Chronicles

Category: memory

  • Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Jemimah hit a hundred chasing a mammoth score, with tough-as-nails women from Australia standing between her and victory. She did not raise her bat to soak in the glory. She knew the fight was far from over, and her team had folded a few times already in the tournament with the finish line in sight.

    She became the cheerleader for her tiring self, her team, and a nation that barely rallies behind its daughters. She had spent almost the entire game from the start in the hot and humid cauldron. The steely look in her eyes, the muttering to herself, and the chatter with her mates falling midway in the fight played out before thousands of compatriots. Yet she found an ounce of energy for a few more hits, as if she were riding the crescendo of a symphony.

    The symphony was made of human frailties. Losing to three of the SENA teams in the lead-up to this game had sullied expectations for this side. Their bowling barely inspired confidence. Fielding was in disarray—dropping simple catches, conceding overthrows, stumbling over balls hit straight to fielders. Jemimah herself had failed and been dropped from the team a few times already, and she didn’t even know she was one down until five minutes before she was sent out.

    Her captain and the oldest player in the team, Harmanpreet, was a complex soul trying to break the karmic cycles of those who walked ahead of her out of the park and toward an assured oblivion.. She carries a tortured look, as if fighting a demon that never lets her be. She, too, was cramping, but decided to lash out, believing Jemimah would anchor the ship still teetering in the tempest with a prayer. The match could very well have been her last had India lost. But the partnership with Jemimah became their ticket to redemption. Other batters brought much-needed wind to the sails, even as they faltered along the way.

    There is no video of Kapil Dev’s 175 against Zimbabwe, when the World Cup-winning team was on the brink of elimination. But that team of 1983 changed the destiny of Indian cricket and the spirit of a nation. Yet it was still a man’s victory.

    Women’s team coach Amol Muzumdar, too, has his tryst with destiny. He never got the chance to wear the blue, waiting in the shadows through a long career despite being one of domestic cricket’s greatest run machines. He started his career waiting for a chance to play for India, padded up and waited for an eternity and a day, while Tendulkar and Kambli batted to glory.This was his Chak De moment—seeking redemption alongside the girls who know what it means to be so near, yet so far.

    But this is Jemi’s time—to change the destiny of millions of girls and help them chart their own course to the future.

    It is already late.

    Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini

  • On Folk Arts

    On Folk Arts

    It seemed like a long time ago when time was still timeless, I had an affliction of color and sound. My mind, for the first time, was registering the overwhelming play of bright colors and engrossing sounds of the yearly festival at the temple in our neighborhood. Even the colors of candies stacked by seasonal peddlers upon their makeshift stalls added an ethereal sheen to the phantasmal vision unfolding before my eyes.

    The soothsayer’s song in praise of snake deities, loud and stout-looking actors on stage enacting extra-terrestrial battles from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the balloon man with his mobile paraphernalia—those were the early connectors to the heritage of the land, expressions of a world order that defied the onslaught of time as long as they endured.

    It was much later that I began to notice earthier and more primordial forms of folk art such as Ayyappan Paattu, songs in praise of Dravidian gods (Muthappan, Vishnumaya), along the sidelines of flashier performing arts. In them, I could sense a kind of cathartic realization of individual and collective dreams and fears—emotions that might otherwise have remained buried in the subconscious or erupted into something sinister and dark. The national festival of Kerala, Onam, was borne of a folk legend and became an occasion to celebrate all kinds of folk arts—ritualistic and secular (such as Tiger Dance, Kummatti Kali, etc.). More than its significance as an age-old tradition, Onam created a grand setting for people to celebrate life and revel in others’ joy.

    Some of the shapes and forms I witnessed in the traditional settings of Kerala were intense enough to quiet my growing apprehensions about the lack of development and modernity in the state’s social life. The richness of folk art easily filled the gaps of deprivation and countered the snobbery prevalent among the audiences and practitioners of classical arts. Often I marveled at the striking similarities between Theyyam and Kathakali costumes, and how Theyyam invariably broke into cries, in contrast to the refined aural and literary traditions of Kathakali. The social dynamic at work here was too stark to ignore.

    The dialectics of folk art were cleverly adopted and manipulated by political strategists, especially the communists, who embedded their ideology in seemingly innocuous variations of folk music enjoyed by workers in the fields. Later, popular poets used the structures and sounds of folk music to lend their art a vivid imagery and unexpected dimension. Listening to such poems in native languages like Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, etc., became a unique experience. Translating them would never have made sense.

