...I am playing Dhrupad - the idea is to assuage these portents of doom I have been experiencing in my mental landscape - the bomb blasts in Hyderabad that happened today didn't help any, given that one of the bloody infernos - Gokul Chaat - was were I used to eat desi junk food every so often when I used to live in that city.

Perhaps, I have no business brining such disasters into my brooding - re-reading Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" after a night of broken sleep didn't help any. Logically, I have no good reasons to return to India - except for family who still live there, I have no other emotional bonds - landscape laced with culture is too abstruse a thing to hold onto - even if I know that this raaga I am listening to might sound better if played as night falls after a hot summer day, as one is stretched out under a large banyan tree. Yet, I am going - on the bullock cart version of an airline, Air India - in less than 30 or so minutes - to figure out what?

Perhaps, Don Quixote (in the Edith Grossman's translation, purchased many months ago in Toronto, unopened until today) will provide a clue for a way out of this unease that I can't even exactly name.