Rhea was right, I wasn’t ready.

“Ma, please don’t worry, she is ok. It’s almost not visible, don’t worry Ma,” Rhea kept saying, even though I had not asked her. Ina had gone to meet some friends she said, and even though I had kept stalling, asking about everything else, Rhea knew what I wanted to know. Or maybe what I didn’t want to now, what I was not prepared for, not yet anyways. Children of a certain age think they have to protect their parents from emotional and physical distress, not knowing a lifetime of life had prepared them, hardened them. Maybe we never know either, when in the eyes of the children the roles are reversed from the protected to the protector. But he knew that whatever happened, no parent could for a moment stop worrying about their child. He knew that I wished that I could always keep my children under my wings, away from all harm. But I was not sure I had strength anymore. I was not sure he had it either. I had seen him wither away in the last few months, and he was left a mere skeleton of the man he once was. He was in the other room, pretending to read, and despite all his bravado I knew he was a crushed man.

Tomorrow was Shasti, the first day of Durga Pujo. The sound of the Dhak was still coming from the Pandal outside even though it was already after ten. The local boys had just brought in the idols of Ma Durga, and her four children, gods and goddesses in their own right, a couple of hours before. The Bodhon Pujo including the unveiling of the face of the idol would happen tomorrow, but now the women of the housing complex were decorating the idols, and more noise meant more excitement, and thus more community participation. The noise had been so loud, that I had hardly been able to hear Rhea on the phone, calling from the Bombay airport, where she had gone to pick up Ina. I had never thought about the noise before, and the fact that the Pandal was less than a hundred feet from our front door, the proximity having been one of the reasons for having the Pujo in the front grounds of the housing complex originally. We had moved to the Kanchenjunga housing complex, which had apartments for about four hundred families, our first home, after renting for our entire lives, a little more than three years back. The Pujo that first year had required a huge effort from me, directing all the efforts, almost like I was the headmistress again at my school in Jamshedpur, given that there were less than fifty families which were living in the complex then. He had helped too; “Always happy to help Mrs. Sarkar,” he would say, referring to me by the moniker he had given me early in our marriage, partially out of love and partially in mock respect. Last year I had been one of those women decorating Ma Durga, not minding the ear shattering Dhak, right next to me, wanting to make sure Ina enjoyed that Pujo, before leaving for America, not sure when she would get to see a Pujo next. Now, when Ina was coming back after a year, during Pujo, I was not sure if I even wanted her here at this time, during Pujo, when the house would be full of the ever meddling relatives.

Rhea and Ina would take the morning flight tomorrow and get here around eleven, and then the jackals would attack. Everyone would be dripping with concern for her well being, full of ever helpful suggestions and advice for her future. Mrs Bagchi next door had said last year I should get Ina married before letting her go to a foreign country. My in-laws had said the same thing. The cacophony had increased through the year, and now that she was going to be here, I am sure it would rise to a crescendo. Had I been the same way about others’ daughters, or their sons, without realizing it? Maybe I had been, maybe what I had considered concern for others, had gone beyond inquisitive curiosity. Maybe his sister, Ina’s Bodo Pishi, who now seemed downright callous and insensitive to our feelings, our problems, our utter helplessness, had once been me, interfering in someone else’s problems. But my attempt to rationalize, trying to understand everyone’s point of view or trying to decipher their intentions would not help Ina. My little girl would be here in a few hours, and I would be as powerless to protect her from these society’s busybodies, as I had been in protecting her from the affliction that ailed her. When Rhea had called from the airport, I had not asked Rhea about it, but she had known what was own my mind, what was foremost on my mind every day now. I had looked at the photographs Ina had sent for the Homeopathic doctor, but they were close-ups of various parts of the body, and after a glance I had not been able to look. I was not sure what I would do tomorrow.

I had grown up as the eldest of five sisters and a brother, children of wealthy parents in Jamshedpur, who had not given up their quest for a son, till they had finally succeeded, after five consecutive attempts. I was not sure what effect that had on me, or what that had done for my self esteem, but I had never been second in class, excelled in debating and at athletics, completed my Masters in English when few women in that small town even graduated from college. In five years I had become the headmistress of a local secondary school, continued even after I was married to him, a manager in the local Tata Steel Mills, and a man I married despite my parents’ disapproval, or maybe because of it. Then Ina had been born, and even though he had never asked me to quit, with Ina in my arms I had felt as if my purpose in life had changed, that I did not need to prove to anything anymore. When I had held Ina in my arms for the first time, twenty nine years ago, I had thought I would never let her go, do everything in my power to make sure she would never have to through a moment of pain, an iota of suffering. Now in some ways I felt I had been faking, somehow my feelings had not been genuine, or I had not tried hard enough for what was a part of my very being. I had resolved to shelter her from all suffering, and at this, her greatest hour of trial, I had succumbed, I had given up. What a phony I was.

She had called early one morning in January, only a few months after she had moved to America, and told us what the doctor had said. We had never heard of it, and though we had seen people affected with, we did not know what it was called. Initially it had been a few patches, which had quickly grown. In some ways he had taken it much worse than me. When I had first met him, as a guest in a family marriage, he had been rough and boisterous with a tough exterior which was always on display, but a soft underbelly which was hardly ever evident. Being in a household with three women had softened him, and despite the fact that there were perpetual playful skirmishes in the Sarkar household, we the women always got the better of him. Ina more than anyone held sway over him. She had ruled over him, when on finding out, he had wanted her to take next flight back to India for treatment, or when, after her refusal, he had wanted to take the next flight to Philadelphia. After Ina told him that several dermatologists in America had said that there was no cure and not even any known causes that had been conclusively proven, he had not given up and consulted every skin specialist he could find in India. He had consulted even Homeophathic doctors, Ayurvedic specialists, Acupuncturists, all leading him to the conclusion that over time, with Homeopathic or Ayuvedic medicines, the marks would reduce and eventually might go away. But there was no magic bullet, no conclusive cure any amount of money could buy. At some point during the exercise of running around the country, he had given up, and it had not just been on finding a cure, but the feeling of failure went deeper, and permeated every aspect of his life. He had taken a leave of absence from work for a few months when he had traveled to meet the doctors, but now it was a struggle every day to get him to go for work. I was not sure whether I wanted him pottering about the house all the time either, but I did feel one of these evenings he would say, “Mrs Sarkar,” with the zing missing in his voice, “Maybe I should retire at the end of this year. What do you think?”

