Thoreau couldn’t get enough of it. Beerbohm wished that he didn’t have to do it. Gandhi used it as a political act. Evolutionarily, it is one of the things differentiates us from most animals. Most of us need to do it. Some people could use more of it. Few of us actually think much about it.

I’m talking about walking, a physical activity my son has taken a keen interest in. It started way before his first year, when having mastered and discovered the limitations of crawling, he literally took the next step, by standing on his wobbly feet. Of course, the first few weeks of standing required holding on to objects for support and learning how to fall. Babies tumble quite often as they master their motor skills, but I think there is probably a right way to fall. After a few clumsy spills which resulted in squeals of pain, the little boy learned to fall properly, so as to minimize pain. Soon he was sitting down whenever he anticipated losing his balance.

By his tenth month, my son was regularly walking with support, tracing a straight line at a tiny arm’s length from the sofa and darting from it for a few steps before lying flat on the carpet. This herculean labor continued until he learned a key trick: the best way to keep from falling when losing balance is not to keep going, but to stop to regain composure. And once you know how to stop, you can practice making each stop between a walking motion shorter and shorter until the repeated movement is seamlessly harmonic. Developing this key deceit is crucial to walking, but with repeated practice it develops fairly rapidly. And so once standing, falling, stepping, and stopping are mastered, turning and sauntering are rapidly added to the repertoire.

A curious child that walks poses a new set of challenges to a parent. In a typical span of thirty minutes on one fine Saturday morning, my son pulled a book from my bookshelf and chewed a few pages, threw an old mp3 player in the trash, and broke the flush of the toilet by repeatedly trying to deploy it. A walking toddler will close a door, but being unable to open it again, will knock until you open it for him (so he can close it again, and so on and so forth). Thus, the parent is forced to walk as well.

For the growing child, learning to walk means a much larger world has to be navigated. The world now has slippery, hard, and uneven surfaces. Among other things, the sidewalk has manhole covers, leaves, twigs, cigarette butts, and plastic wrappers. There is traffic: other people, strollers, dogs on leashes, and bicycles (not to mention cars and buses in the off-limit areas). Soon the child comes face to face with a new obstacle: steps. The standard adult step nearly reaches up to the knees, and in scale would be hardly an easy task even for someone with decades of walking mileage.

So, as the child is exposed to the walking world, he is taught that he must hold hands. He does not really like it, since he has a mind of his own. He wants to run his fingers through water pouring out of fountains, chase birds, pet plants, and pick up dirt.  His parent pulls his hand in the other direction. Is it time to go back home? He does not want to go back home. He tries to drag his parent the other way. Failing to move his much larger adversary, he tries to use his body weight to sit down on the sidewalk. And in staging his first sit-in, learning how to fall properly also comes in handy.

A few simple questions.

Would people publicly share naked photos of people they did not know and in the process destroy lives? I expect that in any civilized society, the majority of people should like to answer “no” to that question. Why then, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, in which three were killed and over 100 injured, did online mobs congregate to wrongfully accuse people of a heinous crime they did not commit? Is it because they thought they were doing a service? Who exactly were they serving?

Why was a Saudi man who was a victim himself treated as a criminal because of his ethnicity and nationality? Why was a innocent Moroccan teenager fearful for his life when his photo was shared by an unapologetic newspaper in New York as that of a suspect? Why was it acceptable for a prime-time CNN anchor to identify a suspect with only the description “dark-skinned male” and then question if the skin-color was “domestic or foreign”? Who will apologize to the parents of the Indian American tragically missing from Brown University for a month whose photos went viral on social media even though he was not a suspect?

Why even bother with due process and legal proceedings? How many Batman movies do you need to watch before you can don a cape and inflict swift retribution?

If the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon blasts showed the admirable capacity of some strangers to rise up to the occasion in real-life crises, the ensuing days have demonstrated an unending capacity of others to orchestrate withchhunts from the comfort of their homes.

