Railway Lines Here, There and Everywhere

Railway Lines Here, There and Everywhere 

Lines that never meet yet 

Connect 

People, places, things

Intersecting, punctuating

A journey's premise

Promise

Of something that will shift

A rift 

Between what you were and

What you become

Like lines that never meet yet

Connect 

June 8 2025

Diwali Memories

Diwali is one of those festivals which brings back tons of happy memories. Childhood Diwalis in Kolkata began with preparations a day or two before. Making yummy bakshanams (snacks) helping mother out particularly with sieving the flour for whatever sweets or savouries, cutting the designs of the matris / namakpare, tasting (a big and essential part of Diwali as it was one festival where you didn't have to wait for any puja to start munching, and of course running around to the neighbours to check what was on their menu list and comparing it with ours, then running around again on Diwali morning to distribute the goodies. Diwali mornings started with the eldest in the house - dad, grandmothers, mother applying oil on the head. Nallamma's was gentle, Appa's steady and firm, Amma and sometimes Pati's was full of brutal love 😃; the bath and eating the Diwali essential - the marundhu. The firecrackers (I sheepishly admit) was a big draw. The neighborhood dadas in Kolkata would go a few days prior to buy the fireworks from Luni and then would put us to work to sun them for better performance. In Coimbatore, all cousins sheparded by Annaji and later my eldest cousin would go to Townhall exhibition to buy fireworks. And then Diwali morning started early. In competitive spirit. Who wakes up when, bursts how many crackers, wakes up how many people. Much later, Dilwalis started becoming our own - with lots of lights, friends, food and of course Diwali snacks (one sweet, one savoury) and the Diwali essential - the marundhu. After finishing unbelievably long days of work, coming back home to start preps (invariably going on until midnight). 'Early-morning-bath' was replaced by 'whenever we wake up bath' calls to family and friends. Now while spending hours in front of stove / airfryer (sorry, pati!) slaving away over bakshanams, all these memories brim over. So much love, warmth, friendships, feels like a tight hug for the aching heart. Growing older comes with this bittersweet emotion I guess - deciding what we hold on to or what we let go. This year, as I will not be calling so many people (especially pati), I'll hold tight to those memories and hug those around tighter.

October 20 2025

Place At The Table

The dining table holds pride of place in memories of places I close hold to heart. A place of conversations, a place where stories are traded and a place where newer memories are made. The intricate web woven by the warm tales spun by people held together by the silken bonds of deepest thoughts shared. At my grandmother's house, when we visited every summer, relatives would gather for evening tea and snacks. While most would make space around the large table, drawing up chairs from around the house, a few of us cousins would be perched on the staircase, hanging on to the gossips. As streams of bajjis would keep coming in from the kitchen, animated, loud, boisterous family members would keep up the music playing off the sound of potatoes and brinjals dunked in besan touching the hot oil. The smell of hot sesame oil in which bajjis have been fried are one of the pervading memories of my maternal grandmother's house. It wasn't always only fun. Intense arguments, emotional fights, grief and longing, all came together around the dining table. No matter how big the house, how big the drawing room and how comfortable the cushioned couches in the living room, we all eventually came back to the life centre of that house. That big oval dining table with chairs tottering under the burden of the stories they held. After sitting around the dining table at my parents' home in Coimbatore, either the four of us, or the six of us, or the many more who join us every now and then, the conspiratorial glare of the morning sun bouncing off the glass top seems to call out longingly to share one more story, one more memory, one more anecdote. Friends, family, friends of family and families of friends have all seated around this table, bound together by the invisible arms of its embrace. Even today, no matter where I go, I seek the comfort of that dining space which is the fireside of the homes I have been brought up in. Some my own, some that have become my own.

Prison Stories

Counting bars 

Counting stars

Fleeting rays

Empty space

Ceiling dance

Stealing chance

Freedom lost

Freedom gained 

July 7 2026

Memories

The photo came silently, innocently, unceremoniously. To herald the return of the prodigal grandson. 

The furniture cleaned and arranged neatly. The dining table resolutely standing in the middle of things. Like her, proudly. Refusing to let the isolation of the last year and more show. 

Instead, standing testimony to decades of conversations, food, laughter and fights. The floor was welcoming, as it has always been. The room well-lit. Reminder of the times when the curtains would always be drawn, to keep the light out. The light hurt her eyes. But why? Did it remind her of the final light that would come to take her away and she was not ready for? Did it seems to bright for her tired eyes? Did it remind her that the world outside had changed so much. The people around had changed so much and that she was unable to change along with it? 