    Yet, the most impressive of all folk arts has always been music. The rhythms and sounds of folk music have a rare ability to cut through the carefully manicured fences of culture and language. The aspirations of common people rising in unison resonate naturally with their counterparts across the world and touch hearts in a singular way—whether it is a group of Moravian gypsies assembled in a tavern, a Texan singing Americana, a Baul singer walking down the beaten fields, or farmers on a nondescript islet in Kuttanad rhapsodizing about the harvest season and the pleasures of a simple, unhurried life of yore.

    Living in a time when hypermodernity and globalization are often confused and utterly inadequate to describe the human condition—and, to a great extent, the condition of the earth—folk art may offer the much-needed healing for our electrocuted humanity. Although we will never return to the refuge of a rural and agrarian setting, the only lasting answers to our complicated problems may be simple ones.

    I remember reading Milan Kundera, who devoted an entire chapter to folk music and modern society. He spoke about men weary under the weight of their own egos and mistrust of their identities:

    ...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my primal point of reference… (The Joke).

    Notes:
    Some of the most evocative uses of audio and visual expositions of folk arts have appeared in popular and offbeat Indian cinema. Aravindan’s Kummatty comes to mind—the entire film based on a folk tale and roused by folk music. Nokkukuthi (Scarecrow) was another experimental effort, based on M. Govindan’s poem depicting a ballad. Other folk arts such as Theyyam and Kalam Paattu have long had their place in popular films. Mani Kaul also made a documentary on Rajasthani puppetry and a film, Duvidha, based on a folk tale.

  • In Light of India – II

    In Light of India – II

    Rama & Allah

    Octavio Paz is incisive when he speaks about the coexistence of the two religions that are strikingly at extremes – one the richest and most varied form of polytheism and the other, the strictest and most uncompromising form of monotheism. He observes how the two communities retained their identities without fusing and how the Muslim invasion happened in India long after the decline of Islamic civilization itself. He also notes that Sufi mysticism triggered a literary tradition in northern India, just as the Bhakti movement drawing on the Sufi influences sought to challenge orthodox Hinduism.

    “Kabir is the son of Allah and Rama. He is my Guru, he is my pir…Tagore translated Kabir’s poems because, in Kabir’s Unitarian vision, he had seen a failed promise of what India could have become.”

    Paz highlights the contributions of Akbar and Dara Shikoh. Dara’s translation of translation of Upanishads into Persian eventually ended up in Schopenhauer’s desk and through him, inspire Nietzsche and Emerson. Schopenhauer had called all his poodles as Atma – Soul. However, the period of enlightenment was followed by the dark years of Aurangzeb who according to Paz deepened the fault lines between Hindus and Muslims – divisions that echoed across centuries. He also noted that the East India Company had rarely interfered with the social fabric or religious identities of Indians, they instead exploited the divisions for profit and deflect conflicts away from colonial masters. Ironically, the notion of nationhood was an idea given to the Indians by the same foreign rulers.


    Another striking aspect of the book is Paz’s take on the caste system. Often condemned—and sometimes confused with racism—caste is, for Paz, also a way to understand the Hindu social fabric in relation to its philosophy of Karma. He acknowledges the critics of untouchability, but warns those who recoil at the word “caste” not to overlook the ancient hypotheses of cosmic order and the doctrine of Maya — the illusion of time – which assures that even suffering souls will eventually be freed through the cycles of birth and death.

    Modern Indian History

    From religion and social philosophy, Paz turns to the figures of modern Indian history: Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Subhash Bose, Gandhi, Nehru, V.K. Krishna Menon, M.N. Roy. Of these Menon and Roy drew his sharpest attention. According to Paz, Menon was a malignant influence on Nehru who ultimately proved to be a “fatal union” for Nehru.


    “Menon was an arrogant and intelligent man, but, as so often happens with the proud, he was not the master of his own ideas: he was possessed by them. Nehru was never able to recuperate from the disaster of his foreign policy.”


    By contrast, Paz’s account of M.N. Roy is replete with fascination and respect. Reading Paz’s account of Roy’s many political transformations, especially with the benefit of hindsight that we have now, one couldn’t but admire Paz’s prescient grasp of political history and recognition of Roy as perhaps the only genuine political mind to have emerged from India to leave a a lasting impact on International politics.


    Roy’s journey was extraordinary: an extreme nationalist inspired by Marx, pursued closely by British Intelligence, he fled to Chicago, and later during the First World War sought asylum in Mexico. There, he helped found the Communist Party. Impressed by Roy’s activities and skills, Lenin invited him to participate in the Third International and made him its agent in Central Asia and China. Yet Roy eventually broke with both the Comintern and Marxism itself. Returning to India, he fought for Independence, and spent years in Jail, and during the Second World War supported the Allies, recognizing the threat of Nazism posed as far greater than colonialism, and rejecting to take sides with either Gandhi or Subhash Bose.