When a group of activists spontaneously gathered at Dhaka’s Shahbag a little over a month ago, little did know that they would serve as a catalyst for a broader movement and countermovement in Bangladesh. The initial outcry was over a sentence handed out to a conspirator and war criminal, who had not only opposed the foundation of nation of Bangladesh in 1971, but had also served as the leader of a prominent political party with impunity. This conspirator and others, who were being tried over forty years later, were not in court for treason, which in most sovereign countries is in itself cause for legal proceedings, but for the more barbaric acts of mass-murder, serial-rape, forcible religious conversion, arson, and other crimes for which there were numerable eyewitnesses. When Adbul Qader Molla, who was now a leader of Jaamat-e-Islami, was given a lenient life-sentence for involvement in over 300 deaths, sections of civil society erupted. Molla flashed a smile and a victory-sign to his supporters after the verdict, because he knew that if his party ever formed a coalition government with their current ally, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, then he would literally be a free man.

When on February 28, another war criminal Delwar Hossain Sayeedi was sentenced to death, the enemies of Shahbag, namely Sayeedi’s political party Jamaat-e-Islami and their student wing Islami Chatra Shibir did not sit and idly watch. For days, armed supporters wreaked havoc across the country, looting stores, burning trains and buses, vandalizing homes and religious places of worship of minorities, and savagely killing police and the family members of those who testified. They have since used social media outlets such as Facebook to coordinate attacks on property and person. They have doctored images (such as a photo of Sayeedi superimposed on a photo of the moon) and have spread blatant lies to instigate villagers. Within Bangladesh, they have a sizeable media presence, but they have also garnered the support of some foreign media agencies as well who have called out police “heavy-handedness” conveniently omitting that the police is responsible for maintaining law and order.

Shahbag, a neighborhood of Dhaka became a focal point for protests as well as a symbol of a greater movement to address questions that remained unresolved after more than forty years. Shahbag initially developed as a grassroots movement led primarily by the generation that was born after Bangladesh gained independence. Indeed it was absolutely necessary that the movement develop without any political affiliation because many Bangladeshis felt that they had been betrayed by the failed policies of all of the major political parties since the country’s liberation. All political parties had stifled dissent and allowed war criminals to enter mainstream politics. And in 2013, even though the Awami League was at loggerheads with Jaamat-e-Islami and their ally, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, segments of the population remembered that once upon a time even the Awami League had collaborated with Jamaat-e-Islami. Therefore, instead of politicizing their demands, the protesters looked for inspiration to the late Jahanara Imam, author of a famous memoir based on events occurring during the 1971 (and mother of a freedom fighter who died during the war for liberation) who had subsequently struggled to bring war criminals to book, but had failed due to political machinations.

In different South Asian nations, there are different official narratives of what exactly happened in 1971. When, for example the Pakistan Army targeted religious minorities and intellectuals in December even though surrender was only a few short days away, what objective did they expect to achieve? Still, as reprehensible as some of the atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army were, they had the Nuremberg Defense: they were following orders. Additionally, the Mukti Bahini did retaliate against some civilians, though to a much smaller scale. It is a slippery slope when you try to weigh relative immorality, but the razakar conspirators were not soldiers, they were civilians who betrayed their own neighbors. The Pakistan Army waged an inhumane war, but left the country after defeat. The razakars that stayed in Bangladesh, on the other hand, reaped the benefits of liberation on the graves of the freedom fighters they butchered.

A section of the foreign media has wrongly portrayed Shahbag as mob vengeance and blood-lust. This is a superficial analysis. Shahbag boldly proclaims that a Bangladeshi identity is not equivalent to a Muslim identity or a Bengali identity, or for that matter even a Bengali Muslim identity. There are Muslims, Bengalis, and Bengali Muslims who are native to other countries in South Asia. There are also other ethnicities in Bangladesh and those who follow other religions in Bangladesh. None of these criteria are unique to Bangladesh. Therefore, none of these criteria alone are adequate to describe the Bangladeshi condition. Shahbag is in essence a reaffirmation of a Bangladeshi identity shaped by Partition, the Language Movement, and Liberation.

The Jamaat-e-Islami and their ilk have sought to discredit the Shahbag movement in whatever way possible. Jamaat sympathizers murdered a blogger who was a Shahbag activist and attempted to justify his death because reportedly he was an atheist. They have sought to portray Shahbag as entirely a movement of atheists, which is untrue. In fact a number of practicing men and women of all religions have supported Shahbag. As a broader point, Shahbag is a matter of national identity and has nothing to do with religion. Even Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party branded Shahbag as supporting the cause of atheism. In some bizarre parallel world, falsely calling someone an atheist is deemed an acceptable defense for supporting those who have been convicted of mass-murder and rape!