Rhea had moved to Bombay this summer and the empty house just added to the gloom. When Rhea was at home I could hear her talking to Ina, discussing what she was going through. I suspected they never shared much with me. I had never been the mother who had frowned upon boy friends and in the past when Ina had believed she was pulling wool over my eyes, while in college in Calcutta or when she was working in Bangalore, I’d always had a sense of what was going on. I knew it when she would go for lengthy tuition lessons, sometimes seven days a week; and I would know it as well when something had gone wrong and she would hardly eat for days on end. I knew it when she had fainted from fasting for days, and even when it broke my heart to see her like that I had not asked her anything, preferring to give her the privacy and freedom my parents had never given me. But when Rhea moved I was left without even knowing those scraps of overheard conversations. For the first time in my life I had been forced to ask Ina about what she was planning, what she was thinking of doing. I was not sure what I was expecting her to answer, what I had wanted her to do, but perhaps it was my feeble attempt to distract her from worrying constantly if she would ever get better. Every conversation we had, I would not be able to help myself, and I would repeatedly ask her if she had been taking her medicines, as if there was nothing else to talk about. So I felt her plans were maybe something else to talk about. But even that was not much of a conversation either, as she refused to discuss anything, saying, rightfully so, what was it that I wanted her or expected her to do. It hadn’t helped that I had said that she should think about marriage; let us know if she had someone in mind. I had thought in offering her the option of choosing her own life partner, besides the default traditional India option of an arranged marriage, I was being open and broad minded. But she did not see it that way, both options seemed farfetched to her, she said. But I had pressed, why were they not possible, why couldn’t she think about them, or make an effort. But I had been stopped dead in my tracks with a single statement, my blood turning cold at the thought that the same daughter, who I had held in my arms and had resolved to give my life to protect, would one day be helpless enough to utter the words, “But who would love me Ma, in this condition, who would love me.”

The Dhak had finally stopped beating. We had had dinner in silence, and lay next to each other in bed, both of us awake for a long time, not saying anything. We had run out of things to say to each other. We had moved beyond the pretence of saying that everything would be alright, or the pretence of breathless action to find something, anything, which would correct this situation. We could not let Ina see through the sense of defeat in our eyes, but it was not as if we were doing a good job of hiding my sense of being enveloped in perpetual gloom either. Besides going to work for him and occasionally to get groceries in my case, we had hardly left the house in the last few months. We used to be fairly active in entertaining guests or relatives at home, would go for a trip or two every year to Darjeeling, Sikkim or Bhutan, but all that had stopped. We hadn’t gone anywhere for sightseeing since Ina had left. He seemed to have aged a decade in the last year, and I had little interest in taking care of myself as well. Eventually Ina found out and she raised hell. From then on every conversation had been about Ina wanting us to go somewhere, or inviting people home and we would always assure her we would, knowing fully well we could not bring ourselves to do those things. Relatives would call, wonder what was going on, eventually ask about Ina’s marriage and lately even Rhea’s marriage, and then give up at our monosyllabic answers and hang up. But it wouldn’t stop, as a few days later someone else would call, maybe some old friends of his or mine, and ask the same questions. We were bordering on being rude to our friends and relatives, but we were beyond caring.

It was Ina’s visit that was bothering me. I knew three generations of Sarkar’s would descend on the house tomorrow when Ina got here, and we would not be able to stop them. I was not sure how I would react to their incessant questioning, or how would Ina be able to bear them, while at the same time not sharing what was truly going on. She had had been certain on that score. She did not want anyone to know. But beyond the questions I was more worried about seeing Ina. The pictures could not prepare me for what I would possibly see tomorrow. I had imagined this a thousand times, thinking about how I would be able to face Ina, thinking about how it might look. What it would have done to my beautiful little girl, my little daughter. I kept going over and over in my head, thinking about how Ina would react, of what she would say, of what I would say, of how strong I would be in front of her, on seeing her. Would I be able to keep up the sham, the façade? Would I be able to say, my dear daughter, everything is going to be alright. She knew, and I knew there was nothing to be done. There was nothing I could do, for my daughter that I had promised to protect with my life. There was nothing but a phony life to live, to pretend that what was real, wasn’t. To hope what might never change, would. Or would I be strong enough to say to my daughter, my flesh, be strong, fight everything that comes your way, let nothing defeat you. As I began to doze of, I was not sure I believed it in my own heart. But tomorrow, I would have to believe, for myself and for Ina.

He did not have a very high opinion of himself to begin with.

He often recalled a joke he had heard growing up in India, about the varying viewpoints, one could say, of the people from two eastern Indian states. Even though the joke was somewhat racist, it was rather illustrative. A Bihari, lets call him Yadav Bhaiya and a Bengali, lets call him Bannerjee Da, were fighting over something which was hardly of any relevance, but for the sake of the story, let us say they were fighting over a goat, both claiming it to be theirs. They broke into a scuffle and eventually Bannerjee Da had the upper hand, and was on top of Yadav Bhaiya, straddling him, holding his fist right over Yadav Bhaiya’s face, but still not hitting him. The onlookers were puzzled, and asked Bannerjee da why he wasn’t pummeling the goat thief, after all he was on top. Bannerjee da replied sheepishly, “It’s not that simple, when Yadav Bhaiya gets up, he will beat the heck out of me.” So despite Subhas Chandra Bose, a Bengali having formed the Indian National Army to fight the British, despite rest of the country following Gandhi’s peaceful resistance for independence, Bengalis had the reputation in India for being somewhat lily livered, justly or unjustly. Needless to say Kaushik was Bengali.

