I would want to take care of him and be by his side in India is precluded by the fact that I have to earn
faster than the expense rate was an irony of fate. We don’t always get what we wish for.

The Delta flight touches down in Bombay at 1.20 AM. It’s pouring at a steady clip. Bombay is quiet at this time, the
twilight hour when things are slowly winding down but not before the newspaper sorters and the milkmen start their
daily routine.

Tired bodies are sleeping on the pavements, covered by thin sheets of cloth, their only protection against the
elements. The cab races through and the distance that usually takes more than an hour is covered in less than 20
minutes. I get down and pay the driver and there is a feeling of dread.

The brain gives us two ways to evaluate our experiences — there is how we apprehend such an experience at the
moment and how we look at them afterward — and these two ways deeply contradictory. I am still in the moment as
I take the elevator to the third floor, the sound of the elevator awakening Ana as she opens the door to the apartment.

I peek in and see him lying down on the cold marble floor on his side and I look at Ana questioningly. She tells me
that he was fine when he could walk with assistance as he had come from the bedroom to the hall in the evening but
then could not go back. The women of the house could not carry him back in and so he was asleep there on the cold
marble floor. A wave of guilt washes over me as I gently pick him up and slowly carry him back to the bedroom. He
wakes up and looks at me but I am not sure if he recognizes me. I lay him on the bed and cover him in a blanket. He
is still shivering slightly.

“Dad, it’s me….”, I manage to say as I stroke his head gently.

The thinning hairs on his head that are usually neatly parted are now just disheveled. I try to fix them but then just
give up. I sleep on a thin sheet on the floor right beside his bed waking up every hour to look at him. I still haven’t
got used to this. Ana, my sister, and my mom seem to have taken this in stride.

I am supposed to be the stronger one, the man of the house, the backbone that keeps this going, and yet here I am —
Dazed, worried, and almost dysfunctional.

The next couple of days are no better. He does not wake up the next morning and we transfer him to the local
hospital for dialysis. The doctor recommends a spinal tap as they suspect an infection of the brain fluid. I stand
outside as they bring in the curtains and cover his bed from all sides. A flurry of people moves in and out as I sit
watching them come and go.

I suddenly hear a loud moan and recognize his voice. This is the first time I have heard his voice since I have been
here and it’s heartbreaking. I have seen spinal taps before and how painful they can be. I cannot imagine what he is
going through. I quietly step outside. I am putting a distance between myself and his pain — The coward that I am.

A couple of hours later the family doctor calls me in for a quick consultation. They are planning to put him on a 24-
hour dialysis routine and possibly a pre-op procedure to determine the root cause. I ask her what the prognosis looks
like and she shrugs her shoulders.

“It might be some days or it might be for some months. I just can’t tell”, she says with ambivalence.

I talk to my mother and then head back in.

“We would like to take him home”. I have made my decision. The spinal tap had finally capped it for me. If he was
going to go, at least he would go in peace.

“You can’t do that. We could try many other things and one of them might work”, she says. I doubt she can even
convince herself.

“If you do that, he won’t have more than 10 days as the urea poisons the bloodstream. There is no kidney function at
all”, she looks at me incredulously. I shake my head. No words are spoken. I have already made my decision.

As a person’s end draws near, there comes a moment when the responsibility shifts to someone else to decide what
to do next and it’s one of the most heartbreaking decisions for a son to decide that this is where it stops. But the
arrow of events refuses to follow a steady course and that plays havoc on one’s mind.

Only the day before, it seemed like he might have weeks, even months. I didn’t want my mother or my younger
sister to be making this decision. The parent who sustained you for all your life, who is the reason for your very
existence, and whose life or death is now being decided by the very same child. I dread that the decision will haunt
me for the rest of my life but instead there is a sense of peace, and acceptance of the inevitable hand of nature.

The ambulance van threads through the evening rush hour traffic as I sit next to him holding his hand looking
outside the window at the rain-drenched people trying to get home.

On the third day, he suddenly opens his eyes. I have barely woken up and I see him looking around.

“When did you come back? Don’t you have to work?”, he asks looking at me.

“He’s awake!” my mom shouts out as Ana and the girls come running into the room. He’d recognized her.

“My little Baku”, he smiles at the three-year-old as she pulls herself up next to the bed, looks at him, and smiles her
toothy smile.
I sponge him down, brush his teeth, and even asks for his cup of tea which Ana brings to him. A small cup, just
enough. He doesn’t know what each cup of liquid means. That it would weigh on his heart, making it pump harder
and harder, circulating the blood that’s quickly increasing in urea content.

I push those thoughts further away as I smile and make him sit in the wheelchair as I push it down to the hall where
the neighbors are waiting to say hello.

Later in the evening when everyone is gone, he sits and watches a cricket match on TV.

“I barely made it this time”, he suddenly looks at me and smiles shaking his head. I don’t know what to tell him and
an overwhelming sense of affection comes to me as I hold him close. He is sitting and I am standing, towering over
him, the balance of power in a father-son relationship shifted. He hugs me back patting me on the back.

“I am really glad you came. You are a good son. I hope everyone gets a son like him”, he says that to my mother
who has suddenly materialized and is standing next to him. For a minute everything is back to normal. Ana sitting
on the floor smiling, the kids running around as he watches them smiling. For a minute, everything can wait while
we let go of yesterday.

It’s almost ten days now. Medical science and nature have taken their toll and he has slipped back into a comatose
state, his breathing getting more and more labored as the liquids circulate his body without any means of exit. His
eyelids flutter at times and he opens his eyes and looks around, those big blank eyes searching for something,
recognizing nothing.

For long hours in the night, I sleep on the floor beside his bed as he lays quiet and stock-still, except for the rattle of
his breathing that permeates everything around him, the air, the sound, the silence of the night. There is a sharp
intake of breath — it sounds like a snore that would shut off suddenly as if a lid had come down — followed a second
later by a long exhale. Then there is silence for what seems forever, and I count the seconds laying on my back
before the cycle starts up again.

