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 dur...

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 sal...