The logic of Shahbag is rather simple. if Bangladesh is a nation of laws, then there must be justice. If Bangladesh is indeed a sovereign nation, then those who committed genocide to stifle the aspirations of its citizens for sovereignty must be brought to book.

(This is a longer version of a post I wrote in Bangla).

This morning I intuitively sensed that I could no longer see a particular color. “Sensed” was not the right word, because I could not remember if this was actually true either:  how do you really know if something is missing if it had never been there and you had never asked?  For an instant I had no way of knowing if I had always been colorblind. Perhaps, I had gone through life missing out on a particular color. Or perhaps, I once recognized this missing color but now it had stared to fade: as my perception of it got blunted, instead of the canvas being devoid of its hue completely, another color bled into the spot to replace it. One by one, is this how we lose our perception of a field of flowers? Is this how the kaleidoscope eventually becomes monochromatic?

I lied still in bed trying to hear the sounds around me. I thought about all the frequencies which I knew were inaudible. It was not a silence, but a heavy white noise that enveloped my ears. Maybe I was deaf to particular notes? Or it could have been that there were entire octaves that had gone missing in the night.

I took a deep breath. I exhaled. I could smell nothing. It is said that smell is the sense closest linked to memory: there in that sterile room, I tried to recall waking up many mornings to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. I tried to reconstruct the bitter flavor on my palate. But it seemed that my nose was blocked. The room was impervious to all sensation. Or was the room unchanged and I had changed?

How could I even be sure that the physical attributes of the objects around me remained as they had in the past? Were events still occurring, transmitting the same amount of information as before? Was the sun up? Were children laughing? Did flowers still blossom?  Truly, I had no way of knowing, because my weakening receivers had failed to pick up the details hidden in so many lost frequencies.

While lying in bed, the colored lenses in front of my eyes had become eye-patches. I had heard nothing as the cut-off filters progressively narrowed the dynamic range restricting what sounds reached my brain. My olfactory receptors had withered in a sudden frost.

Just then the alarm rang. I rubbed my eyes in a blur. By focusing and filtering for so long, I had let the world slip away until I had reached the point that I could no longer recognize it. I had rationalized that I didn’t need to see the forest for the trees, and in the meantime, the trees had vanished one by one, leaving only a foggy imprint of what was once lush vegetation.

Those were the thoughts of a man who had just woken up older by another day.

One year ago, we came into your life.

It is all so vivid in my memory. I remember the day you came home from the hospital, the first day you dipped your toes in water, the day you first said baba and ma, the day you got your first tooth, the day you ate solid food, the day when you started to crawl, the day you opened your first book and turned the pages, the day when you waved at me, and the day you took your first steps. I remember being able to cradle you in one arm and to rock you to sleep. My biceps have since gotten bigger.

365 precious days ago, you came into our life. You were born with your eyes wide open and full of curiosity. Your movements became coordinated. You started to grasp. You began to sit up. You started to stand. You reached for the camera. You took your first photograph.

You had your passport photo taken. You sat in cars, and trains, and planes. You traveled to cities, forests, fields, deserts, and mountains in three countries on two continents. Along the way, you learned to smile consciously. You became camera-conscious.  We have taken thousands of photographs of you over the last year. Let me confess that among those photos that have turned out well, I have not been able to delete a single one of you, even those backed up on multiple storage devices.

I still fondly remember the tiny clothes and swaddle blankets you rapidly outgrew. Your mother has neatly folded every single article of clothing since your birth. You won’t be able to wear them again, but we have not been able to give them away yet. Your fragrance still lingers in them.

Growing up has taught you fear. Of the unknown that lurks in the dark. Of injections. Loud noises. Iron supplements. Gerber’s sweet potatoes. The fear that your mother will get lost behind the bathroom door. That your father will get up in the middle of the night and leave. And there must be many other fears that I cannot know which stalk you in the night. But when you wake up, your mother’s reassuring voice is always there to caress you.

