[1] Reading certain scenes in Bellow’s novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in which Augie supports his next door neighbour Mollie through botched abortion attempts by back alley quacks, my heart’s screws tighten an extra bit for living in America, especially as an immigrant, is to be closer to certain weathers of loneliness.

Making it in (and also being unmade by) a city is one of the themes of this novel, and this makes it appropriate to read as I leave a city of trees (and also of final inertia) for a city of glass and power (and also of grime, grit, human-herring exhalations, and solitude).

[2] In the musty and boxed main reading room of the Jersey City Free Library, sitting among a few homeless hobos sheltering from the cold, black kids dressed in prison fashion reading the sporting papers, old retried white men with slack open mouths dozing off their lunch in this time of afternoon siestas, I find the latest copy of “Poetry” in the magazine racks, and on reading a poem that speaks of riding into the New York City through the cattails, the sludge heaps, the newly minted towers of New Jersey, and the tunnels in the belly of the Hudson river, I feel a tiny tremor of excitement.

[3] Staying with an old friend from middle school days, you wonder how was it that in those days you could effortlessly fill all those hours of companionship, hours that both of you find hard to fill with anything other than a stream of Bollywood movies, and scattered talk that revolves around making it, getting ahead, and the facts of life in America.

Observing the satisfactions that seem to derive from replicating a version of Indian middle class life in America with its cargo of a wife, a car, a house, a bank balance, a fund for the kids’ college educations, occasional vacations into the sprawling American immensities, few dinner parties, Indian movies with their fixity of plot lines, romances, tragedies, song and dance, I wonder, I do wonder, if it is my wanting to live a life of the mind that precludes (or will preclude) me from this version of happiness, if not real, an acceptable facsimile.

[4] A poet was buried, after his beheading as a heretic, for reciting only the first half of the creed, the kalimah, “there is no god” (La Illaha) - he claimed since he had thus far directly experienced only the first half of the creed, it would be really hearsay to complete it by saying “but god” (il-lallah) - at the entrance of one of the largest mosques in the world, Delhi’s Jama Masjid. The tyrant-emperor’s tomb, who ordered his execution, lays forgotten somewhere in the middle of a rocky plateau while this poet’s (Samard's) dargah continues to be drenched with flowers, swards of red velveteen, and the hands of the faithful who seek solace. I discover this in America, and chant this Armenian-Iranian immigrant’s (who somewhere on the mercantile byways into India, stumbled upon intoxicating love, and burst into poetry) verses:

I have been appointed to the office of Love I have been made oblivious to asking from creatures Like a candle I have been melted in this world Due to my burning I have become Love’s confidante!