He did not base his entire self assessment on a mere anecdote or a stereotypical caricature. He was twenty eight and enough incidents in college, back in India and here in NYU, and confrontations he had had outside had confirmed his hypothesis. There was not much he could do though about it, he reasoned to himself, besides taking it lying down. Perhaps this is the way he was born. Bullying, in the college went to for four years for his engineering degree, was called ‘ragging’, and was pretty brutal and frequently caused physical injury and in some rare cases, even death. Forced nudity, simulating sex in awkward positions, humiliating skits, were all pretty common in the hostels for the freshman class. Since the college was in his hometown of Kharagpur, and he stayed at home and not the hostel, he had managed escaped the brunt of those encounters, getting away with some minor infractions in the campus itself. Now in his MBA class at Stern, everyone was too grown up and busy with their lives to partake in these kinds of juvenile antics. Still it was the first time he was staying in a hostel, which besides being called residences here, were a completely different animal from the ones in India.

As he stepped out of the Palladium residence, and headed towards the subway, he wondered if he should get a bottle of wine. Piu wouldn’t like that, drinking being a sure sign of moral decay to her. His sister lived at the border of SOHO and the West Village only from a few blocks away from his apartment at the Palladium residences near Union Square. So even though his sister and brother in law, Sudip, had a two bedroom apartment in a brownstone on Greene Street, fairly large by Manhattan standards, and the guest room was always free, he did not stay with them. She was a couple of years older than him, had already been working in Delhi for a few years, when he had finished his graduate degree and got an internship with an automobile accessories manufacturer in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi. At that time it had not been a consideration at all and even though she stayed in Punjabi Bagh, a good ninety minute commute for him each way, it had been expected he would stay with her. He remembered the fun they had had that year. He was just out of college, earning for the first time and knew almost no one in Delhi, while she being a fairly senior manager at an ad agency, got invited to the most interesting parties and get-togethers, and he would tag along. Then there was Neel, a family friend that both of them had known all their lives, and a completely stereotypical version of an ad agency copy writer, wild, pony tailed and hilarious. Their fathers had been in college together, worked in the same company together for 35 years and now stayed in five minutes from each other in Kharagpur. Neel was a class clown growing up, lifeblood of any party, absolutely entertaining, so much so that one felt he was always performing, however small the audience, or however inappropriate the situation. He was always surrounded by women hanging on his every word, but for all the time he knew Neel, he was never into a one steady relationship. Neel had been in Delhi only for six months after he got there, when on getting an offer for a stint at the Chicago branch of his agency, he leapt at the opportunity and left. Now through sheer chance, after so many years, they had all landed up in the same city, Neel having moved from Chicago some time last year, within a few blocks from each other. Though in his case, he had had a few options besides Stern, but had chosen it in no small measure because Piu lived here.

♦

She sat in front of the dressing table mirror, staring, almost not even looking at herself. There was no way to explain this gash, and the make up was only making it worse; it would be too obvious. Sudip had stormed out, and she had no idea where Neel was, or if he would show up. Kaushik was on his way and would be there in less than an hour. She had made all the preparations in the morning before leaving for work, expecting to spend an evening chilling out with her family which she thought was magically coalescing in Manhattan. She had gone to great lengths to cook traditional Bengali dishes and neatly stacked them up in the fridge in Tupperware boxes. The house had been cleaned, she had a new centre piece on the coffee table that she loved, and she had gotten fresh flowers yesterday. Now the living room was in a mess, broken glass everywhere, flowers strewn all over, and in the bedroom was a mountain of clothes and bed spreads everywhere, as if a minor hurricane had passed by.

Piu was still a little stunned by the way the day had unraveled, and though the heat was turned up, she could not stop shivering. It had been a mistake she thought, moving here. She did not feel like she belonged here. She had no roots here, nothing to hold on to, and it made her feel very vulnerable, this lack of control. But she had thought things were getting better with Kaushik and Neel moving here. With a family and support group with her here she had thought the wrinkle in Sudip and her relationship would ebb away as well. The first year here had been especially hard, not being able to work without a work permit and sitting at home had made her gloomy, made her question herself. She had been working since she was eighteen, first teaching Rabindra Sangeet to young kids in a community center in Chittaranjan Park in Delhi, along with her studies and then starting down the ladder at the ad agency and rising through the ranks. Unlike Kaushik she had stayed outside home and had been on her own since she moved to Delhi for her graduation, and liked the feeling of being independent. This had made her mother very uncomfortable and resulted in long phone calls back home, almost endless and too numerous it had seemed to her, about getting married and settling down. Though she had had a few relationships in college, and when she was working in Delhi, none of them had been anything serious given that Piu’s first love was her job. She had risen quickly within the ranks, but made few friends at work, for try and she did, she had an abrasive no nonsense manner which did not suffer fools lightly, and when she was immersed in work she would hardly notice that in herself. But when she looked back on it later, maybe after a fight over a decision at work, she would introspect and tell herself to soften and take others points of view, but then when she was back in the middle of another deadline, she would abandon the niceties and get down to doing the best job for her clients and ignore ruffled feather among colleagues as an occupational hazard.