    After the war, convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and Bolsheviks was a disaster, he formulated Radical humanism as a revolutionary response to the failure of socialism. His ideas may not have endured, yet Paz’s brilliant portrait of M.N. Roy- spare, brilliant and perceptive – captures a political genius in a few strokes that might not be found in Kosambi’s tomes of political history.

  • In Light of India – Part I

    In Light of India – Part I

    It rained.

    The hour is an enormous eye.

    Inside it, we come and go like reflections.

    The river of music

    Enters my blood.

    If I say body, it answers wind.

    If I say earth, it answers where?

    The world, a double blossom, opens:
    Sadness of having come,
    Joy of being here.

    I walk lost in my own center    .

    The essence of Octavio Paz is captured in the short poem: existence as a reflection, time as mystery and the world as duality. As a reader, I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had parallels in ancient Indian philosophies. Today, he is being rediscovered not only as a poet of great vision, but also for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed.

    In Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz has argued that the Mexican civilization had come to a stasis, abandoning its glorious past to withdraw inwardly and self-deprecatingly looked up to its neighbor in the north. It was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’s affinities and insights in the book, In Light of India.

    As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before your brain begins to register all your preconceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in a daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

    “I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

    Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorian London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

    Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

    in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

    Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red betel stains on the sidewalk,

    Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half-opened flower,

    Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

    A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

    More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

    As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles on the sidewalks: men and women with no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.”

    Paz goes back to his hotel but decides to take another walk toward the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he has seen, heard, smelled, and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a “young barbarian poet”.

    If we chop and change some images here and there, contemporary India despite the double-digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. One doesn’t read Octavio Paz as an academic exercise. One reads him for his insights, provocations and his attempts to engage civilizations in a constant dialogue.

    Even in the opening chapter, Paz reveals his sense of history and uncanny gift for archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, or Alexander Dumas. For him, it was the most ancient of cities – Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also the city of serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky was only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him, it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

    Years later, Paz would return as the ambassador to India, travelling across the country, collaborating with poets Agyey and Shrikant Verma, and writing East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. At Rajiv Gandhi’s behest, he gave a Lecture on India, which he revisited later to write In Light of India. The book makes no sweeping claim of anything in particular, yet it remains a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest to make sense of civilizations in conversation.

  • Life A User’s Manual

    Life A User’s Manual

    I read Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual when I was a master’s student in physics. At the time, I was toiling through books and lectures on classical and quantum mechanics—essentially, working for a degree. The Lagrangian and Hamiltonian equations, particle theories, their graduation to quantum physics, and further into Schrödinger and Heisenberg’s formulations, all passed by in a haze.

    I was grappling with the concept of constraints in Lagrangian mechanics when I opened Perec’s preface. In it, he forewarned the reader about the games and devices he had woven into his novel. Although he wrote the book to be eminently readable, he made no bones about the underlying rigor of its construction: the sequence of chapters follows the algorithm of a chess game; jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and probabilistic formulas organize the literary elements—objects, characters, situations, allusions, and quotations—into a deliberate order; even the indexing of its ninety-nine chapters is modeled after Dewey. It was the mind of an architect at work—focused, meticulous, and simultaneously non-committal about the grandeur of the project, stoic about its futility, and dispassionately observant of life’s intricate goings-on.

    Lagrange essentially said that imposing constraints on a system is another way of stating that forces are present in the problem which cannot be specified directly, but whose effects on motion are known. Perec took this principle into literature—adopting constraints as an empirical approach to writing and, by extension, to reading.

    Perec was part of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) group, devoted to the study and invention of literary forms. Under the leadership of Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the Oulipo worked—and still works—to identify and revive neglected forms, while also devising new ones based on rigorous formal constraints. One member famously defined the group, tongue firmly in cheek: “Oulipians: Rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.” Perec found a home here, among writers like Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Bénabou.

    Life: A User’s Manual tells the story of a ten-story building at the fictional 11, rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, meticulously describing its interior and the lives of its residents—179 stories in all. Their order is determined by a famous chess problem: visiting every square on a board using only the knight’s move. Once the constraints are set, Perec emerges as anything but a cold formalist—his affection for the characters and their idiosyncrasies is unmistakable. The stories stir wonder, laughter, and reflection, as they reinvent genres—romance, drama, detective tale, adventure, murder mystery—through restaurateurs, mediums, cyclists, antique dealers, and pious widows.