The bright red sofa replaced the low diwan that was there. Where many an afternoon I lay next to her. Sometimes her fractured body and wounded spirit kept me company and found some temporary warmth. Just lying down next to her, holding her bony fingers would bring in a sleep so deep that I often long for it desperately. 

I wonder if the TV is there. Screaming out various things in succession over the years. From the Bold And the Beautiful, to films played on a VCR connected to it, Tamil serials about the natural, the supernatural and the unnatural, screaming news anchors spewing hatred, cricket and tennis matches, with a commentary outside to match the one inside and more recently, religious programmes, hymns and sermons. 

The bookshelf where for many years somewhere in the last three decades a whiskey bottle shaped like a khukri adorned tested the resolve of the young and the old until it was emptied under the coconut tree behind the house. Ever wondered if the coconuts from our house are intoxicating? You may be closer to the truth than you think! 

A story about Abe Lincoln, a woodwork of Krishna steering Arjuna's chariot in the battlefield, the rabbit made of white beads and the photo of that white bearded, man - sage-like visage - and a smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa's. 

And two more recent additions - which sometimes worked and at most times didn't. One was a monitor reflecting flickering images from outside - a young couple caught canoodling on a bike parked outside,  cat curiously peering at something, an auto zooming past, an unknown car blocking The gate nonchalantly, and more. 

The other was a set of handphones. The receiver of her wrath, the bearer of many stories, the constant companion when it worked as well as when it didn't, a fixture, much like everything around, including her. Only it seemed to have outlasted her, at least in its physical presence. 

If only walls could speak. So much would be said, including many salacious accounts that will not pass these lips, tragic tales of death and disease, conspiracies, stories of friendships, inventive abuses, naughty pranks and myths and mythology. 

As if it is all not a myth. There until she was. Gone after she went. Did it even exist? Or was it just, like everything else, a chimera with a promise to last forever. 

Kindness of folks

Kindness is one of those virtues that seem to be 'optional'. Not embedded as deeply as, say, honesty. Or say, faithfulness. So when there is kindness in places it is not expected, the tears do flow. Like while trying to push the wheelchair on the granite floor of the Meenakshi Amman Koil in Madurai, and a devotee hither-thither nonchalantly pulling it over the ramp or across a tricky bump. There was no need for that. There was no expectation. It was just that. A random act of kindness. Or asking someone if they could enquire about a medical equipment, and they going to another store in the maddening heat just to find out if they had it and organised that it be dispatched in time for use. It's just that kindness, especially from strangers, hits different. It kind of makes the world alright again amidst war, violence, pain and grief. It kind of momentarily feels like a balm.  

If

'If' is one of those poems that have stayed with me. It comes back to me in times of pain and grief, offering hope and courage. Leaving cities is like breaking down pieces of a life you built to move elsewhere and start building again. It reminds me of something a friend said after interacting the designers of the Puja Pandals of Calcutta. When asked how they could bear to see their designs pulled down after the week-long festivities, one seemingly told her that unless it is brought down, how will the next year's Puja Pandal take shape. That is courage. 

In small measures, I thought I had that wisdom and courage. When I made a list of which of my friends would get which of my plants when I leave the city - plants I had nurtured lovingly and also with great heartache, as quite a few of them seemed to wither in the heat, I thought it was that wisdom kicking into action. 

Turns out the pain of parting is so much more when it's something you have nurtured for six-odd years with sweat and blood, at great personal loss, through some of the worst periods of my professional and personal life is passed on to someone to take care of. Someone who may do a better job, or may not. 

From my high horse I am being judgmental. My plants, I know, will survive as they are fighters like me. But this thing, I am not sure. And the pain of that uncertainty is physical. The fear real. The guilt palpable. 

And in times like that, the words of Kipling in 'If' is a reminder that there is wisdom in treating Triumph and Disaster both the same. Someone just help my heart understand what my brain knows. 

Lines from books

The prison wasn't the place. It was the perspective. (The Midnight Library, Matt Haig)

Some lines from some books stay with you. This seems to be one of those. 

Mind over matters

A dark cloud often passes

Bringing rain at times 

A heavy presence at others.

The fog lifts from time to time

Revealing blue skies 

For hours at times, days at others. 

