Anwar - "Maula Mere"

Note: After an afternoon spent on finishing up reading Richard Yates's brilliant novel "Revolutionary Road"¹ in the backseat of a car, while being driven around the great Chicago suburbs

• freshly hatched houses on the prairie, raw and out of place in the middle of wind blown cornfields, then a brief detour to a Balaji temple where another first generation of Indian-American children (including one of my nephews - oddness on realizing that I am, also, an uncle) were inducted into the world of writing/knowledge under the gaze of a goddess, Saraswati, while wincing on overhearing, "Tell uncle beta what you want be when you grow up? A doctor, no?" -

I came to the end of this book, deeply disturbed by April Wheeler's death, and the quite (suburban) desperate lies that drove her to it.

Afterwards I gazed out of the car window at southward bound Canada geese circling over the ruffled ponds and lakes for the evening, trying to remember that cold day many months ago, which was spent on the road between Montreal and Toronto, just as geese were making a reverse journey, northwards, as spring was waiting to break open from the snows. Hours spent thinking of a future, or the possibilities of one with a girl.

Again as a winter approaches, there is nothing to soften the hardness of upcoming days. And as Yates makes it clear in his story, talking about hope might be fool's errand. What then is left to eat? Music - in Bismillah's reedy pitch and yaw of this lovely late evening raga - or even more simply the hunger for it.

[1] Here is Richard Ford's introduction to the novel which made me buy the book many weeks ago at the Strand.