    Some examples:
    – A trapeze artist’s swansong at the circus—an impossible feat that ends in his death.
    – An archaeologist on the Nile trying to rescue a German girl from a harem.
    – A judge’s wife whose thrilling thefts lead to hard labor, ending as a bag lady on a park bench.
    – A murder mystery in which the protagonist adopts the Monte Carlo theory of probability to find his wife’s and daughter’s killer—only to narrowly miss encountering him.
    – A prophecy that shadows generations of a tragedy-stricken family, glimpsed only in a brief visit to an empty apartment.

    These stories leave little doubt about Perec’s storytelling gift. Beneath them all runs a subtle negotiation between writer and reader, with the big picture always in the backdrop. That is where Perec introduces his central figures: Bartlebooth, the millionaire maverick painter; Gaspard Winckler, his assistant; and Valène, the concierge who narrates this intricate web of stories.

    Bartlebooth’s project is monumental: over twenty years, he will travel the world painting 500 watercolors of different harbors. Every other week, a painting is sent to Winckler, who mounts it on wood and cuts it into a 750-piece jigsaw puzzle. Once Bartlebooth returns, he will spend another twenty years reassembling the puzzles, then return each to its original harbor, where it will be washed clean, leaving a blank sheet—the beginning and end coinciding. But things do not go as planned.

    To avenge twenty years of “pointless” work, Winckler begins making the puzzles increasingly difficult. Almost blind, Bartlebooth dies while attempting the 439th puzzle. Perec’s final paragraph captures the irony:

    “It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o’clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironic thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.”

    Winckler, dead two years earlier, has triumphed—but it is a meaningless triumph.

    In a single paragraph, Perec captures the grand project of life, the inherent meaninglessness of human effort, and the role of chance in undoing even the most carefully designed schemes. Our lives are shaped by innumerable constraints—social, ethical, moral, physical, biological—some accepted, some resisted—while the interplay of chaos and order goes mostly unnoticed.

    For someone who once wrote a novel entirely without the letter e, and as a leading figure of the Oulipo movement, this feels like a summit. In it, you sense the shadow of Joyce, Borges, Calvino, Flaubert, and Kafka—but also something uniquely Perec’s own.

    For now, I have nothing more to say. Go read it—the book belongs to you, my dear reader.

  • Hope Springs Eternal

    Hope Springs Eternal

    My aunt’s husband left the city of Kochi (Kerala, India) after retiring as a Deputy Revenue Officer. He relocated his wife, and children, except for the oldest daughter finishing college, to Chelakkara in the early seventies, a sparsely populated boondock northwest of Thrissur. After a day-long journey by bus, I had to walk for miles on a rough, winding road flanked by undulating paddy fields on either side until it became an unpaved but equally wide rugged rural pathway, leading to the gate bearing their family name inscribed.

    The house stood in the middle of several acres of land with a bamboo fence. The yard was filled with various fruit trees – many mangoes, jackfruit, guava, gooseberry, cashew apples, and Sapodillas. I was told my uncle even attempted farming paddy once. The original owner of the land was his neighbor. The house also had a cavernous well with nothing but rock at the bottom which my cousin wistfully described as a money pit where his father threw away a fortune over several years hoping for a spring. Now it was just a reservoir for rainwater that dries up in the summer for snakes to snuggle in the damp and shade.

    The house was spacious with a room full of antique cupboards where I found a treasure of his collection of books and audio cassettes. In a chest, I found an official invitation to the first show in Shenoy’s theater in Kochi for its grand opening which someone kept as a souvenir. Uncle had diaries with quotations from and annotations on Malayalam poets, mostly by G. Shankara Kuruppu and Vallathol. It also had notes and tips on farming. I realized the books on Physics and World literature belonged to his brother who died young when he was a lecturer at Brennen College. The complete collection of Yesudas’s Hindi Songs too was his legacy. I never met him. I saw my uncle only twice, of which the second meeting was when I traveled for almost all day in several buses with my parents for his funeral. He visited us a few months earlier to seek my parent’s help to dissuade his younger son from marrying a young girl he met near the dorm, having decided to drop out of college.

    I observed none of my cousins were interested in the books or farming. No one else studied beyond High school or basic trade school while their cousins in Kochi were known for academic excellence including post-doctoral degrees. The older daughter got a job in Government, married, and continued to live in Kochi. They sold the property by the end of 1999 back to the neighbor for a price. Until her last, my Aunt, who retired as a teacher ages ago, lived with the younger son who became a primary school teacher in a small town closer to Kochi. He divorced his first love and is separated from second wife. The other children too found their place now closer to Kochi even though they are still a few hours away.