 

Mahua Magic

I bit into a ripe Mahua flower (left), goaded on by eager women. It's the 'tribal grape' one said. The other added that it would be sweeter than jaggery. The experience definitely was bitter-sweet. The intoxicating smell of the Mahua flowers carried through the wind to my expectant nose, promising more than it could deliver. The women harvest around 10 quintals of Mahua a season and earn Rs 35,000 to Rs 40,000 by selling the dried Mahua flowers (centre). They save some for their own consumption. They explained how they make sweets with it and how they add it to the vegetables they cook. A man was more forthcoming. "Do you know when there was no food to eat, we would consume the wine made from Mahua and work tirelessly?" he said. The others insisted that they did not make any alcohol with it. This may be because I was accompanied by someone who bit into the Mahua flower and wrinkled her nose saying it tasted of alcohol. It's interesting how narrative and knowledge shapes our senses and our experience of things. Thus Mahua 'tastes' like alcohol even for someone who has probably never consumed alcohol. Because alcohol is commonly made from it and is seen as taboo. Someone whose experience of alcohol is through films, would probably have a whiff of alcohol and start swooning, because that's is the commonly Bollywood-certified response to alcohol. Most tribal communities these days do not openly admit to making alcohol from Mahua. They would rather keep it a cultural secret than talk about it and have it disparaged in public by 'outsiders'. Often civil society projects end up vilifying any consumption of alcohol as a blanket crime. The cultural significance is thus marauded and shamed until even the children of these communities internalise the criminality of drinking and proclaim taking action against alcohol consumption with pride. It goes to add a moral reputation to alcohol consumption, not addressing other dimensions of why alcohol is consumed, why it may lead to violence, why excessive consumption can impact many things, including health and well-being. This is done through a careful juxtaposition of alcohol consumption and domestic violence. Often, going into the root cause of domestic violence can lead to uncomfortable questions, upending status quos and open social wounds that cannot be closed. Is it all the Mahua talking? Or the deep dissatisfaction with the way some questions are repeatedly broached and addressed regardless of geography, community, or custom? One wonders, but for those few minutes, the Mahua magic brought me together with the women of a small tribal hamlet somewhere in Odisha.        

 

Pati. A year on.

Time flies. It's been a year already since pati bid goodbye to us. The one word that comes to mind when I think of her is regal - she had a regal air to her. Even in her most shrivelled, helpless, confused last few days, she was a queen. Exercising control during the moments of clarity between long spells of daze that she was experiencing. Glimpses of the Lady of 312, Thadagam Link Road, who oversaw her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, maybe a grand niece and a grandnephew or two grow up, become persons of their own being, get married, have children, get jobs, move cities, move countries and continents. She was the constant. Over the last few years, we bonded so much more as friends and conspirers. She would take me back in time to go with her neighbour and friend to watch Tamil films in Alankar (I think) Theatre in Mumbai. Through her I would experience the country's Independence, like her, learning from her Post-Master father about the birth of a nation at midnight. I would walk a few paces behind her and her friend as they giggled and chatted on their way to school. I would watch enviously and proudly as she got a rubber stamp declaring the magazines she collected, collated, curated belonged to Annapoorni Swaminathan. I would gape with amazement at a grandmother who could hold her own in conversations about any sport - be it tennis, cricket or even football. I learnt how she started getting interested in cricket - serving as the secret messenger who would listen to the radio commentary of matches played by India to religiously recount the same to her elder brother who was forbidden from listening to the radio because of his exams. The mischief never left my grandmother. We would indulge in some of her guilty pleasures, like an icecream, some sweets (especially badam halwa / badusha from Sri Krishna Sweets), and earlier, a soda (usually Sprite or Limca. As I remember her, the fragments of our conversations come rushing through my memory palace. Especially as I am stranded without access to my Smart Phone which had recordings of many of our ramblings, I rely on memory to relive my dearest pati. As I watched a golden sunset over some hills in Deogarh today, I wondered whether a person who dies lives on in every memory of them that stays behind. Is that what forever means?        

Count your blessings

The last few days: from watching a swarm of bees fly towards us atop Ponnuthi Hills as we tried to get as close as possible to Lambton's Peak to watching a bear with her cubs negotiating the tea gardens in the Nilgiris, from bisons out on an evening walk to peacock twins perform a synchronised number in the morning as I was enjoying breakfast on the thokkarai kallu, it's just a reminder to count the blessings. 

Also witnessed a teacher taking students down archaeological journey at an hour exhibition of excavations in different parts of Tamil Nadu. 