You have taught me conversations in which the meanings of words are inconsequential.  You have helped me to be patient when rational arguments are meaningless. You have shown me how to derive pleasure from the simplest of blessings. Last year, for a fortnight, I was traveling from one strange town to another. Every evening, in my hotel room, I would check my email for new photographs of you, and wistfully wonder what milestone I had missed. Even now, every morning, as I leave, I am saddened because I will not see you until the evening; every evening my footsteps hasten because I know you will rush up to the door with a beaming smile to greet me.

Before you were born, I had an erroneous idea about parenting. I thought that once I became I father I would finally have to grow up and act my age. Since, you’ve been born I’ve had the rare opportunity to be a child again. We’ve stared at grease stains on windows, made music with makeshift instruments consisting of tin lids and pots and pans, played battleship while simultaneously modeling global warming by overflowing bathroom tiles with bathtub water, danced Gangnam Style to the Elmo song, and derailed choo-choo steam trains in dastardly Maoist attacks.

Last week we went to the beach. You were amazed when you saw waves rolling into shores for the first time. You looked out into the distant horizon where the water dissolved into the sky and clasped my right hand tightly. After mumbling something of great import, you let out a huge sigh. With a serious expression, you sat down. You purposefully picked up your little shovel and started to pour sand in your bucket. The beach was vast and your bucket was tiny. How much sand could it hold? I joined you. We filled up the bucket. We poured out the sand we had collected. We repeated this activity until we got exhausted.  As it turned out, I had the rules wrong. I had underestimated the thrill of the game. It was a blast.

Today, as you turn one, we celebrate. I can’t wait to find out what new adventures await.

The facts are now well known. The elected government (and/or the law-and-order infrastructure) of West Bengal prevented noted author Salman Rushdie from visiting Kolkata to promote the cinematic version of Midnight’s Children citing security reasons. In the aftermath, this heavy-handed action has met with disapproval, and quite rightly so.  An author with a valid visa has every right to visit any city in the country and to deny him this right is a travesty. Many columns have been written about this including one by Ruchir Joshi in The Telegraph and another by Sandip Roy in Firstpost.

The underlying theme in both columns? Kolkata, a city once noted for tolerance and for being the “cultural capital’ of Asia has now, to quote Joshi, “completed its downfall to a narrow-minded, spirit-crippled, morally corrupt, goonda- governed provincial town.”

Joshi concludes his column with the following lament:

There was a time when (what used to be) Calcutta understood what ‘freedom’ meant, what ‘free speech’ meant, what ‘imagination’ meant, what was meant by ‘art’. The movement for the stopping of sati started here (it offended the core ‘religious sentiments’ of lakhs of Hindus), the movement for a free India, where people of all faiths and belief and non-belief could live, also garnered huge charge from the thinking of Kolkataiya minds and hearts.

Central to each and every thing that Calcutta (and Kolkata) gave to the yet-to-be-born republic was the tenet, “Where the mind is without fear”, i.e. that you can think and say what you want. What this latest assault on our freedom to think, read and see what we want does is plunge us into a darkness of a kind we in this city have not yet known. Today, we Calcuttans have really become the children of a dreadful midnight.

Roy joins the bandwagon and heaps on the scorn:

That is why the Rushdie sting hurts so bad here. It’s all we had – that where-the-mind-is-without-fear cultural capital. Calcuttans’ sense of intellectual exceptionalism, the kind that made that young woman at Jaipur bristle, stems from the pride of a city that has little else in its kitty anymore. Now the emperor has been shown to be without clothes. And we are truly just a backwater obsessed with the price of fish while one of our most famous living authors of Indian origin could not come to the city when it was hosting, of all things, the legendary Kolkata Book Fair.

Like both Joshi and Roy, I am appalled by the treatment meted out to Rushdie. However, I take issue with a number of overreaching statements made by both observers.

Disregarding the overused-to-the-point-of-cliché reference to Tagore (as an aside, can we refer to Tagore beyond where the mind is without fear or ekla cholo re for once please?), both Joshi and Roy pine for a Kolkata from the past which was politically a beacon of fearlessness.

When does this Kolkata exist? Was this the Kolkata that segregated natives in the “Black Town” so that they did not interfere with the Europeans who lived in palatial houses and roamed wide boulevards in the nicer part of the city? Was this the Kolkata that suffered not once but twice when Bengal  was vivisected? Was this the Kolkata of Direct Action Day? Of slums with unlivable conditions for the streaming humanity dumped on it due to Partition?

