Flying over the vast emptiness that is Canada at 30000 ft, the quote "no man is an island to himself" comes to his mind, as the eye scans below Green Bay's many ice crusted islets, which from this height look like the rotten teeth of a demon.

It is the in-flight navigation tracker which informs him of this, the current location over which he slides. He thinks of time's curvature, dimensions of space, the lack of any such instrumentation to map the human heart and memory, and this once great friend who over a period of nights many winters ago tried to lead him into a world of twenty six dimensions, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking watery chai.

Nothing much got absorbed as this was around the same time when they had both stumbled upon a Dutch painter - this man's life and painting, in which stars are whorls, in which sunflowers are nature itself - spoke to their young and raw urges to leap into the world. And so his head was too full of Western art that he ate from thick yellowing books, rarely borrowed from the library they both dearly loved; his friend for all the quantum physics books it contained, written by people with names like Landau, and full of incomprehensible symbols and diagrams. As for himself, he was more modest in scope; penetrating nature's mysteries was too onerous a task for him. He limited himself to the library's cave of poetry, best reachable via a pitch dark iron fire escape stair.

Now headed into this horizon's lit arc with dusk eddying under him, he remembers his friend, and also the time's fork which took them to different countries, in opposite directions from the country of their youth. They have't spoken to each other in months or have met in years. The last time they did meet was when he went back to the country in which neither now lives. There was too much smoke and noise from the seperately experienced heartbreak of the intervening years for them to hear each other's voices. They both left that meeting, which also ended at dusk, puzzled and unable to explain how and why their seemingly perfect country of friendship, with its riverbank talks, railway walks, impulsive train journeys had all come to that zero of silence.

He scans the in-flight tracker again, and brings fore to his memory a leg of the lonely trans-continental journey, from Delhi to London, back to this New World, during the course of which he tracked geographies, murmuring their names, and thought repeatedly of another saying - a cousin of the one currently flashing in his mind - this one by Hercalitus - a man can't step into the same river twice.

I am with the lost Lying in the trenches and minefields.

Poppies and dust fill my mouth. Rain and snow become the sacramental wine of my world.

But even here the memory of you Is as insistent within me as the sighing of plane trees (Those trees by the narrow straits that I heard you praise to the skies) In these blustery spring nights.