Sudip had tried his best when she moved here to get her work permit as quickly as possible but in the end it took eight months, and by the time she got a job as a Marketing Consultant at Boston Consulting, a year had passed. By then she was beginning to question her decision. While still in Delhi, the arguments with her mother about marriage had gotten worse, and she had given in after a point. She adored her mother more than anything else in her life and knew she had gone to great pains to raise both of them, and their happiness and to see them settled was her sole goal in life. Piu was twenty seven and relatives were beginning to talk. In India girls were supposed to be married early and any delays led to endless gossip, innuendoes and prompted endless questions from close friends and relatives. It was not as if she was seeing anyone either at that time and or even had had a relationship in over a year. There was nothing she could stall her mother with much longer. The issue of marriage had become an obsession with her mother, and when her health began to suffer, Piu thought she could maybe buy some time if asked her to start looking at prospects and she would then consider it. This strategy though boomeranged on her since she had underestimated her mothers’ single minded focus on the subject, and soon newspaper classified ads had been put in, responses began flowing back and forth and before she knew it her mother was in Delhi with a stack of photographs and profiles of prospective grooms. Arranged marriages, she thought might appear so anachronistic to observers looking at India from the outside, but it was the de facto social norm in the vast majority of the Indian society.

When Piu met Sudip, first in an arranged family get together in Calcutta and then alone for dinner a day later, Sudip had been working with an investment bank on Wall Street for over four years. Before that he had lived and studied all his life in Calcutta and though he had studied from premier colleges in India, first graduating from Jadavpur University and then doing his MBA from IIM Calcutta, his family was from a working class background and life in Manhattan took some adjusting to get used to. Sudip was short and stocky and his skin was a darker shade of brown than even most people from eastern India. He did not fit into any of the shallow race based stereotypical groups that got formed either at work or where he lived, neither with the white right wing crowd or with the blacks or latinos. He had not gone to school here, and though there were quite a few batch mates from his IIM class in the area, he had not managed to assimilate into any of those groups either. He had always had a nagging complex about his social background even in India, and that only got more pronounced here. He had never been in a relationship, had gone on only a handful of dates even in India, and dating scene in Manhattan, very different from Calcutta, scared him. Even then, despite being lonely and missing home desperately, he had stuck it out here for pure ambition. He had wanted to be different from his family, the careers they aspired to, the lives they had made for themselves, all in and around Calcutta.

When Sudip and she had finally gave in to their parents persistence, they were not in love, far from it, they were making compromises, she for her mother and Sudip to his loneliness, both literally plunging into what could be the sun soaked warm waters of the Caribbean or a gaping abyss that could swallow them both. In the first years of marriage, she found out, the truth was somewhere in between, with the ever present possibility though lurking in close vicinity of it perhaps moving to the edges, to the extremes.

♦

As Kaushik stepped out of the Prince Street subway, and moved towards Greene Lane, he was surprised to see Neel standing in a corner finishing a cigarette, a disgusting habit that both Piu and he had not managed to rid Neel off, all these years. He had not expected to meet Neel here, in fact Sudip, Piu and Neel all had some work at Park Slope that afternoon and had all decided to meet in the 9^th Street Station and come back home together for the evening. Neel had moved to Manhattan from Chicago about eighteen months back, a little after Piu got married and move there. He seemed to have hardly aged or changed ever since Kaushik could remember. Neel’s family had moved to Chandigarh for a brief period and by the time they returned to Kharagpur, Kaushik was in his first year at high school and Neel and Piu were just starting college. Neel had been the same ever since, an overgrown child, constantly switching interests and majors while in college, on occasion disappearing from his hostel and backpacking through southern India at a time, when not many in India even knew what backpacking was. Kaushik always felt a little wary of Neel, never sure what he might do next, always feeling like he was in a shadow of the strong ray of Neel’s luminous presence, but not wanting to miss the sheer entertainment of being with him either. But he seemed distracted today.

“Hey Neel,” Kaushik said walking up to him, “What are you doing here; I thought I’d meet you guys at Piu’s.”

Neel, who hadn’t seen Kaushik come from up behind him, seemed to wake up from a stupor and then looked at him and far beyond him at the same, and said, “Uh, I had some other work, so…” and then he trailed off.

Kaushik wondered if it was something he was smoking, since it was quite like Neel to go off into his moods, without needing any assistance from hallucinogenic inducements either, when they wouldn’t hear from him for weeks. Last fall after Kaushik started his classes at Stern, it was like old times, like in Delhi. They packed the weekends with, first the sights in Manhattan, the museum mile, the MET, Guggenheim, MOMA, musicals on Broadway, smaller plays off Broadway, and then moved to sights all over the tri state area, sometime going as far as Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, or the Jersey shore. The three of them would almost always be in perfect unison in their plans, while Sudip would never have an opinion himself of where he wanted to go, but would join them in their rendezvous without question or comment.

As they entered the lobby of Piu’s building, Neel said, “Why don’t’ you go ahead Kaushik, I’ll finish my smoke and come up.”

As Piu opened the door, Kaushik reached out to give a bear hug, saying, “Hi Didi”, but coiled back immediately, noticing suddenly the bruises on her arm. Her entire right arm seemed to have a dark bluish tinge, and there was a distinct reddish swelling on the side of her neck too, which she had attempted to conceal with a polo neck pull over.

“What happened Didi!” he said, while still at the door, looking at her in disbelief.

“Come in first Tito,” referring to him by his nick name, “Its nothing really, come in, do you want something to drink first”.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, still not saying anything, looking at her as if to say, go on, tell me what happened.

“Oh its nothing, it was really stupid of me,” putting a bright smile that hardly penetrated her eyes, “I stumbled on the steps at subway station. Sudip tried to grasp me, but could not, and I fell down some nine or ten steps and landed hard on my right side.”

The doorbell rang, and Kaushik opened the door without even looking since he knew it would be Neel, and kept looking at Piu, as Sudip stepped out of the living room.