Where was this fearlessness when Ritwik Ghatak got a raw deal then for speaking up against the injustices caused by arbitrarily carving up the homeland? Where was this fearlessless when some of the state’s best and brightest students were mercilessly bayoneted in their classrooms in the Seventies? Where was this fearlessness when Taslima Nasreen was banished from the city?

My memory and my reading of history seem to recall a quite different Kolkata, in which common citizens have striven despite the machinations of inept politicians and a woefully inadequate system.

I stress this point because it bears mentioning over and over again. The leadership of a political party banished Rushdie, its inhabitants did not.  How does this political act alone indicate the intellectual demise of millions of people living and breathing in the city – writing poems, singing songs, and taking part in amateur plays?

I say all of this with mixed emotions. I never lived in Kolkata for any appreciable time, growing up instead in its shadows in a small town two hours away. There has been much that has disgusted me about Kolkata: its inefficient, crumbling infrastructure; its lack of economic growth and opportunities for its own; its flexibility with time and its lackadaisical attitude. But for me and for countless others who grew up in mofussil towns in West Bengal, Kolkata has always been The City. We watched movies made in The City. We read books that were published in The City. We looked to The City for health and education and then elsewhere in India, when we painfully found that these had not been priorities to successive administrations. Even when the state failed us and we left it physically, we continued to look to it for our cultural bearings. Therefore, its decline is our decline.

The decline of Kolkata when compared to other cities is quite apparent. But I cannot give up on the city, just as I cannot give up on my friends and family. And I am not willing to write off the Kolkata Book Fair just yet either.

I have many fond memories of the Kolkata Book Fair. Of days buying brightly-colored, inexpensive books from Russian vendors. Of looking at maps and trying to figure out how I might cover all the stalls. Of jostling through massive crowds to pick up new releases from major publishers. Of standing outside at stalls distributing copies of my ill-fated short-running little magazine to people who cared to read and discuss poetry (yes, there still are many people in Bengal). Of meeting editors of other little magazines. Of fish cutlets and coffee in small cups.

Even on days I could not go, like countless others, I followed the Kolkata Book Fair. Many years, in the evening, friends and relatives would come back with new books that they had just had published – their faces beaming with pride.

Times have changed no doubt. Authors who have writing for years in Bangla, lament the increasing difficulty in publishing anything other than textbooks. Bookshops note that readership is marginally up in English, while it is down Bangla: people just don’t read as much anymore. These are worrying issues, indeed.

In the meantime, other states and countries have made notable progress. In West Bengal, for the longest time, we remained criminally unaware of the excellent literature in Bangla created just across our borders in Bangladesh. But I am very happy to note from author friends that there is a stronger relationship now than even two decades ago and large contingent of authors, publishers, and intellectuals is participating in the Kolkata Book Fair this year.

I remember when Rajiv Gandhi called Kolkata a “dying city” many years ago. It survived producing very many writers, artists, and musicians. It may not be the intellectual capital it once was, but don’t write Kolkata off just yet.

As I type, my ten-month old son is licking the track-wheel of a mouse that has been sanitized for the purpose of toddler tasting. He has two visible teeth and has now been eating solid food for four months, in which time his mother and I have observed that his early interests are not so much in the Eating Department as in the Turning-the-Head-and-Trying-to-Escape Department. Oh, he’s a curious one by all means and has demonstrated a determined proclivity for putting any small item in his mouth, unless of course, the small item happens to be in some manner edible. As far as food is concerned, he loses interest after the first small bite.

In these four months I’ve learned that toddlers are just as social as larger humans. They want to eat with us. They want to eat what we do (but of course, we know we shouldn’t eat what we do). My son already prefers drinking from a glass to drinking from his bottle. So, whenever possible we try to ensure that he eats at the table with us. We give him various healthy, edible bits of food with different shapes, textures, flavors, and colors and he enjoys sitting there tasting and playing with his food (not necessarily in that order). He picks up a small piece of his food with the thumb and index finger to closely inspect it. After he’s comfortable with what we’ve given him, he clasps it in the tiny palm of either of his hands and shoves it into his mouth. It is a slow deliberate process. It is also inefficient and not adequate for all of his nutritional requirements. Sometimes, the hand is not perfectly coordinated food ends up on his cheeks.