Of Leprechauns and more

Spent a sleepless night tossing and turning, waking up several times, listening to the screeching peacocks and the pattering rain. Spent an hour of darkness staring into the screen wondering what was making me so anxious. Decided enough was enough and stepped out through the backdoor, hoping to sit on 'washing stone' for a while with my thoughts. 

However, that wasn't to be!

Stepped out to see a glorious rainbow through the coconut trees and my father pulling out weeds oblivious to the cosmic creation behind him. I called out to him and we went looking for the edge of the rainbow. The sun groggily shone and the beautiful brick wall of a neighbour's half-constructed house basked shyly in the goden light, turning pink with the adoration. A patch of gold on the water tank. A patch of pink gold on the house. What was it about rainbows and Leprechauns with pots of gold again?! 

Went about weeding some more, woke up some beetles from slumber, plucked some spinach for lunch and worked up an appetite before the rain steadied into patter once again. 

Yes, I found the pot of gold alright. 

Coimbatore, May 19 2022

The Tower of Babel

June 22, 2020

Each to one’s own. 

Each in one’s own. 

In a tower of one’s own build, 

One’s own rules, messages, memories filled.

Each running one’s own race

Each one the victor

Each the vanquished 

Alone in an imagined crowd, dead.

Life in a vacuum

Held in a palm

I talk, you listen, you talk, I hear

Yet, neither knows the other’s fear.

Fighting for another, 

Fighting for self

Art, music, borders, votes

Everything comes, and everything goes.

Your words sound familiar

Yet your ideas queer

Why! do we speak the same tongue?

I hear you loud and clear

As you tell me your dreams

Unfulfilled desires

Our minds intersect briefly

Before contempt dulls the fires. 

Alone, in our shell, dead. 

Speak out and be heard

When i was a child, I was told I was too young to know what’s good for me.
I was told life is too short to make mistakes and learn from others
When I grew up, I was told my focus should be studies and I believed it.
When I went to college, I was advised to stay off politics as it is a ‘bad’ thing.
When I started working, I put my soul into following orders, even ones that I knew were wrong.
When I questioned anything, my seniors said I was too big for my boots and needed to be shut down
Now I am told to keep quiet or face the consequences.

I have kept silent enough and now I know I must speak up now or die.
Because my silence is equal to the permanent closure of all my thoughts
It is the shroud over my ability to think and to decide for myself.
I dare you to tell me what is right and wrong and whom to follow and who not to.
I dare you, because, it is as much an insult to my intelligence as to yours.
I believe I can make an informed choice, even if it goes against what the majority believes
I believe I will be right even if my decision is wrong for me.

This is a promise to myself, today and hereafter.
Your voice will not quell mine.
Your stares will not blind me.
Your abuses will only make me stronger
And your selective silence will only convince me that I am doing something right.
It is not the time to wait for understanding and compassion
It is the time to stand up for what I believe in and stand up I will. 

#StandWithJNU

Aruna's Song

The night sings the elegy
Holding your head lightly upon its lap
The farewell song hums
Tears gently flow.

Confined to a bed,
Condemned to live your death
You served the sentence second by second
While the fiend escaped unscathed.

You lay limited by four walls.
While he roamed the streets.

You like to listen to the radio they said.
They who breathed life into you morsel by morsel.

I listen to the radio along with you.
Praying for you to pass.
Wishing you peace.
Wishing you release from this strange life you were forced to lead.

Stomach churns to hear the words you may have spoken.
Heartbeats pause to catch your wasted smile.
Eyes hurt holding back the pain you have endured.
It's time to let go. Gently may the night take you home.

(11.45 pm. May 15, 2015)

She died two days later. Hope she finally found the peace that was eluding her for so long. 