“Hi Sudip, this is crazy, isn’t it,” Kaushik said, and then turning to Neel, “Can you believe it? Didi fell down a flight of stairs at the subway.”

“Oh, are you alright? Maybe we should take you to the emergency room,” Neel said, in a voice which Kaushik thought betrayed a sense of detachment, seeming to suggest almost as if injuries were only to be expected in daily commutes in Manhattan, though if pressed, he would certainly be open to getting some medical attention for Piu.

“I think both of you are trying to be big drama queens, and you two are late. Sudip has made his special Radha Ballobi. It’s getting cold.”

He had known for sometime that Piu and Sudip had been having trouble. When he had come here last August, a month before his classes began at Stern, he hadn’t yet decided to stay at the Palladium residences the college offered or use the spare room Piu and Sudip had. He had always been very close with Piu, in terms of caring for each other, but when it came to very personal matters, they had built a barrier of sorts. He could talk to her for hours about the kind of literature they liked, or her complete fascination with post modernist art, and his complete lack of appreciation of any art of any period, his love of movies and their common interest in old Hindi Ghazals. She had never told him about her relationships, her breakups, and he had not even met any of her boy friends, except one who at that time he had assumed was a colleague, and had found about the truth years later. Kaushik had never had much to tell, except of course Piu found about Jenny, his batch mate that he was seeing now, more than six months after they had been together. Talking about each others lives made him uncomfortable, any discussion about love, happiness and pain, seemed melodramatic. It was really sketchy territory where he was not sure of his footing, something which he would ask of her, might boomerang on him and she might want to know why he had made some of the decisions he had made. For the weeks he was at their place, he would over hear arguments once Piu and Sudip retired to their bedroom after dinner, never very loud, but definitely disagreements. In the morning, while they would be visibly fine, there were silences, slightly longer than there should be that he would pick up, or a certain turn phrase, or stress on a particular word said in perhaps a sarcastic way, things he noticed but never discussed with Piu. At his core he wanted everyone to get along, no confrontations, clean straight lines, always A+B = C; nuance, meanings between the lines, gray areas were too dark for him to venture in. He would rather stay in the light, oblivious, content to know everyone was happy, assuring himself in his mind that these were just minor instances of discord every married couple had. So he would just turn up the volume of the TV and watched whatever was on, till they were asleep and then he would try to sleep himself, trying to convince himself this would pass. The alternatives were just too scary to consider, for him, or Piu, or their parents. But he was convinced he couldn’t stay here and keep his sanity, and so he filled out an application for the residence after all, and luckily still found a room, and moved out as soon as he could.

♦

She wished everyone would just lighten up, and she could get through this day without any further incidents. She would have to rethink everything tomorrow. Her sacrifices weren’t going to make anyone happy in the long run, least of all her mother. Kaushik was trying to sell his idea of all of them going on a cruise that thanksgiving. He was asking her where she thought they should go, she heard him, but it seemed like a voice far away, a reality that did not matter any more. He had convinced Jenny to come along, and this would be their first real holiday together away from her family or from their friends in college. She like Jenny a lot, the way, despite being from an old moneyed Connecticut family, she did not give the impression that she was trying to study the exotic and quaint lifestyles of the natives. She seemed genuinely interested in Indian culture and had come home many times without Kaushik, looking at his old pictures, trying her hand at Bengali cooking.

Neel and Sudip both sat staring at the TV, trying to be polite to Kaushik’s ideas about possible cruise locations, but she was sure they were not listening. The idea of them taking a cruise together now seemed so farfetched. She wished they hadn’t had their altercation at the station in such a public way. She was still not sure why Sudip had chosen it that way, where they very well could have gotten into trouble if a cop had been nearby, or if it had just had happened to get out of hand. She didn’t know if she was happy or sad that he had reserved the worst for when they got home. Sure she had fought back, and there were scratches all over his back to prove that, but she still felt humiliated at being overpowered, for once not being in control of her life. She would have to think about this tomorrow, now was not the time, pretences had to kept. Kaushik did not know anything, and it was best this way. She did not want him to worry. She knew she could take a lot, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to drag him into this. As for Neel she did not know, what more she could tell him, or how else she could help him. But it was his decision, and if he wasn’t ready, she needed to give him his space, give him the time to deal with it in his own mind.

Kaushik was hardly up to the job of being a party clown, given that his idea of an engrossing upbeat conversation was to discuss Proust or if he was in a particularly decadent mood he would talk about the screwball comedy stylings of Shaw. So suffice is to say, he wasn’t being particularly convincing at the dinner table. She had worked really hard last night and in the morning to make a complete fish themed Bengali meal starting from fried Hilsa, to dal with fish’s head, to cabbage with fish’s head, topped up with two curries, Hilsa and steamed prawns. Sudip kept his head down though Kaushik’s ramblings and kept his responses down to barely passable monosyllabic replies. She wished Neel would work a little more to keep up appearances; he was hardly eating anything and sweating profusely, so much so she had to finally ask him if he wanted the heat to be turned down. He did not want that either, saying he was cold. By the time Neel and Kaushik left, it was almost a relief to be left alone with Sudip, which she thought was rather ironic given the way the events of the day had unfolded.

♦

The evening had been a disaster. It was a little after eleven when they had left Piu’s place. Piu was fooling no one with that subway story, he thought. He was surprised Neel had behaved that way, so distant and aloof. He thought of Neel as part of his family, he had expected him to be more concerned for Piu. He was ashamed himself that once again he had shied away from confrontation. As they stepped out of the building onto Greene Street, a cold gust of wind hit them, and Neel seemed to double over. He was just wearing a short sleeved shirt and slacks in this weather.

He reached out to help, “Neel are you alright,” but Neel who seemed to be in a daze, took a couple of steps back and sat down on the steps of the building. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be clutching his left hand.

