Small hours of the evening, a cool evening in Balichak,sitting on the canal bank with Maniak, preseumtously fishing, the string unsteady in the breeze, hanging from the end of the bamboo pole,it was more to be there than to fish, however Mainak doesn't recognise this and catches fish with a mechanical efficieny, puts them in the small basket he brought along, well then Mainak couldn't afford to buy fish in the market, Debu the killer shark could.A small boy rdies a cow further up the stream and dives in with a splah into the water, joyous laughter.Women returning home from work,sarees a careful quilt of repair work, strangely beautiful in this setting sun.They must be masters at economics to wear the same wrap of cloth so many times,he knows that how terrifying is poverty, he was born in that, so he doesn't glorify being poor, just notices how much content these women would be if they could buy a piece of cloth in the weelky fair.And back in Bombay he remeber going out one evening with Helena, one of his colleuges, just out of loneliness, and on going to her flat and seeing two whole wardrobes of clothes and being mildly shocked.She laughed at him and said maybe he should have been born when that naked fakir, as Churchill had called Gandhi was around.He laughed yet at a level the discomfort didn't go away.Maybe he should bring Helena here and show her these women, with the sarees or whatever one can call those colorful quilts of cloth,dusty elbows from working in the rice fields all day.Maybe beauty will be redefined.

    The season of monsoons had begun and Mainak doesn't seem to particularly like this

season,well then he hates how hard it rains and how much his hurt leaks.It feels strange for Debu to be sitting in that one room hut and listen to the sound of rain above on the thatched roof, it almost feels like it's raining on his skin,how foriegn had this sound become.It had been almost ten days since he had come to Balichak,travelling on that old train that turns at the bend, ten miles from here.Soon his truosers were replaced by a simple wrap and a vest, it seemed obscene, almost overdressed to wear anything else. And impractical too in that moist wetness that the air used to take when almost bright sun used to come out when it stopped raining.Croak of the frogs at night,just a small earthen lamp for light and sound of Mainak's flute on some nights when Mainak was too tierd to sleep.It used to soothe them both.

    Somehow now the recollections seem to happen less often and with less sharpness.He couldn't make sense of things when Varsha left,he still doesn't understand why, though he took the blame for the fall when it came. This place where he was born somehow took him back to the womb and

makes him not seek answers to those insistent questions of why and why.He is content to just watch the stars on blanket of darkness when the clouds used to clear their wreath of gloom.And those stars those infinite large number of infinitely small points of light for these nights subsist for Varsha's eyes whom he loved to kiss everynight before he slept.

Notes: Kgp and Bengal when I was there I couldn't wait to get out.Now I remember the whole place so vividly.Those few miles I used to ride down with Kuppa to sit on a canal bank and watch bullock carts and village women walk on by, old t shirts wet with sweat,old faithful hawwai slippers on the feet,Kuppa smoking a ciggy sometimes, we used to sit there for sometimes late into the evening and ride back as small earthen lamps used to glow from the inside of small huts that used to line the road.I think I loved those smells and somehow some of the character of that place still remains within me, as i sit here in the shadows of skyscapers and the miracle of airconditioning.There was some greater force at work at those times.

2001-04-28 Atlanta,12.20 AM