My article on Tsutomu Yamaguchi ... So that it doesn't get lost in time

Would you call him the luckiest or unluckiest man alive? (Published in Mail Today on 23 August 2009) Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who miraculously survived despite being at ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when US bombers used atom bombs in August 1945, does not know the answer to this question. But what he does know, and repeatedly acknowledges, is that fate had a plan for him. At 93, Yamaguchi’s battle with cancer, probably caused by exposure to radiation sixty-four years ago, has become a way of life. Recuperating in a hospital where he was admitted on August 8 this year, he said he spent every anniversary of the two “fateful days” praying. “This has been like the 128th anniversary in these 64 years,” he told Mail Today. In March, he became the first person to be officially recognised as a nijuu hibakusha — a dual A-bomb survivor. The recognition comes towards the end of a life of bitterness, a constant effort to water down the blow dealt by fate, and a late reconciliation with the role he could play in ending war and nuclear proliferation. After all, one does not often meet a person who has been through hell twice, within the space of just three days. Yamaguchi survived while more than two lakh people around him succumbed. In August 1945, Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old shipbuilding engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. A resident of Nagasaki, he was in Hiroshima on a three-month assignment. He and two other colleagues were scheduled to return to home on August 7. Destiny had other plans. On August 6, Yamaguchi was on his way to the shipyard a little after 8 am when he heard the familiar drone of a B-29 bomber. In wartime Japan, this was a noise one grew used to. But what happened next was unprecedented. “The ground was filled with a white light that sparked midair and I saw a ballooning giant fireball,” he wrote in his autobiography published in 2007. “I saw a pillar of cloud growing high above the sky in the shape of a mushroom.” At least 90,000 people were killed that day in Hiroshima. Yamaguchi partially lost his hearing and suffered burns. But what affected him most was what he saw around him. “The river that till yesterday had reflected peace was now filled with bodies clumped together… The river kept flowing yesterday and today. But a single bomb forever divided them into completely unrelated days,” he wrote. After spending a fitful night in Hiroshima, he managed to return to Nagasaki on August 8, almost as if to keep his date with fate. On August 9, he went to work and tried convincing his manager that one single bomb had destroyed an entire city. Even as he was being called a madman by his disbelieving superior, the atom bomb dropped over Nagasaki, about three kilometers from where they stood. “The same mushroom cloud I saw in Hiroshima was growing tall as if to sneer at me,” he wrote years later. Five feet in diameter, 11 feet in length and over 9,000 pounds in weight, the bomb called Fat Man killed nearly 70,000 people in Nagasaki that day. Even after all these years, the images of destruction and pain he saw refuse to leave Yamaguchi. “I remember the pain in my body. I saw people evaporate like mist, people lying on the street burnt to charcoal, barely recognisable as human bodies,” he told Mail Today. The bitterness towards the Americans caused by the experience still finds voice in him. “I cannot forgive them because this hell is a result of a well-planned attack,” he said. Despite the anger, Yamaguchi did not participate in anti-war activities. Nor did he make it a point to get official recognition of his status as a dual survivor. He carried on with life, taking up a job as an English interpreter with the US Navy and later as an English teacher in a Japanese school. A few years later, he returned to his job as an engineer. But his family’s constant struggle with illnesses and the effects of exposure to radiation prompted Yamaguchi to come out of his shell. When his son died of cancer in 2005, he felt the need to voice his anguish and tell the world about what millions of A-bomb had gone through. Yamaguchi finally penned an autobiography in his eighties. He was also featured in a 2006 documentary Nijuu Hibaku. He attended a screening of the film at the United Nations, where he urged the audience to fight for the abolition of nuclear weapons. “As a double atomic bomb survivor I experienced the bomb twice and I sincerely hope there will not be a third," he had said. For Yamaguchi, the official recognition as a nijuu hibakusha on March 24 this year was a hope for the future. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die,” he told a local newspaper. Asked what he would most like to change about his life, Yamaguchi’s answer was simple and direct — “Everything on wars.” Yamaguchi’s faith in the Buddhist concept of insei mijyou (the impermanence of everything) kept him going as the pain of his past threatened to consume him. Now, finally at peace with what fate had in store for him, Yamaguchi made an example of his life. “Life or death, there are only two choices for human beings. I wish young people choose life as their purpose,” he signed off, hinting that hope too may have survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Charting my own religion

I wrote a section for the May edition of Discover India and the edit team massacred it. So, here's the full version