I clean him up in the morning slowly sponging him as has become my daily routine. I am tired, exhausted, and
overwhelmed. He looks at me with those empty eyes and I want him to recognize me, to hug me one more time, and
to crack that smile of his just once but instead, he just looks around, the labored breathing the only sound that I hear,
again and again, and again.

“I think you should just let it go now dad, just let it go”, I hold his shoulders tightly, too tightly as I shake him a little
before telling him that.

Immediately as I do so I am overwhelmed with a seeping sense of shame. What did I just say? I just told him to die,
to let it go so that I would stop suffering, stop watching him like this so that we could carry on with our lives, our
normal lives.

He looks at me with those same eyes and I am ashamed that he has heard me, not just heard me but even
comprehend what I had said and meant. Those words uttered in desperation at that moment would stay with me for
the rest of my life as I contemplate my ending someday and someone standing over me probably thinking if not
uttering those same words. It’s a dark day for me and for what I have become.

Outside the balcony is an almond tree, which surprises me one morning with a bright red leaf among the broad green
leaves; it has changed color overnight as if painted by a practical joker.
I leave for Pune the next day with Ana, an escapist’s routine that I have become so used to, away from this suffering
if only for a day. My brother-in-law is getting engaged and we have asked them not to cancel the event. They are
worried about what to do for all the right reasons, so I want to go attend the function for a day.

It’s early morning the next day as I prepare to take the evening train when the phone rings. Ana picks up the phone,
looks up at me, and puts it back.

“It happened at 9.30 AM. We should take the next bus”.

I look at her for a second and blink.

Inside its winter and outside… It’s spring.

The Other Shoe (04.26.1989)

When I was growing up in Four Bungalows, Andheri in Bombay, I had a secret but intense crush on a family.
The entire family—who lived in our neighborhood: Mahazabin, Hormaz, Shahrukh, Mehran, and Dinshaw
Merchant. The Merchants were like a family of gods to me. Every spare moment after school before coming home,
when I wasn’t playing field cricket or practicing math or doing homework, I walked circles around their house,
hoping someone would notice and invite me in.

The other kids in the house were a lot older than I was. The year I was thirteen, Shahrukh graduated from medical
school in Bombay. Mahazabin was already in medical school in California. Hormaz was in my grade but studied in a
different school once he grew up. An exclusive private catholic school with much polished English and mannerisms,
but we kept in touch on and off.

The Merchants were beautiful and bright and happy. Their home which was huge compared to mine always seemed
lit from within, not only by glowing lamps and a steady hum of activity but by something I couldn’t have put my
finger on at the time. To me, they seemed blessed.

Life in the Merchant household was in sharp contrast to the tension and loneliness I felt with my household, a little
bit lacking, always wondering if I am not a burden on my parents, almost like a guest overstaying their welcome but
in my own house.

However, that was not the reason for looking back. That just wasn’t it. The reason for my infatuation with that
family was their certainty, their absolute conviction that they lived in a world designed to serve them and reward
them. They would always have whatever they wanted. Life would continue as planned: they were charmed, gifted,
golden, and admission to their inner circle meant that some of that good luck might, maybe just maybe rub off on
me. Even if slightly.
I knew Hormaz and since he was in my grade, I would hang out often, much more beyond the normal standard.
Even had a crush on the elder sister Mehran – The usual ones that teenagers my age have. Something unattainable
yet available for oh so delicious imaginations.

Each summer, the family spent their Christmas vacation in the fertile town of Daman in Gujrat. They stayed at the
same hotel called Oliaji, played tennis with the same pro, ordered the same mutton kebabs and their coconut rum
drinks on the beach.

Once, I asked them if they were planning to go to Daman that year. The oldest son, Shahrukh, laughed at me with a
bit of innocent scorn: “Of course, where would we be otherwise?” he said.

This might, in perspective, appear to be slightly arrogant, but really it was a form of innocence. Nothing bad had
ever happened to any of the Merchants. It was elegant if flawed logic to proceed from there to the absoluteness that
nothing ever would.

Then things did change, after their annual Daman holiday—from which they returned tanned and lavished—
Mahazabin went back to California and suffered a massive brain stroke, from which she never recovered. In the
blink of an eye, she became paralyzed and bedridden, trapped inside her own body. It was an inexplicable, rare
occurrence, the doctors had said.

She spent the rest of her life—I recently heard that she passed away in her forties—living at home with her parents.
Wheelchair ramps replaced outdoor steps. The three stumps for playing cricket next to the garden outside were
removed forever. The house went quiet, almost down to a whisper.

The family closed ranks around each other immediately. As far as I remember for the rest of my teenage years, I
continued to circle the house on my bicycle whenever I could, but never again was I invited inside. Hormaz came
out to see me when I rang the bell slightly out of breath at having run down to their house – A potbellied teenager
holding on to my spectacles. I even blamed myself as I grew up. Did I cast an evil eye on their good fortune by
being ever so slightly jealous? But I had no intentions of doing so. I was just a teenager slightly in love with
affluence.

It has been many years since I heard any word of the Merchants. My parents moved away from the Andheri suburb
where we all lived. However, their story is embedded somewhere within me, a teaching in life, almost like a
samskara.

Had they been foolish to believe in their own good fortune for all that time—to trust so implicitly that all would be
well?

They were not at all highly religious people, but they had a kind of blind faith in their own inevitability.

I, on the other hand, come from a virtuously long line of religious people who aren’t so sure that life will work out
smoothly, almost predictably as I want it to be—much less than their own lives will unfold with as much ease.