And so like other parents we’ve devised numerous games and charades. Our chief weapons are surprise, deception, and distraction. At first, we tried to make the boy think his bland food is delicious by tasting some of it.

Me: Eat your delicious yogurt. Mmmmm… It’s so yummy. Look at me eat it. MMMM…

Loud Internal Voice: HAAAKTHOOO. THIS SMELLS LIKE CAT VOMIT. HOW ARE BABIES SUPPOSED TO EAT THIS?

Barely Audible Voice of Reason: [Smirks] It’s because they’re largely immobile, can’t talk, and haven’t eaten anything tasty to benchmark against yet… Count your blessings. Soon your son will want to eat pizza for breakfast.

OK, let me rephrase. I don’t actually advise trying to eat baby food. Rather, simulate eating it without actually eating. This doesn’t work for long, because babies figure out the trick pretty quick. The more viable solution is to distract the little child. This is much easier said than done because babies have very short attention spans. Think, in the seconds. If you don’t have any family members with you or domestic help – and these are a luxury in most of the western world – then your options are severely limited. You cannot call upon impromptu musicians to perform Mozart’s Pots-and-Pans Symphony 5, and therefore you are left with devices such as moving objects, falling water, or obscenely-loud, noise-making toys. In our case, is been primarily up to the boy’s mother to come up with ingenious methods to feed him and also to fret once their effectiveness wears off: mirrors, the bathtub, the baby-walker, and large plastic toys have all had their time.

Very recently, the K-Pop song Gangnam Style started working. I don’t remember how the idea even first came up. Our son is not allowed to watch television, so it must have been sometime when he was playing with my iPad. Anyway, long story short: he is mesmerized by the video in such a way that he quietly eats his food while watching it on YouTube. He polishes off his bowl after we’ve played it 2-3 times, so he’s not watching it for too long, but I would’ve preferred not to have introduced him to moving pictures this early. In this case, however, nutrition takes precedence. What worries me is that the magic of Gangnam Style will soon wear off. Neither of us speaks any Korean, nor have we watched or listened to any Korean Pop apart from Gangnam Style. So, it is a Brave New World.

I’ll let you know what I discover.

Some days I wake up when it is cold and dark outside and you are still asleep. I quietly make coffee and get ready for work. Just before I leave, I kiss your forehead, ever so careful not to disturb you. And then I pick up my bag, and walk towards the door, secretly hoping you win this game we play, wishing that you wake up before I leave.

The days you are awake, we both stand in front of the mirror and make funny faces. You try to grab the toothbrush in my mouth and I bob my head in the other direction. You look with wonder at the white lather taking up half my face and then at my shiny cheeks after I run a razor across them.

We have breakfast together. I carefully tear off a tiny piece from my toast and put it in your mouth. You smile showing me your two teeth and then hug me tightly. You lick my phone like it is a bar of chocolate. You leave tiny fingerprints on my glasses. I run my hands through your soft hair. And then I look at the clock and know it is time.

In a few moments, you see me all dressed up and smile. You think we are both going to take a leisurely walk. Your elation turns to despair as you see me tie my shoes. I am ready to come with you baba. Why are you not dressing me too?

And then I pick up my bag, kiss your cheeks, and drag my feet out the door as you begin to cry. You are obsessed with doors: afraid that I will close one every morning and disappear, and elated when it opens and I am back in the evening.

In the evening, I open that door and see you crawl towards me, smile, and clap. There is so much work to be done! We need to look at the world from six inches above the ground and hide plastic blocks under the sofa. We need lift the corner of the rug and nod approvingly. We have to find that long strand of string from a frayed shirt. We have to perform a percussive jugalbandi by tapping furiously on the ottoman. We must flip through the Macy’s catalog that just came in the mail and tear out all the pages. And then tired from all the effort, we need to lie on our backs and talk about how our respective days went as we sip water.