    I remember watching a French film starring Gerard Depardieu – Jean De Florette (1986). Depardieu played the character of Jean, the Tax Collector and son of Florette who returns with his wife and daughter to the village to claim the land he inherited from his mother to begin the life of a farmer. Ugolin, his neighbor and local farmer who fought with Jean’s uncle earlier for not selling the land, realized that Jean too did not intend to sell. Despite all the efforts to make Jean’s life hell, Ugolin couldn’t make Jean sell his house. He along with an accomplice blocked the spring that was the only source of water forcing Jean to begin digging a well to collect rainwater at least as long as that lasts. Unfortunately while trying to blast open the well, Jean gets hit by a rock and dies. Jean’s distraught and orphaned family sells the house to Ugolin and leaves the village. Soon after, Ugolin unblocks the spring and begins to make a good profit.

  • Atlantis, the lost island of childhood

    Atlantis, the lost island of childhood

    In the beginning, as far as I can remember, the lush green strip of land was ensconced by the Arabian Sea and a thin river line that was lost into an estuary. A billion species of life thrived in the tiny whirlpools. Sunshine fell on the flowing waters in every fissure. When it rained, the natives who lived in the shanty could see the silver lines of thunder afar and scampered to bring the cows and kids home from the field and the wantons of country roads. The wind wove a symphony across the countless coconut trees that arched over the white and golden sand dunes. Folks called the place – an island, with no name, perhaps to remind the sovereignty of the land that leant over the timeless ebb and flow of the ocean.

    I used to visit my grandparents’ house during our summer vacations. We, the boys from the city found our space and deflated the overcrowded time from our senses on the island. The travel included trekking by bus and ferry boats, finally walking more than a mile passing paddy fields and country roads paved with soft red soil and sand until we reach the Riverbend and holler for the ferry as we soak in the wet breeze wiping away the last trace of fatigue.

    The folks in the house had to paddle across the river for everything that they ever needed, and every household had its own boats. The nights were dense and we could see each other’s faces in sepia sitting across the kerosene lamps for dinner. Eight siblings and dozens of grandkids thronged the spacious and benevolent home during those unforgettable times. If I close my eyes, I can still see the shimmering torch lights of solitary pedestrians on those rugged paths by the river and fisher folks rowing by.

    It must be right after the famine in the forties, my grandfather and his brothers left their misery to follow a dream of a piece of land to call their own. I never asked him to chronicle the events or timeline. They had nothing and everything to fight for. The island was waiting for them to build the Promised Land, and the earth was nubile and feisty. He had plowed his way and unleashed the raw power of farmers and fishermen to build the house, cultivate the land and build boats to fish with a lot of camaraderie with his brothers and natives.

    As kids, we spent the summer vacations in exhilaration, playing on top of the piles of coconuts and grains; canoeing up and down streams; gathering around the table where everyone assembles for dinner and woke up with the roar of waves retreating from the back of the house every morning. My grandfather looked like Odysseus who just came home to Ithaca, having done his journey.

    I spent a lot of time with him listening to his monologues on movies he watched from the country movie theatre or the quality of carpenters who worked on his boats. He also spoke about the murderous sea storms and fights among fisher folks who haunted the evening taverns with a kind of defiant nonchalance. He was Hemingway’s Santiago who came from the sea with the biggest fish I could ever imagine sculling the boat from the horizon, but he was not weary.

    I never asked my grandfather about his journey, rather I was basking in his days of glory. But then things took a different course ever since he folded himself into retirement. My aunts were all married off and had more significant issues in life and kids to gather around, my uncles vanished into the crowds in different parts of India and outside in search of jobs.

    Society itself was undergoing the customary changes as always has been. The deluge of foreign money and pomp of Gulf country residents rolled over the spirit of the land. The old house was abandoned and the grandparents were transplanted to the new home built near the highway and surrounded by walls. The rain, the wind, the undulating expanse of coconut trees, and the waves from the ocean were shut out for the rest of their lives.

    Grandma died first and Grandfather followed her soon. Even the new house looks so old now, occupied now by one of my uncles. He might probably visit once in a while from Dubai where he found a job. The dilapidated and moth-ridden old house bid the last moments of its existence before it was smashed down, probably to build a concrete warehouse for fertilizers. Now that the island has been named and electrified.

    Atlantis, the lost continent is considered to be the source of all Religion, all Science, and all races and civilizations. As we enter the third millennium, the Age of Aquarius its discovery is deemed to cause a major revolution in our view of the world and of both our future and past. I found my Atlantis on that island a while ago when I was a kid. The hearts and minds of the dwellers who built a brave new world over there, though lost, would still speak to you if you listen. That this world can still be mysterious and beautiful if you can spare a moment to grasp.