I was born and bred to fear the worst. It was implicitly ingrained in me to look out for the worst and always be
pleasantly surprised at things turning out even slightly better. That way I protected myself from the unknown. If
things went wrong – Well, I had anticipated that, didn’t I? When things turned out good - oh God! It was such an
amazing thing. Good things, miraculous things do happen in life, even to me, despite me, I would tell myself.

I know that misfortune either shows up or it doesn’t. Most of the time it does without any warning, especially when
things are going well. Worry is not protection insurance. So, who was I fooling?
Occasionally I search for the Merchants online when I have a little slack time from my work. Not much information
is available. The sons have both become cardiologists, like their grandfather. They’ve established private practices;
moved to more affluent neighborhoods; one even to England. They had a few kids, a rare breed among us Parsis.

As I sit by myself at times, I often find myself wondering how those teens, the heirs to the kingdom whose
innocence was so suddenly and completely ravaged—have been raised to think of themselves.

What have they inherited from childhood? Do they feel a certain sense of blessing? Are they certain of nature’s
special benevolence on them?

Or perhaps, maybe just like me, they live in fear of the other shoe dropping, without a sound, when they least expect
it.

After all, it did drop once.

Beyond (01.10.2016)

I guess I tried to tell them that the mind is the door to the mystery, that is bigger than us.
How two people, strangers, come to meet at a specific time and place. It takes eons in the making to get to that
single moment.

There is this poem by a Venezuelan writer that begins

The earth turned to bring us closer,
It turned on itself and in us.
Until it finally brought us together
On this street at this moment.

There are some mysteries that are beyond you.

Recognizing the limitations of your logical brain is taking that first step.

If you follow this unicorn into the deep forest, you will find yourself standing at the edge of the precipice.

If you look down, it will terrify you.

And if you are brave enough, you will take that leap from that precipice - into the unknown.

To what's beyond reality.

Beyond the invisible.

The Barn (10.27.1992)

" This is ……where it happened”, he says as he points out at the towering barn adjacent to two newly built houses.
It’s painted in red and bales of hay are stacked on top of each other. A lone sickly cow wanders outside followed by
a couple of stray dogs barking behind her.

“Thank you for bringing me here Pakya”, I hear myself reply, barely, in a whisper.

He pats me on the back and steps back. It's sacred ground and I walk around it slowly as if I am afraid of disturbing
something, something inside me.

I look at it. I look around and I feel nothing. I want to walk away from it but my legs are rooted. I don’t know why I
stayed, but he tells me I stayed for the longest time before he finally pulled me back on his bike, taking me back
home.

The first memories I have are of smoke and water, the smell of burning old wood, and bales of hay. It’s as if the sky
is smeared in a red paste, I remember the black smoke billowing in circles, as it rose towards the sky.
I had never seen anything burn unconstrained before, and at that moment, I feel afraid. I feel time sliding sideways
as if it were allowed to feel other, older moments within this moment.

Every time I’ve remembered the night, I’ve had to remember something, invent something more dramatic to convey
the experience: efforts to save the barn, the heroism of the firemen. It was just a leaning barn stacked with hay and
the scene didn’t need any embellishing.

The truth is that the sight of the barn on fire put me at a complete sense of peace — but only for a moment, the
tremendous spitting roar, the orange light rippling across our faces, the box of matchsticks shuffling in my pocket,
the bottle of lighter fluid lying in one corner. The air around our circled bodies was thick with smoke and the smell
of fear.

Something missing among them had returned for a moment — the fear of death. The body of the lonely burnt cow —
my only regret.

I must have looked around me, though.

The faces in the small crowd must be my memory.

They were beatific, orange, flickering as if it were a sign of the beginning of the end. Their backs were turned black
with the night.

It was as if our lives in time-lapsed black & white photography were playing at high speed in front of me and my
skin was rippling with heat as if I needed that burn to soothe me, lull me into forgetting her memory, of what had
happened, of how I would live to go ahead.

There is nothing more liberating than seeing your own demise and finding it beautiful.

Weren’t you there? Wasn’t it a gorgeous event?

In all the attempts at chronicling the lives, the feelings, the events of myself as well as others, I have kept two nights
to myself so far — for the longest time. Every time I start to write about it, I end up deleting the whole thing. As if
this was a sacred secret that I held in my palm, carrying it around until it felt heavier, hotter — like molten lead. This
night was one of them.

Everyone knows that experience is never as tidy as the stories we cull from it, and memory is even worse — it’s just
the stories that we tell ourselves enough times it sticks. But when we tell stories of love, stories of revenge, stories of
hate, we need plot points and explanations.

If I were true to experience, I would stand there, incoherent from grief, shaking, wondering how I would be able to
move on from this.

The burning of that barn reflected the inferno raging inside me that night and after it was burnt down to black and
the people had scattered away and the moon came over the horizon, I looked inside me, hoping against hope that
those flames burning deep in my interior would be extinguished too.

Instead, I find them burning with a raging intensity to a point where I could not stand there anymore.
I walk and walk until my legs go numb under me.

Sitting on the sidewalk of a busy street littered with garbage that night as the vehicles pass by, I remember their
bright lights and I remember holding my head in my hands with only one thread of feeling that I recall — Despair.

And hate….

Just like the smoke that had settled on my skin.

He had never said the words — “This is where it happened”.

My memory glosses it over, makes it sanitary so that it doesn’t inflict so much pain when I recall it.

I will remember his words on my deathbed, but I will spend my entire life trying to forget them.

“This is where she was raped…”, he had said.

Eye Candy (11.19.2015)

“Damn…That one looks hotttttt”

My eyes are glued to the front, my grip slightly tightens up on the steering wheel as I watch a beautiful specimen
walk up ahead. Short skirt, blond hair, and 6” heels.

What more could a man with a mid-life crisis ask for?

Laughter erupts from the seat next to me.

“She is going to turn out to be old. You wanna bet?”, she says.

“No way!”, I moan.

“You always hone in on the older ones. Didn’t your friend Nigel tell you so many times?”