Hearing your crying get softer as the distance between us increases in the morning felt agonizing. So one day, I slipped out to work while you were in another room. All morning you crawled from room to room looking for me. You stood up on two feet and beat furiously against the bathroom door calling out as if to say “baba, I have waited for a long time; you can come out now.” And then when I was nowhere to be found, and you realized that I had run off, you sulked for the rest of the morning. That evening after I got home from work, you turned your face away from me; you didn’t want to look at me. You were angry. I took you out for a walk and told you I was sorry. I hugged you and hugged you until you rubbed your face against mine.

My darling, I cannot explain to you why I wake up every morning not having fallen off the bed. Why I don’t stand in the shower until the water turns to ice. Why I don’t forget my stop and take the train to the end of the track. I cannot explain to you the strings that pull me every morning across a well-traced line. But you know with what eager anticipation I converge upon a singular focus every evening.

I decide to visit the ancestral village. There is protracted discussion on how best to get there.

The driver has a theory. “We should take the national highway across the state border and loop back, after which we take the dirt road down to the village.”

That was the plan when we left. We are now on the highway.

My cell phone rings. I recognize the number. “Hello.”

“Where are you?” asks the voice at the other end.

“I’m not quite sure. We’re probably one hour away from the village.”

“Wait! Have you crossed the rice mill yet?”

“I think we passed one about five minutes ago. We’re coming up on an intersection.”

“Turn, turn, right now!”

“Which way do we want to turn? Right? Left? Back?” The driver hits the brakes hard, pulls over to the side of the road, and stares at me.

“Turn back to the rice mill and take the road on the left. Wait, let me think if it is to your left or right… Yes, it is to the left.”

“Are you sure that is the easiest way to get to the village? Can’t we just cut across the state border and come back?”

“No, that is not the right way. We never take the dirt road. We always take a shortcut. Let me give you the details… You want to take the road that cuts off near the rice-mill, drive past the high school, and go past the temple until you reach a thoroughfare.”

“And then?” I ask.

“And then call me. I’ll give you the rest of the directions.”

Clearly, this is not going to work. I turn to the driver and say “Do you have any idea how to get there?”

He nods in the affirmative, but that is not entirely accurate. No driver has ever admitted to not knowing the way.

Two hours later we are relieved to finally enter the village. We pass the high-school which came up on land donated by one of my family members. We pass the library which my grandfather helped start.

Some villagers crowd around the car to see who has come. I feel like a celebrity.

After another ten minutes we make it to the house. I get out of the car, stretch, and look around. There are insects which I shoo away. I walk up the dirt path to the house. This is the soil my ancestors trampled on for generations. I am careful not to get any mud on my shoes.

I come up to the intricately-chiseled door. I remember this door from the distant past, even though my callused hands are not those of a child anymore. I run my hands over the smooth panels. I push them open.

An old woman wearing a white sari is standing behind the door waiting for me. She says “Come in” without ceremony. I bend down to offer my pronaam and accept her ashirbaad.

Next to her is another woman, about twenty-years older than me, who is giggling. She is happy to see me. She remembers taking care of me when I was a child.

The old woman takes me inside and points to a very heavy chair before entering what I assume is a kitchen. I sit down on the chair and look around. There is very little furniture. I raise my legs almost immediately. There are bloodthirsty mosquitoes everywhere.

The old woman comes out with a small ceramic plate in one hand and a stainless-steel glass in the other. She places the small plate with sooji halwa next to me. She hands me the glass of water.

“I really don’t eat sweets that much.”

“This is really not much. If you had given us a bit more notice or come earlier in the day, we could have caught fish from the ponds,” she says slowly.

“True. But this is sufficient. And I like sooji.” I shift in the chair and eat quietly. Sufficient is probably not the right word. I am conditioned to worry about places like this. I reassure myself. One mosquito bite will not give you malaria. Drinking the water will not kill you.

I look at the cracks in the mud floor. Were there that many before? Wasn’t there a thatched roof before the current tin one? Once I am done eating, the old woman asks “Do you want to see your rooms?”

I ponder on the question. My rooms? My grandparents used to live here. This is where my father and my aunts spent their childhood. This is their home. This is where I spent three of the first four years of my life. But that was a previous life. My rooms are on the twelfth floor of an apartment building in another country.

She continues. “We keep cleaning all the rooms, though there are very few of us here anymore. All the children and their children have moved to the cities. Hardly anyone visits. You have all forgotten us.” She pauses and then asks again, “Do you want to see your rooms now?”