“Neel are you alright, do you want my jacket,” he tried again.

This time Neel nodded his head to say yes, but as he took off his jacket and tried to drape it over Neel, he could see tears flowing down his cheek.

“Hey Neel,” panicking a little now,”Are you in some kind of pain, c’mon buddy tell me”.

“I’m sorry Kaushik, I’m truly sorry.”

“What for Neel, do you know what happened between Didi and Sudip today. It sure wasn’t the subway, right?”

He shook his head, shivering violently now, and then seemed to keel over on the steps.

“Ok, forget that for now Neel, we need to get you inside the house and call 911.”

“No, No,” Neel screamed, the mention of 911 having shaken him out of his stupor, “I’m ok, I’m ok, can you walk me to my apartment”.

Neel stayed hardly three blocks away on Thompson Street, but he wasn’t sure Neel would be able to walk, but agreed on Neel’s insistence. Any mention of going back to Piu’s place seemed to get him in a frenzy, made him forget the pain that he was obviously in. They had hardly gone fifty feet, when Neel sat down at a bus stop, out of breath, sweating heavily, this mere distance having worn him out. He had then insisted that Neel tell him what was going on before they went any further, or he would call 911 right now. Having no other choice, Neel spoke, so softly that at times Kaushik had to lean forward all the way up to Neel’s face to near him.

Neel, Sudip and Piu had met at met at the 9^th Street station in the afternoon after all. Neel had gotten there an hour earlier than agreed, and called Piu, and found that she was almost done as well. They had then decided, since they had some time, to get their favorite Calcutta style Kathi Roll from Karim’s near Byrne Park, and then come back to the station together. By the time they had gotten back to the station, eating their rolls, carrying one for Sudip, Sudip had been waiting for more than fifteen minutes wondering where they were. According to Neel, suspicion and jealousy had been in Sudip’s mind for a long time, and it had been a cause for a perennial fights between Piu and Sudip. Piu had tried to explain that Neel was like family, they had never thought of each other that way, but the seed had been sown and there was nothing Piu could say that would make that go away. Seeing them together that afternoon, had triggered something, and a fight that had between Piu and Sudip, had finally come out into the open. Sudip had been out of control and had tried to hit him, in the middle of the platform in front of scores of onlookers. Piu had made Neel leave and had said she would talk to Sudip. But when they had reached home, matters had gotten worse and they had gotten into a physical altercation, and as was evident from her bruises, Piu had borne the brunt of that exchange.

“So are you?” Kaushik asked finally.

“Am I what Kaushik?”

“Are you guys…, or were you guys ever, I mean seeing each other.”

“It’s not possible Kaushik,” Neel was wailing by now, crying uncontrollably, ”I simply can’t make Sudip understand, it’s impossible.”

“I know that Neel, but is it not plausible that Sudip might think, given that we all know each other for ever. In his mind, in his sick mind, maybe he thinks it is obvious.”

“It’s not possible,” Neel said quietly, still shivering, “I’m gay, Kaushik, I’m gay.”

This shook the ground beneath his feet; he had been standing in front of Neel, kneeling to make sure he was O.K. Now he sat down next to Neel, still reeling from what he had heard.

“What, you’re gay? Are you kidding Neel, I’ve seen you with scores of women in Delhi.”

“That’s an act Kaushik, I have to do it. Have you ever known me to have a relationship with a woman, have you ever met my girl friend here or in Delhi.”

He was right, they would hear of lots of stories, well told tales of conquests, but had never met anyone who was a bonafide girl friend.

“So no one knows? Your parents?” Kaushik said, as Neel shook his head.

“This is 2007 Neel, don’t you think people will be fine. Who cares what you do. It’s nobody’s business but yours.”

“They care in India Kaushik, my parents care. I have to live in this society after all. For god’s sake they care even here.”

“But Neel, don’t you realize this is tearing Piu’s marriage apart, don’t you think she should know, Sudip should know.”

“She knows Kaushik,” Neel said, bending, grimacing in pain, his eyes closed.

He couldn’t believe it, Piu knew and yet she was going through everything, protecting Neel, respecting his privacy. It took Neel and him three quarters of an hour to walk three blocks to Neel’s apartment, stopping numerous times for Neel to catch his breath, more than once collapsing on the side of the street. Finally Kaushik supported Neel on his shoulder and almost dragged him the final stretch to his apartment. Once in the apartment Neel collapsed on the couch, not even having the strength to make it to the bedroom. Kaushik knew there was something wrong with Neel, but could not convince him to call 911. He did not want trouble; he did want everyone to come to the hospital, lest they all found out. How or what they would find out, Kaushik could not get out of him. He stayed up all night next to Neel, checking every few minutes to see if he was alright. He must have dozed off in the morning, for when he woke up, Neel was gone.

Almost a year had gone by since that night. He had not met Neel again. Piu said he had moved back to Chicago, informing her through a text message. He himself had received an email from Neel many months later, saying he was fine now, he had gotten himself checked the next day, that it was a mild cardiac arrest and that he wanted to thank Kaushik for everything he had done that night. The matter of fact way in which Neel referred to what had happened, that he might have almost died, took his breath away. He had almost let a man die because he thought it would complicate matters, and all their families would find out what was going on. He later realized why Piu had never told Sudip about Neel. Sudip might never have told their parents or anyone, but Piu knew if their marriage could not stand that test, perhaps it was not worth saving. He never spoke about that evening with her either, neither did he ever confront a man who had beaten his sister. Piu and Sudip separated later that year. She had proven to be stronger than any of them. He knew in most cases of domestic disturbance, the couples reconciled time and time again, perhaps confounding the friends and family who wondered why or how a women could suffer voluntarily through such ordeals. In many cases these instances ended in disaster. He was proud Piu was not part of that silent suffering majority. She had confronted her reality and taken control of her life. Even though this country was new to her, she had planted new roots here now; she had decided call this her new home. All she needed to do was to clear the weeds out in the summer and start afresh.

