In Limbo 2

It wasn’t an exchange really,  but a one-way ferry, at least at a material level. Every morning, he handed us a bagful of edible flowers and sacred  tulsi  leaves for our daily consumption of herbal tea, and some  paan  leaves as after-meal digestives. We, on the other hand, shoved the goodies in our bag and returned him his empty one with a smile and a little, `how are you?’, politely followed by, `And your wife?’ Our timid thank-yous were not acceptable to him since they transmogrified, what he considered `his little contribution’ to our quotidian life into a formality. ‘It is my pleasure, ladies,” he liked to say to my mother and I in not-so magnanimous a tone. Some days he would message, “sorry, no flowers today. My ma-in-law is sick”, or “Sorry, no flowers; have to go to a wedding”. “Please don’t be sorry,” I’d message back. “Remember, no thank-yous or sorrys”. We had met Akhtar bhai, an avid walker, a naturopathy enthusiast and a practising Muslim during our morning constitutiona

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still".                                                          T.S.Eliot And this is what life tried teaching me recently when in a single swipe, I lost a 150 page collection of short stories and an anthology of poetry flaunting a similar number of leaves, all stored under 'Drafts' on my Gmail account. Compiled over the last few years, I kept procrastinating the need to have a hard copy, in the form of printed pages. Never once did I anticipate an e-crash due to some virus in my phone, which would rob me of the right to access my own account. After the fiasco, for weeks I felt hollowed out as though a whole chunk of my deepest self had been immolated, mercilessly thrown into the pyre... I scampered for help from the few techies I knew, and despite being empathic to my anguish, no one could salvage the situation.  Anyway, it is lost...interestingly, I also lost my right to post anything new on my own blog. For, I cannot pr