We drive ahead. I slow down, look in the rear-view mirror, and grunt loudly.

The chick is ancient. Old as an Egyptian mummy.

There should be some law against these older women having gym-toned bodies and wearing this outrageous
clothing. No wonder I get burnt every time at the expense of being ridiculed by no one other than my half — the
better half.

I get lucky marrying that one. I sure married up.

We call it as we see it. We skip the jealous nonsense.

It isn’t uncommon to see a beautiful girl walking ahead of me and for me to say:

“Dammit, I don’t recognize that ass!”

My sexist, fraternity-aged brain still chronicles beautiful women by their behinds. It’s just bone and muscle carved
in different shapes of round, but my bite-sized brain stores these as images — To be referenced later, to be cataloged
for recognition.

She laughs and shakes her head. She knows she married a weird one.

When we had just started dating, I would be careful when eyeing other women. I would go cockeyed trying to slyly
follow a moving beauty.

Nothing goes without her noticing it.

“Hey, you can watch as much as you want”, she says and then pauses…” As long as you let me watch mine”.

I hear that and break into a smile. I am no longer in prison. I realize that the prison that I was in was just self-
constructed. At that moment, I fall in love with this woman —all over again.

When we go out to the beach, without fail, on our drive to the shore, one of us will say, “Weather is great. I hope
there is some good eye candy today.”.

I admit — mostly it’s just me. She is much more age-appropriate, but just barely so.

There are no jealous stares. God No -- — we aren’t swingers. We are just human beings who like looking at beautiful
people — just like others.

We just treat it like it is.

Some months ago, we were at an airport security line, to scan all of our bags before passing through to the terminals.

Suddenly, there was a bit of commotion behind us.

I look behind, a security guard is escorting a traveler, ushering him forward past the long line that we were near the
front of. People are mumbling and moving to the side as the security guard insists people move aside.
The passenger he was escorting was late for his flight. He was getting him to his gate and was in communication on
his phone with the people attending that terminal entrance.

The passenger comes forward past us — it’s a 30ish year-old-man in a perfectly fitted suit, with a clean-cut face that
looks cut out from a statue — he could have easily been a contestant on “The Bachelor”.

He begins taking his shoes off, he looks winded from jogging, he smiles and looks behind towards us and says, ~
“I’m so sorry everyone. '' — it’s a long story. Please forgive my cutting.”

I nod right to my wife thinking “That right there is one good-looking bastard.” ….and I laugh. There she is, the
mother of two with a dreamy look, already eyeing the candy.

He didn’t have to apologize too much. The old lady working the security scanner was lying in wait, with a smile,

Ready to pat him down.

Attention (07.18.2009)

I
“ crave attention. Without it I would feel invisible”, she says without any context.

I am sitting next to Jessica and we are on our way to the bus station where she will undertake a 10-hour trip to see
her boyfriend who is in a hospital. He is beaten up in some random bar fight and she is worried about him.

Jessica’s man has anger issues and has taken it out on her multiple times. Her wall has been punched in, she has
visited urgent care multiple times for — falling over the stairs or running into a door.

I start to speak and then hold the thought. It would not matter anyway.

She needs the man, she needs his attention, she needs his words, and she craves his touch.

Perhaps it is true that the only words we say are the words we would like to hear,

that the praises we sing are the praises we would delight in,
that the faces we like are in some way reflections of our own,

that we touch the ones we love in order to tell them how we would like to be touched.

This is how we spend our lives: looking for someone to get our stories straight, to read us as we hope to be read, and
then turn around and tell us all about it. Just the way we want it to be heard.

When you seek others this way, you are invisible, nonetheless.

Your shawl is covered in mirrors in which others admire themselves, this is why they greet you so passionately.

It is good to be seen, but it is better to see.

Find a being to look hard into, and if you find the right mirror for yourself.

and just maybe if you look deep enough in that mirror, you will see a glimpse of yourself.

…and that what is more than you.

The Battles of Sangamner (11.14.1995)

S
“ angle, you should close your shop and go home”, I tell him, still looking at the horizon, away from his shop.

Sangle, a skinny lanky 20-year-old tea vendor stands by his stove warming up a batch of tea for the customers who
might take the last ride out late into the night. The stove hisses as the scent of the sweet milk tea permeate the
atmosphere.

“It’s still an early night Saab. The last movie ends at 12.00.

There will still be people coming over”, he is busy chopping ginger as he throws it into the cauldron on the stove.

He starts to arrange the glasses of tea in his tray for the upcoming customers.

Suddenly he stops and comes over. He senses something is about to happen.

“Go home Sangle. It’s late”.

His mind slowly registers the tone and starts to understand what I am saying. Taking a couple of steps back he turns
off the stove in a hurry and puts the glasses back on the shelf. The stove is hot, but he picks it up wrapped in a thick
cloth, pulls down the tin door of his little shop, and locks it up quickly. It’s a useless activity and the tin shed barely
protects anything except shield its inner wares from prying eyes.

But it’s a matter of habit.

He picks up the stove and walks quickly towards the direction of the fields. Even if the shop is broken, the most
expensive item in his shop needs to be safe.

I sit there outside the shop on a wooden bench with a red plastic chair next to it.
Standing up, I pick the wooden bench and drop it behind the shop. It’s not a selfless move trying to protect the poor
man’s furniture. I just don’t want it to be used against me.

As I barely sit back in the chair, I already see them in the distance. I can only see the shapes as they turn the corner
from the college building.

1000 feet.

There is an entire football ground between us. As they cross the lamppost, I see them much clearer. They are almost
ten of them, walking quickly. They know exactly where they are headed.

800 feet.

There is a sudden excited uttering of voices as they recognize their quarry across the field.

There is a burst of adrenaline as the heart starts to pump faster than normal preparing the other organs for the
upcoming assault. There is a slight tremor in the legs and the hands are cold, even though it’s a warm night. I can
feel the vein beating in the back of my head. The knot in the stomach feels — very tight.