I offer the only acceptable answer.

The two women solemnly lead me into a courtyard. I am greeted by the faces of other relatives upon entering a different part of the house. There are smiles. “How are you these days? We remember you as a little boy. You know, we have kept the gramophone records we used to play when you were a child to get you to eat.”

“Maybe you can teach me a few tricks that worked so I can try them myself.”

They smile. “You can take the records if you want.”

“I don’t even own a record-player.” There is silence, which the old woman interrupts by opening the door of one of the rooms.

I enter.

The room is very dark and nearly empty except for a small wooden bed in one corner next to a small window and a bookcase. It is all very unimpressive.

I spread out the mat on and lie down. I shut my eyes.

I hear the tinkle of bangles and the jingle of keys tied to an aanchal. My grandmother uses keys to open a tin full of biscuits. I hear a creaking sound. My grandfather must be sitting on a hammock outside reading the newspaper and mumbling to himself. The room is full of toys and clothes. The courtyard outside is brimming with laughter. Members of my extended family are all here.

What is this place? I open my eyes. It is still dark and empty. I get up and step outside the room.

A bell is ringing. A priest is completing the sandhyarati in the puja room. I chat for another hour or so. I am told my grandfather made sure there we were well stocked with fresh fish because I ate steamed catfish everyday. That my grandmother dressed me up in a sweater and socks even when it was hot because she was afraid I’d catch a cold.

I look at my watch. “I really must be going now. It is getting dark and I need to get back to town. ”

The old woman walks up to me. “Come. I have to show you something before you leave.” She slowly walks up to a photo framed on a corner of the mud wall. She wipes the thick, translucent plastic covering it and calls me near. “You have not seen this before. No one else has this. It is a photo of your great-grandfather and your great-grandmother.”

I look at the fading photograph and see a stern looking dark middle-aged man in dhoti next to an equally-stern looking woman in a sari. I squint and see a resemblance to my grandfather. Maybe. Maybe not. I am quiet for a while.

The old woman comes up close to me and looks straight into my eyes. “You will not forget us, will you? All the others are gone. I will be gone soon too. You will come once again before I die?”

“Of course I will be back soon.” I force a weak smile and then look away so our eyes do not meet. We do not talk any more but quietly walk outside the house towards the car. The last time I was here was fifteen years ago when my grandmother was still alive.

I get mud on my shoes.

On the way back, we get lost again. We pass fields, villages, narrow unpaved paths. We almost run off the road into paddy fields. We nearly get swallowed up by creepy-looking forests. As we pass through an unknown village, a crowd uses the light from our headlamps to spot a venomous snake which they then promptly beat to death.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, we make it to a slightly-more navigable road. There are people here who know the way to the highway. We follow their directions and heave a sigh of relief when we are back on the highway We stop for some evening cha at the eatery and then it is a straight shot back into town.

The next morning I pack my suitcases. I have a flight to catch.

Getting older

I am told that I am getting older? Chuckling heartily
I repeated the phrase in the bathroom!
In the solitude of that place it wouldn’t have hurt
To dance a few steps either-
Shall I start exercising to lose weight? Wear tight-fitting trousers?
I laugh myself silly; in the afternoon
I ask Neera,
Have you heard the news? Have you heard that I am getting older?
You know, there is a bit of grey in my chest hair, in my sideburns, and in my beard
You can see it too. Take a close look
Everyone who sees me wonders, where is the boy, this is a man!
These are very complicated magic tricks- how a boy becomes a man
How men become aged and then die-
I too will die.
Loving for a little while longer, writing a few more poems
I too will eventually die
Isn’t it?
Wandering along aimlessly, where have I come… this place is unknown.
Mine was a vast kingdom, beyond it is so much that is limitless.
A tune reverberates through my entire body, I hesitate to even blink
I enjoyed this brief sojourn, I got a chance to witness a lot;
The darkness is also dear to me, Neera, give me your hand
Let me take its fragrance.

Neera, only when I am near you do I realize
Even today time stands still!

- Sunil Gangopadhyay

(I was overcome by emotion as I translated one of my favorite poems written by one of my favorite poets, but I have no better tribute than this.)

And here is a poem I translated for the Midnapore Kavita Utsav of which I was a co-convener in 2000.