"Faster cars, bigger houses, better girls." That summed it up so well. Sitting at the the foot of an ancient tower in the descending twilight of a June evening, this sounded profound and yet so very simple. You just can't argue it or deny it. But accepting it, for me, feels like accepting the end of everything that a person can ever stand for. So, waiting for the next splurge is reason enough to live the way we are living? The footnote (if at all there is one) about job satisfaction is possibly the only redemption available.

So we wake up in our swanky apartments, go to work in swanky cars, work for 10 hours a day, get high and happy (if not pissed) on weekends, go on the occasional travel spree and do touristy things, watch the TV serial and do a 10-minute soul-searching on the past relationship, pay our bills and fill the long and short hours of existence.

I heard and saw and felt, but still didn't want to believe. We are good people, my mind kept saying. We are not bad! We love our friends and family and petting the neighbour's poodle! And then, as a confirmation of all that I was dreading, a message reached me from Silicon Valley. The next splurge had happened. That nailed it. This is the truth. The splurge is what matters.

Now, seeing the incessant drizzle against these tall glass windows I wonder if it is possible to make out just one of the droplets on the pane from the million others. Guess it is. It is the one that catches the first ray of the sun and glints with brilliance.

It is never too late to catch the sun. Never too late to glint.

I am sitting in a room which used to be home for the last nine months. It is a room once again and I don't want it to be so. Stripped off everything that I had brought with me, thought to be mine, it is now the way I had found it nine months back. Impersonal. And yet, when I had stepped in on September 13, it had appeared welcoming. I had looked around and wondered how it would be to live here. I lived, loved, laughed, cried, hated and fretted here and now someone else will.

Everything is packed and waiting to be moved to yet another room somewhere. Yes, that room too shall be home for a few months. And then I shall leave that as well.

How many homes have I left behind me? How many more shall I leave? And will there come a time when they shall just be rooms and not homes anymore?

What do I feel when I see a dream come true? A dream dreamed years ago, on a night forgotten for everything else but what I saw with my eyes shut. And now, standing amid the ruins of an ancient abbey, with the damp grass beneath my feet, the river gurgling behind the trees, the sunbeams playing hop-scotch amid the foliage, with the warmth of summer on my back, I see the dream stretching ahead of me... waiting to be touched and transformed into reality.

What do I feel...

...breathless.

A mail reached me today (that of course would sound much more romantic in the days of actual mail). It brought with it bits of a time gone by: the ring of long-ago laughter, words of half-sung songs, the faint twang of guitar strings, the hint of machine-made coffee, a whiff of cigarette smoke.

A black and white photograph must still be lying somewhere...

"We are time past that shall not return..."

It was like our fingertips touched... it was good to touch that life again.

In Calcutta there were times when I would wake up one morning and say that it felt like Durga Pujo. Every time I said "Aaj pujo-pujo laagchey" Ma would laugh. It was simply in the air - the sunlight through the leaves did not scorch, the breeze was warm and moist, the sky just blue enough. A sense of festivity would linger somewhere in the crevices of my mind through the day, secretly hoping that it really was Pujo.

Now, sitting by my window overlooking Woodhouse Road, something in the air reminded me of the lane behind the temple in Mangalwadi. The late afternoon sun, the sky, the green and, above all else, the calm. It reminded me of the 21 chicken pox-ridden afternoons that I spent looking out of the window by my bed with nothing but solitude for company. Solitude - I then learnt - can teach you a lot of things. It changes the way you look at things, also the things you look at. For three weeks I had lived on that bed, with enough energy to walk to the toilet with blisters beneath my feet, returning only to collapse in exhaustion. The window showed me a square filled with normalcy - a temple, a lane, children playing, cyclists, stray dogs, vegetable vendors, a row of single-storeyed asbestos-roofed homes. The temple bell and my pagla kokeel. Matrukrupa is one place of which I have nothing but memories... no photographs, nothing.

Now I can't help wondering how different my life would have been if chicken pox had not happened - two persons would perhaps still be there, and one person perhaps not.

...in that case, I am bloody happy that it happened!