A brimming, wild river; a silent moonless night echoing off overbearing mountain sentinels; a warm summer sky reflected in still green waters – different shades of the river of life as seen from a quaint yet oft-visited town.
Nestling in the lap of the Himalayas, Hrishikesh is fed by the raging Ganga before she bounds into a ritual-ridden, polluted phase of her long winding journey into the Bay of Bengal. In this pristine town, the pride of place is occupied by two suspension bridges named after the immortal divine brothers – Rama and Lakshmana. Numerous temples dot either bank, with some no more than an idol under a tree, to others that are at least twelve storeys high.
At any time of year, devotees throng the town’s temples and bazaars, queuing up for a dip in the holy river or just the right of passage on the swaying suspension bridges. Backpackers, both Indian and foreign, jostle for space with mendicants dressed in saffron along the river’s banks and near the eating joints. The more adventurous move northwards towards Shivpuri for the adrenaline-rushing rafting points. A few others relax their minds and bodies through India’s most famous export of several centuries – yoga.
Hrishikesh means many things to many people and several things to me.
I associate this temple town with two things – a sense of overwhelming peace juxtaposed alongside a madly rushing river and a vegetarian foodie’s heaven. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to convince my non-vegetarian friends to make a food trip to Hrishikesh. They laugh off the idea because meat is a strict no-no around the temple towns of Hrishikesh and Haridwar. I’ve not given up though. Now I just try to sell the idea with other unbeatable delicacies added to the platter.
Yet, my most lasting memory of Hrishikesh has nothing to do with food OR peace! It is the image of me jumping off a 23-ft high rock into a placid pool formed by the gushing river below. I recall trying to choose between staring across the river to the opposite bank and looking down into the seemingly bottomless pool beneath the craggy rock I was standing on. The split-second, spine-chilling feeling of being suspended in air ended as fast as it began. It left behind the sweet taste of victory as I recalled conquering the fear of standing on the edge of a precipice with adventure-crazy fellow rafters and of making the jump without chickening out.
Several summers later, of course, a colleague and I bunked office and spent a weekend on the banks of a placid Ganga, leaving the bank only to grab regular bites at the German bakery near Lakshman Jhula, dessert at the Chotiwala restaurant near Swargashram across Ram Jhula, and back for more at the German bakery. Brownies, plum cakes, rasmalai, mushroom quiche, pasta, chhola batura, lassi – we gave our stomachs a tough time, I’m sure.
A birthday trip to Hrishikesh with someone special took me to Muni ki Reti, a quieter part of town, in winter. Loads of photo-ops, the green gurgling waters, the cold, misty mornings, the splendid aarti at Tapovan Ghat in the evenings and the windswept launch rides between the sun-kissed banks gently jostle with the memory of long walks along winding lanes and of cutting a black forest pastry as the clock struck twelve on a moonless night.
The most recent trip, however, is more of a vision than a memory. It is rain-washed and mixes with the rising mist and the descending clouds. Getting caught in Hrishikesh in the monsoon is not the best of things. And two young women barely staying dry under a single ‘borrowed’ umbrella is definitely not the idea of a perfect holiday. But it was a whim we carried to fruition by spending a large part of it with steaming cups of lemon tea in an eat-out called Rainbow near Lakshman Jhula. That, and the yum omlettes made to order, the alu parathas through the day and the view of a mist-covered Ganga from the terrace of a fourth-floor hotel room, made it as perfect as a muddy, monsoon trip in small-town India can get.
The rain clouds parted at will to make way for a confluence of the mist rising from the surging waters and the fog settling down upon it. In the distance, ghost lights from temples across the bank, giving me my first glimpse of the divinity of Hrishikesh. I felt like I was in the midst of the misty, cloudy, heaven scenes conjured by tele-serials on Indian mythologies or the ‘Dream Girl’- type Bollywood romantic numbers.
After numerous visits to Hrishikesh in every kind of weather, sunny, windy and wet, I finally found myself brooding on the nature of religion – on the faith inspired in millions by the Ganga. I wondered why I felt bereft of such a ritualistic devotion that would make me wake up at un-Godly hours to perform rituals to appease our pantheon.
As the rain pitter-pattered on the roof of the restaurant and the aroma of apple pie and omelette played with my taste-buds, I realised my passion for the mighty river that I could only sense below the blinding mist was no less. And knowing that my love did not demand that I feed the river with greasy lamps, plastic bags filled with flowers, incense sticks, vermilion pastes and plastic cans only eased my conscience.
I looked on at the overpowering vision building before my misty eyes, remembered the strong current of this river that had almost carried with her two people I loved dearly and murmured my gratitude for letting them go. And in that vast moment, I was entwined not just with an immortal river but for centuries of its existence, the lives it has made and destroyed and the unimaginable faith people have in its miraculous powers.
And I surprise myself when I realise that if there is one place I’ll keep going back to, and one where I’d like to take everyone I love, it has to be this temple town! I’m sure it has many more shades to be unravelled and I’m raring to go.

By Anusha Chandrasekharan

Four of us going to watch a play...I think this is a first. Good I didn't say together

It's after a long time that all four of us are together at home. It feels good in a way. A feeling of familiarity creeps in providing security to a heart that's flown the nest.