500 feet

A sudden rush of fear as I scan the crowd for a tall, giant-like figure between them. I don’t see him. The wily
Kashmiri decided to sit this one out. There will be no Shera stopping them after a while. They would go on and on.
The brain floods with fear as I suddenly want to bail.

This is not how things should have turned out. I look around and see a flat open space. The cane fields are probably
a mile away. It’s just too late.

300 feet

I can see their eyes in the dark. The brass knuckles on at least two of them. There is a chain that’s dragging behind
the one on the left. Things slow down to a crawl. The last clarity of thought flashes by –

I hope I will be able to walk again.

200 feet

There is nothing more to do. I actually stand up from the chair, bend my knees slightly, hips outwards and tuck my
chin inwards to the chest. Protect the face -- — They teach you, but it’s never so clean and easy. The damage doesn’t
hurt until the fight is over, it just disorients you.

I can hear someone out there calling my name. Time to hunker down.

It’s going to be a long night.

Heros & Villans (07.03.1998)

It's pouring in Bombay just like the rains come in every year around July. The clouds are dark and the drops are
heavy and everything that you see is covered in a sheath of wetness. It's torrential, pouring, and never-ending as I
walk my way back home from work.

The old man sits by the side of the road. He is wearing a dhoti and his upper torso is completely bare. He has a sheet
of transparent plastic over his head. He just sits there dazed looking at the crowd as they try to find shelter from this
pouring rain as it threatens to engulf everything.

He is looking eagerly at everyone, hoping that someone would stop to drop a coin in his little bowl which is filled up
to the brim with rainwater. He is shivering, yet there is a tenacity about him that makes me stop in my tracks as I
look at him.

The guy behind me, his pace broken suddenly by my sudden stopping, crashes into me, yelps, and mutters a curse
before circling me to pick up the pace. The crowd moves in unison. They have different destinations but a single
purpose.

“Will you eat something?”

I ask above the roar of the rain. He doesn’t hear me for a second. He isn’t expecting someone to stop, let alone talk
to him.

I repeat, this time looking directly at him.

“Ji Saab” (yes sir), he immediately replies this time.

I cover him with my umbrella as best as I can. The canopy is small and made for a single person. The left shoulder
will take a drenching but that’s not the primary concern at this time.

We sit at a nearby Dhaba and I order two parathas. They come in piping hot accompanied by two cups of sweet milk
tea. He eats quickly as I watch him. He is a Nepali chap with the usual slit for eyes, around sixty with a hint of white
stubble. They are hardened people, tough and ferociously loyal.

I ask him what he is doing in the rain and he tells me his story in bits and pieces as he devours the food.

He has been in Bombay for five years now while his family is in Nepal. He worked as a watchman for an apartment
complex entering names of visitors into a register and making sure vendors don’t get up to knock on those million-
dollar apartments while their owners slept at noon. His wife is sick and dying and he wanted to visit her back home
and he needed three weeks. The management had no tolerance for that kind of request and replaced him with
someone else.

Having sent all the saved money back home every month, Bahadur has no means of suddenly scraping enough to
take a train ticket back home. It’s a three-day journey and there’s no way he can swing that without running into a
ticket checker who will probably toss him out mid-way with no way of getting back.

“How much is the ticket?”, I ask slightly apprehensive.

“Three hundred rupees Saab”.

It’s a tough amount for me, but beyond reach for him, not unless he begs for a couple of weeks at least.

“What time is the train?”

“8.30 from Bombay central “. It’s already 6.15 right now.

He doesn’t meet my eye. There is a glimmer of hope, but he has been let down often before.

I make some mental calculations and suddenly stand up. I push the uneaten plate of parathas at him.

“Eat up and stay here. I’ll be back soon”, I say as I start to sprint home.

It’s a short ride and I cover it in 15 minutes. There is nobody at home. Dad is out at the fire temple praying while
mom is out somewhere. I open dad’s cupboard and find the small tin aluminum box filled with small denomination
notes. Picking up the largest ones I notice I am still a hundred short. I look around in my usual places but can’t stitch
up the total. I plan to borrow some from dad, but I have already taken his half a month worth of savings. The clock
is reading at 6.40 pm.

I suddenly decide something and take the bus to the fire temple. It’s late evening and the office crowd has thinned
out now. A couple of old regulars are praying before the fire. Just ahead is a tray filled with firewood and cash,
offerings from the devotees of the evening. It will soon be scooped up by the priest. I look around and the old lady, a
regular recognizes me and smiles — The son of the priest.

I bow down to the fire Gods and quickly apologize. Getting up I deftly scoop up two fifties from the tray and walk. I
am afraid someone will call for me but nobody does.

The rain is still coming down as I take Bahadur to the Bombay central station and buy the ticket for the general class
bogey, the cheapest. As I hand him the ticket, he is still somewhat confused. He then realizes what has happened and
he smiles for a second before the tears start to fall. The short man opens up his arms for a big hug. There is no
escaping that. Those Nepalese are built like bears.

As I walk home a heavy gust of wind breaks apart three of the spokes in my umbrella and I decide to just throw it
away. I am drenched already and there is no point pretending to be dry.

I lift my face upward towards the sky and stop for a minute to take it all in. The annoyed crowd, their rhythm broken
by this singular fellow, quickly walks around me.

—————

The next day is a Saturday and I have a day off. Ana is in town and we decide to take a walk by our usual
destination — Marine Drive. It’s a walkway across the ocean and is one of the last remaining scenic places in
Bombay. The crowd is thin, and most people are either working or taking an afternoon siesta.

We pick up some street food and sit on the large boulder watching the ocean. She is telling me about her day, and
we are just another couple littered around on this beautiful afternoon.