I am not a big music lover, though I do like a handful of slow quiet soulful songs. It’s almost like looking only for one mood in music, pathos. Anyways, I used to wonder what to listen to in the car, since music wasn’t my thing. Then I started copying podcasts as audio files on my blackberry and listen to those in the car, but soon I was fast running out of them. Then of course I discovered and started listening to the public radio programming by chance and now I cannot stop. Sometimes if I am listening to a story segment and have reached home, or wherever else I am going, I find myself unable to leave the car until the segment has ended. So I switch off the engine, and listen to the radio till the story ends.

I was wondering the other day, what is it that is holding me back? Why am I so drawn to these programs? For example the other day there was a story was about Liz Lovely and her husband Dan’s story about their cookie business and how they survived through the recession and in the process strengthened their personal relationship as well. Nothing extraordinary, but I sat in the car outside the grocery, listening with rapt attention, until the story was over.

And then it hit me, I am a sucker for stories.

Ordinary stories. Human Stories. Maybe that is why I love the movies so much. That is why I love to read fiction and possibly explains my love for history. And I like to write stories, or at least I think I do. Not that I go to extremes in any of these pursuits. But there is a trend. Take for example my love for history. For a while I could not explain why I loved history more that other subjects, even in school as a kid. But I reckon it’s the same love for stories. History is a huge volume of interconnected and continuous stories. It’s not that I read huge volumes of history, but if hear of some historical figure in some conversation or a TV program, I tend to search them up on the internet and read about their lives, where were they from, what did they do, what kind of lives did they lead. At least I manage to get some basic inkling of what their lives were like. Lately I have tended, almost without realizing the pattern, to buy more non fiction as well, like history of the Gulag, history of the CIA, beginning of Al Qaeda and their top tier of terrorists.

I love very boring slow movies, maybe called the drama genre, and hate horror, sci fi and action movies. This too perhaps is connected to my love for stories. Sci Fi is not and does not seem real; less said about the pure bam bam action movies and the gory horror movies the better. One could say the ‘drama’ movies are not real either but at least those stories have some inherent basis in reality, in what could possibly happen in our own lives.

Lately I have been trying to write and I know I would like to and I want to. I dream up scores of story ideas and sometimes type in a few lines of the story idea in a word file, but mostly I just ruminate on them in my head and then they are lost, gone for ever. I have lacked the discipline and the pure drive to write. Then I thought why not write a blog, that could be easier, less taxing. Over the years when blogging has exploded as a phenomenon, I stayed away not sure why it never interested me. Maybe I thought that a lot of it was about tech, politics and sports, the things that really did not interest me. I have since discovered blogs are about much wider range of things and people write all sorts of blogs about all sorts of interesting topics. Still if it is not intensely personal and does not connect at an honest and visceral level I loose interest immediately.

So I started this blog, and though this website is intentionally not structured as a blog, I did write a few posts, as I am writing this as well. Though I have tried to be honest and put my beliefs and convictions out there, it is not really gripping, it is still like a chore. But I am slowly coming to the realization that if I love to read, hear and watch stories, maybe I would like to write stories, rather than blogs. So if you don’t find another post for a while, you can assume I am trying to, in my own little way weave my own little story that hopefully someone might like to read one day.

I am not sure I have any ability to actually write good stories, but I am going to try. Give it my best shot. And If I am not able to, it won’t be so bad. I can always go back to reading, hearing and watching stories. The world is full of wonderful story tellers and they have fascinating and wonderful material to work with. Ordinary human everyday existence.

The reservations had been made a year back. We had no choice but to go on the trip. Quark said a cancellation now would cost us ten thousand dollars. The reservations were in both our names and they would only let us change one of the passengers. You said you did not want to go with anyone else and I had no one else to go with, not that I would have wanted to. I wasn’t sure why you still wanted to go in the first place. Last year it had been my new year’s present to you. It had been a dream for us. It would be my sixth, and your seventh continent. This year it seemed very odd that we would be taking this trip together.

        The traffic was backed up bumper to bumper on 202 out of Malvern you said, but later called from the Philadelphia airport to tell me that you had managed to make the flight in the nick of time. The flight to Buenos Aires from Miami was not for another five hours and we would reach Ushuaia late in the evening the following day. I would not get any sleep for the next twenty four hours. I could never manage to get any sleep on flights. May be if I found a quiet spot at an unused Gate, I could still get a couple of hours of sleep. So I tried, stretched my leg out, tilted left, tilted right, rested my head on my knees, took the heavy parka off and tried that as a pillow, but to no avail. You would have said, “Give up Kim”. You were only one in the world who called me Kim. You were the only one to whom I was Kim. You used to say I looked Korean. I would say you were racist.  And I think you are full of shit, would be your prompt reply. We would be back to where we started, you as usual on top, figuratively speaking. At the Hosur Road office in Bangalore, almost five years back, where you worked and I was visiting, I had once compared your dress with some sort of red and black web patterned prints, you a perfect stranger, except for a couple group meetings, to Spider-Woman’s. You had not been amused then, and even many years later you reminded me, frequently, that my sense of humor hadn’t improved.

        But that day I was going to try my best to funny, okay maybe not funny, but happy and upbeat. Any grumpiness would surely be perceived as a sign of weakness. As you emerged from the throngs of people exiting my heart skipped a beat. The red North Face jacket, the one we had bought together online for this trip, lazily tossed over your shoulder, you already seemed worn out. My heart skipped a beat maybe because I had not seen you for over six months and all the conflicting emotions seemed to rush back in. I was digging deep to push those thoughts back again, not let them bubble up to the surface, to not show on my face. But what was the word I was looking for now. What was the look I wanted to implant on my face? Oh yes, nonchalance, I was going for cool, poised and happy. Whatever other meager gifts that I had of facial camouflage, nonchalance was not one of them. So I just gave you a big smile and a hug. I was determined not to bring back the bad memories or fight, determined not to show that this was not easy. This was our last trip together. I wanted to sure you had a good time. Perhaps our only dream realized together.