A young beggar boy sees us sitting and decides it’s an easy way to make a couple of bucks. They usually target the
couples who are either too embarrassed or too eager to get rid of them that they will pay up quickly. It’s an old
modus operandi and he probably has used it to perfection.

As he walks up from Ana’s side, I nudge her to attention. She is wearing a thin gold necklace and a knee-length
skirt, short by Bombay standards. I want her to be careful.

The chap comes up and extends a hand close to Ana’s face, uncomfortably close as he ignores me completely. She
stiffens up a bit and sensing a win he pushes his luck by touching her bare knee.

He looks at me and smiles.

Before he can take his hand away, I have him on the ground, on his back. A rage builds up inside me. A rage that
goes beyond protectiveness. He is the face of my low-paying job. His smile is a sarcasm thrown at my ability to
protect my women. Within that second, my disappointment with my life and my inability to do anything about it
manifests itself into a vicious combustion cycle.

The first kick with the steel-tipped military boot lands right across his face and I hear a distinct crack as blood
gushes out from his nose. The next across his ribs curl him up into a ball. He is no match, a malnourished kid
looking to make a quick buck. He just picked the wrong afternoon for it.

I stop and pull back as I see the horrified look on Ana’s face. I have tried to hide this side of me from her and am
hoping she never has to see this. The rage that is bottled up within me is years in the making. The lack of
opportunity, the many death of the ones I loved, the random beatings from college days — They all manifests
themselves occasionally in a single cloud of black, the darkness that I keep well wrapped up from her most times
until the veil slips just slightly. It’s not a pretty sight.

Holding her hand, I walk. I know his people will be around and they will gather soon. As hot-blooded as I am
prudence kicks in at an opportune moment.

After leaving Ana at her aunt’s place, I take the bus home. As the bus winds its way through the crowded streets of
Mohammed Ali Road, I close my eyes and exhale.

There was no need for this violence. He was just a poor kid making his penny — Just like me. Just yesterday, I did
the unthinkable, I stole from my dad’s account and the fire temple so I could get someone home and today I hurt
someone almost identical for no great reason.
I could have found him something to eat or given him some spare cash or even just chose to ignore him and walk
away. He could have gone home and had his dinner and slept under that 100 square foot of tin roof, but it wouldn’t
be. I can be the one who takes you home or prevents you from reaching it.

That’s when I realize that the bright and dark both reside within you, dangerously close to each other. Each
threatens to engulf the other at the slightest of provocation, like a wild animal unleashed within. The man who helps
you is the same person who has ruined a hundred lives. The poison that cures you is the same that has killed
thousands.

The black and the white are both me.

I often used to wonder if I am a good person or bad, a decent kind person, or a rage-infested maniac.

Am I decent or am I just pure evil?

Don’t you see? …

There are no villains. There are no heroes either.

Everyone is convinced the bad guy is the other.

Take a closer look……

Who is telling the story?

Marriages (12.28.2017)

A couple of months into our marriage I’m occasionally wondering, “Who the hell is this person and why is she
doing all these things to drive me crazy?”

I can only imagine what she was thinking. I never asked. I didn’t want to press my luck.

When they say complete opposites attract, they used us as their model.

I need space. If I can’t get it, I become first distant, then insufferable. I wish I didn’t but then she knows it well.

I’m punctual. Well, at least I used to be. For her 20 minutes late is on time. I worked her down from 40.

I can tend to range all over the plains emotionally.

We call her, “Emotionless Robot.”

I like a lot of loving expressions. She gets more mileage out of hers.

So, through the years, on more than one occasion, I’ve ever so slightly wondered, “What did I do?”

And no, I don’t know what she thought. I never wanted to ask. I see no reason to press my luck.

Yet, in those times, when my emotions finally head back into the corral, I’ve also done something else.
I’ve stopped and reminded myself of all the reasons why I fell in love with her.

She’s the most beautiful and loving person I’ve ever known.

When I’m uptight she’s relaxed and that in turn relaxes me.

When I’m agonizing out about being late, she reminds me life will go on just fine, without me.

And when I need a loving expression there’s been some mileage. Then I’m glad I married her. And I remember why.

The other day, we had some lame-brain arguments earlier. I can’t even remember what about it was so important.

It was long past and over. We enjoy dinner and watching TV.

I helped her clean up and stand looking at her in the kitchen putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher.

I look at her working and think, “She is perfect …for me... I can’t imagine life without her.”

And yeah, I don’t ask her. I’m sure she feels the same most days. There’s no reason to press my luck.

Decently lasting marriages are built on at times on wondering why.

And then remembering…

Old Age Home (08.12.2008)

I am in Navsari for my yearly visit.

The weather is warm and a welcome change from the cold Boston climate, so I relish it even when others who have
lived here forever are suffering in the Indian heat. I have been eating the Kolah ice-cream almost daily, a delicacy of
Navsari. Kolah is a family-owned ice-cream shop that has been around for generations now, but the aura hasn’t
changed a bit.

There is a Parsi gentleman who sits on the counter collecting bills from customers. He wears a crisp white shirt, a
red skull cap that identifies the Parsis and nods a little in respect while collecting money from paying customers.
The server shouts out the total from inside each time a customer passes by to go out the door. It’s a 19th-century
process in the 21st century but it's endearing at the same time to see that some things just stay the same.

We walk down the dusty road as we do every year to visit my old aunt who stays in the nearby old age home. She is
eighty-three, yet sharp with her senses and even sharper with her tongue. She remembers almost everything and has
the easy laughter of someone who has seen a lot of life. The roads are dusty and there is filth on every corner. Yet
children play there on the streets between bikes and cars zooming by.

As we reach the gates of the old Parsi Sanatorium, crossing over you see an immediate difference. The place is
clean, there is a small garden upfront with some beautiful flowers growing and I linger around to see them as my
mother climbs the stairs to register herself as a guest.

I quickly run behind her to hold her hand. She is seventy, yet the years have not been kind to her. Decades of hard
work followed by dad’s illness and his subsequent death have taken a toll on her.

She is all of eighty pounds, a thin woman with a frail body yet a glowingly powerful mind.
We pass through the registration office into the main wards that hold these people. I stop by the office to talk to the
manager. He finds out that I am from the US and he suddenly perks up.

“My son also wants to go to the US”, he says without ado. So, does everyone else around here.

He walks me through some of them as we pass by. Many aged people staying here were not homeless. They had
their families somewhere in the city or nearby towns. They were left there to spend the rest of their lives because
their families didn’t want them anymore.

He points to a man who is in his eighties, sitting on the bed rocking slightly, a frail emancipated human being almost
a shadow of what he used to be. When he came to the shelter, he told the nurses that he was homeless, but after a
few questions, he broke down and told them his addresses.

Figuring he must just be senile, they called his son and counseled him to take him back. The son refused, asking the
warden to take “as much money as needed” but they were not going to take him back.

He looks at me with mist-filled eyes trying to focus. As I pass by, he holds out a hand. I take that wrinkled old hand
and hold it for a minute and he pulls me in closer.

“I would like to have an ice cream” he whispers almost inaudibly. He refuses to leave my hand and holds it even
tighter. He doesn’t need my money or even the ice-cream.

He needs a commodity that is much more precious than that —

Time.
End of Darkness (08.27.1992)

I
" heard you went after Deepak", he says shutting the door behind us.

"Yeah. I needed to find my peace, not just say it."

"I get it. Look Deepak is going to get what's coming to him ok? Just...For now, I need you to stay away.

"No. We need to find him and.."

"Hey, I said, stay away...”. There is no argument. He is getting the pressure from the ones above.

We stare at each other in silence for a minute.

"Listen, you go after him, I won’t be able to help you. There is a good chance you might.... just disappear.
Understand?"

Coming from someone in the anti-terror unit who is politically well connected, there is no mistaking his words.

He relents but just a bit.

"Maybe someday, but ...not today "

The discussion is over.

Some days later, I go over deep in the slums of Madanpura, in central Bombay. Walking quickly through the
crowded brick-lined huts, I thread my way to the second last house just close to the public toilets.

"Pakya?", I ask the lady at the communal water tap as she is filling her bucket. She points me to a closed toilet.

Clad in a white vest and a chequered lungi, he opens the door to come outside, sees me, and instinctively starts to
turn back in. There is nowhere to go. Then he realizes where he is and where I am and the bravado returns.

"You think you are going to touch me in the middle of this chawl?", he stands close to me. A bit too close for
comfort.

"No. I just came to say I am sorry. I should have known you wouldn't be there with them when it happened".

He softens up just a bit. There is now a slight distance between us.

"Yeah. Me too. She was a nice girl. It shouldn't have happened."

We both know the implications of his words, what they mean and what they don’t. We know who was to be blamed.
No names are spoken.

"She had parents. A family. This is not how she should have gone". Every pore in my inside is filled with unease,
with hate, with fury.

"I'll do what I can. It will take time. There are limits ..but it will happen.….. He has to live, long”, he trails off. The
kohl-lined eyes grow colder.

"That's not good enough. Find a way or I will."

I turn to walk back down the steps from the public toilets while he stands there watching me.

"Always admired you, Bawa. You know when to fight and when to run. Guess that's why you survived this long."

I stop and turn back towards him one last time.

"I never run Prakash...”

"I just wait."

In six months, a series of unfortunate events will land Deepak permanently disabled in the ICU of Bombay’s top
hospital.

I stand outside his room silently watching him in the hospital bed of the VIP ward surrounded by his parents and
well-wishers. The flowers in the room hide a basic fact. He will never walk again. It will be a long road for him and
an even longer one for me.

It is that day I give up on everything that touches this world.

I simply walk away promising never to come back to this darkness again and hoping it doesn’t come back to revisit
me either.
Searching deep inside my bookshelf, I reach for an old college textbook. From under the brown cover, I pull out a
crumpled sheet of paper with a number written on it with red pencil.

I dial.

The phone rings for a while before I hear the familiar voice on the other side.

"Maya???"

"Yes..."

"I am ready".
Breakfasts and Dinners (09.15.1997)

I never asked my parents if I can take my then to-be-fiancée Ana up for an overnight trip.
This does not surprise me. They were not very open, accessible people or so we believed. We are usually
apprehensive of them, of any of those discussions.

Looking back, I think it was more me being protective of my privacy than me being protective of my intimacy. A
small part of my life was mine, and I didn’t feel like sharing it.

This resulted in furtive behavior and a lot of unnecessary lies.

One day, I suggest to her that we get away. Go to a place where we can sleep next to each other, without feeling too
awkward or on the lookout for someone showing up.

Getting away sounded like such a rich idea, almost too luxurious in its simplicity.
We decide to implement it close to my birthday. It would be my little birthday gift. Something that we both would
cherish.

I don’t recall the reasons that we came up with or even the fact that our parents pretended to believe us, but here we
were taking the bus from Pune down to Bombay with Ana sitting next to me, her head on my shoulder. I remember
the scent of her hair — like citrus flowers, the heat of the sun shining down through the window, and the wind
blowing through the wide blue sky as the bus winds its way through the ghats of Lonavala.

Late evening as the sun is going down back at our small apartment in Bombay, we pick up some Chinese food (our
favorite) along with a small bottle of coke (a luxury) and set up a half-broken desk as our dinner table. We light up a
small candle in the middle and spread the delicacies around and share it on a single plate as we eat.

After cleaning up, we walk up to the window and stand there talking about our future. We have no idea what’s in
store for us but we make grand plans anyway.

That I would work for 3 to 4 years and we would collect enough money to marry one day. That we would deposit
enough in our so-called joint account every month, every penny that we could, and someday we would have, just
about enough. We have no idea what enough means, just a hazy concept of satisfaction.

Ah, satisfaction. It’s an elusive feeling. But that night, it’s right there — In that room.

She sits down next to me as we talk, then lays alongside me and threaded her fingers into mine. A small blanket on
the ground is our makeshift bed. We do have pillows.

Sleeping next to her with her head on my shoulders, I am at peace. The overactive brain that churns out schemes at a
rapid pace, slows down to a crawl.

I have never slept next to her before and I feel — almost ticklish with giddiness. The physical component lingers
thick in the air, but we have already decided to wait. We are adventurous but not on that long a rope.

As I sleep, her hand rests on my chest and I watch the color of her red and green bangles in the moonlight streaming
from the window and I wonder how I got so lucky.

She gently nudges me in the middle of the night to tell me I am snoring because I am laying on my back. I turn on
my side away from her and she holds me lightly.

Sometime later, I hear her softly snoring and I grin devilishly. I now have something on her too if she plays that card
again.

Drifting off, the last thought is — I have never felt this peaceful in a long time.

The next morning, I wake up to the smell of something delicious and I realize she is no longer next to me. She is
standing by the stove drinking a cup of sweet Indian tea. I amble into the kitchen and ask her what she is making.

Turns out the only things we had in the refrigerator were cauliflower and some potatoes and she has made breakfast
out of it. I eat with relish at breakfast, directly from the pot, a dish that is usually served as dinner.

I have a lifetime of memories with people, had wonderful relationships with different individuals some of whom are
still friends.
I’ve been married, traveled the world, eaten in some of the most expensive places, moved to many cities &
countries, and gone through experiences that can only be described as fairy tales.

Still, when asked to pull up a memory of a beautiful night, all I can think about is the two of us standing next to that
window in the bedroom looking up at the moon and the immense amount of future that we ended up conquering and
squandering by being so very young.
Let Her Rest (06.12.1992)

Standing there watching the last of the fires burn out, I am filled with a sense of emptiness. Like everything that I
ever knew, touched, felt — has drained out of me.

“Can I come to the funeral?”, I had asked her friend Rekha earlier. She was almost like a sister to her.

“It would be better if you don’t. They wouldn’t like it and at this time there is no point in adding to their grief”, she
adds slightly sad. She knows how much it would have meant to me.

So, I stand far away from the crowd of relatives, away from it all. I wish I could be untouched by it all, but it doesn’t
feel that way.

Her father is standing there, and I can feel his grief even from a distance.

The women are on one side, a sea of white sarees.

Late in the evening when it’s all said and done and everyone has gone home, I still stand there next to the truck
across the road from the open funeral ground.

Rooted in the same spot, I don’t know what to do next. Her words from the old notebook ring in my ears, again and
again.
I finally move, cross the road and reach the area of the cremation. It’s a piece of land cordoned off with small red
bricks.

The land is still warm, the white ash mostly collected still has remnants.

I bend down and hold a fistful. It’s still warm and my heart just breaks, into every piece imaginable. Life, as it is,
will never be whole again.

A week later, I am standing in the empty college classroom as Rekha joins me before we both head home. I hand
her the old notebook. She recognizes the worn cover and her eyes sparkle up. The butterfly on the upper right-hand
corner. The cursive H in the way she wrote her name, a big arch. It’s all too fresh, too recent.

“Where did you find it?”, the amazement in her voice is apparent. I ignore the question. Some questions are better
not answered.

“Take a look at the last page…”

As she reads, she looks up at me and back at the book.

“What is this?”, she asks.

“She wrote down instructions about what she wanted to have happened if she died. I don’t think she thought she
would ever make it past 20.”

Running her hand on its wrinkled cover, she reads it for a long time. There is silence in the room and the clock
ticking above our head is the only sound between us.

She slowly closes the book.

“You are really going to do this, aren’t you…?”

I bring out a small black box from the lower drawer.

“Already done. “

She opens the lid; peers inside and then close it softly as she pushes it back at me.

“I am coming with you.”, she pats my back a couple of times. Her eyes are moist and there is no dissuading her from
it.

I return, crestfallen, to the doorway. The classes were over. The students had left. I remember her again lying back
serenely on the wooden pyre, the left half of her face shrouded in shadows, her pale right hand clasped in her
father’s.

There were tears — mine, her father’s. Not hers.

She was at peace.

“Tomorrow then”, I say as we walk home.

The next morning, I pick Rekha up and we head down on the bus towards the railway station. We get down
midway, a route traversed many times on the way to the college.

Walking around the college building we come up behind the old laboratory, past the tree where we had put down the
frog, over the slippery steppingstones, all the way down to the green algae pond.

In the opening, close to the pond between the masses of leaves is a pink flower of five petals. It’s embedded in a sea
of green and grows tall as if it’s almost surprised by its beauty.

The water glimmers in the morning light and the birds are perched in their branches.

Under that tall tree, it is very quiet. The branches are huge, beautifully shaped, polished and there is a grace in them.
The sun is just touching the treetops as it starts to get warmer.

We stand there by the water for a bit, the small waves licking our shoes as I slowly take out the plastic bag from the
little black box. I hold on to the bag for the longest time before I feel a nudge.

Bending down, I slowly empty the contents in the water watching them flow away gently, away from me, …forever.
I feel nothing, absolutely nothing.

As we walk back, I touch the folded note in my pocket.

I stop by the place near the tree where we buried the frog.

The land is as usual, moist.

I kneel and start to dig with my hands.

Time stands still as I take out the note and read it one last time before I lay it to rest.

Right at the same spot, the first day we met…

It doesn’t have to be somewhere fancy.

Just someplace where you can’t hear the noise.

Someplace quiet.

Peaceful.

Right when the sun is coming up.

I would like someone to take me to that place.

And it would be alright if just by the water, someone left me there.

To stay….