“Hey Kim”, you said, “What’s with the goofy smile”, returning my bear hug.

“Are you excited Ina”, I said, “I’m really really excited. Antarctica. Can you believe it? We made it,” hoping my voice was not cracking up and you would not see through my phony excitement. But luckily for me you were distracted, we had barely an hour before our flight and you had to call your parents in Bombay and get something to eat as well. The choice of the right thing for you to eat, which had to be the difficult combination of something special and low in calorie at the same time, as usual required us to make two rounds of the food court till you finally gave up and settled for the Southwestern salad from McDonalds. In the end you only managed quick call to Mom before we took our seats for the nine hour flight to Buenos Aires and from there another five hours to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. There were three stops before we reached Ushuaia, with a definite possibility, we had been warned, of loosing our luggage at any stop, which had it happened, would have landed us in the coldest place on earth in much the same state of dress or undress as the penguins there, albeit without the humongous layers of fat that they hide beneath their royal cuteness.

♦

        After the fiasco of the comment about the Spider-Woman’s dress I had tried to stay away from you and the distinct possibility of causing anymore embarrassment that week. I had left Bangalore after my research assignment at your company and went back to Seattle to complete my work on my thesis. We had not kept in touch for a few months, besides occasional mails to your team requesting for additional information for my research at the Turing Center. Then one day late in the fall, with the winter fast approaching, I had returned from a game of tennis to find an email waiting from you. This time it was from a personal email id. You were moving to Seattle to work for Microsoft and wanted to know if you could get me anything from India and if we could meet when you reached Seattle. I replied saying I lived in Redmond, overlooking the western periphery of the Microsoft campus and asked if you needed any help, and if you had friends here, and no, I did not need anything from India. That started a flurry of emails and given that it was your first time outside India, I was quite happy to play Professor Higgins to your Eliza Doolittle. In the end you decided it would probably be better to stay for a week or two in my apartment since I had a spare room which would give you the chance to look for a place.

♦

        You had managed to sleep through the whole flight to Buenos Aires, through both meal services, and I had not had a chance to discuss our situation, which was just as well, because I clearly did not know what we could possibly say to each other, within easy earshot distance of twenty other people. The confusion with your visa at the immigration at the Buenos Aires airport did not make it easier. I had gotten both our visas processed together, but for some reason there was an error in the visa stamp on your passport, which strangely enough still were handwritten illegible scribbles over an Argentine government rubber stamp. Through their broken English and your knowledge of a handful of Portuguese terms, it became apparent that the visa did not mention the number of days you could stay in the country and it had been left explicably blank. My visa, done at the same time, had the correct ninety days. I had been bracing for weeks for something to go wrong before our dream trip. The way the economy was spinning out of control, I thought may be we would be out of work or maybe the visa wouldn’t come in time or our passport would get lost in the mail. This little habit of mine of working out all the permutations and combinations of things that could go possibly go awry, was my way of having an insurance policy of those things not happening, for I was sure if you did not expect something it would surely happen. But I had fallen short in not accounting for the ineptitude of officials in the Argentine consulate in Washington D.C. Damn, the unexpected had struck again.

“But there must be way”, you said, “Can’t you check the application or visa online. This is clearly a human error. Why would they give a visa without mentioning the days?”

We had held up the line for almost half an hour, by the time they finally managed to locate the visa approval record and printed it and appended it to your passport. One disaster averted I thought, but surely the airline would loose our luggage. But this time I had accounted for all the eventualities and our bags were waiting for us besides the conveyor belt at baggage claim. As we waited in the airport lounge, we made some small talk, how long the flight the next flight was, did we have to get off at El Calafate, did I know if the hotel in Ushuaia had internet. As we spoke I wondered at the back of my head, didn’t you want to discuss what we were doing here, why after all this time were we taking this trip together. For the last couple of weeks we had been so busy buying all the layers of clothing that we were told we would need, finishing all of the pending things at our respective jobs, given that we were leaving well before the year end shutdown, that we had not had the time to ponder how crazy it this whole notion was. I was not sure you had really thought through about taking this trip together, being together virtually all day for more than two weeks. But it was too late now. There was still daylight in Ushuaia’s twenty hour summer days when the Aerolinas Argentinas flight landed a little after nine. A Quark representative was there to pick us up, give us the plans for the next day and direct us to our hotel. Embarkation was at three pm the next day and our ship, Lyubov Orlova, quite small by cruise standards, which we came to love over the next fourteen days, would set sail at five.

“Ina” I said to you, when we finally reached our room, “I don’t want to fight in this trip. We should both try not to fight. Maybe just enjoy our last trip together”.

♦

Once you reached Seattle, after a couple of weeks of thankless apartment hunting, you decided my apartment, where I had said you were welcome as long as you wanted to stay, would do fine. You later joked, it was because the location of the apartment was just too convenient, the rent was too low, and I was way too good a cook. I discovered that I was very different from you, I was, what people would call the quiet serious sort, a compulsive loner, my idea of a perfect evening being a good book and this city’s famous obsession, a cup of coffee. You on the other hand were always surrounded by friends, could make friends everywhere you went, really cared about the legions of people who called you a friend, and genuinely worried about their well being. Their sorrow or happiness, I was always amazed to observe, made you more sad or happy than those people themselves. Redmond was a big change for you, in terms of the lack of cacophony and the hustle and bustle of a throbbing Indian metropolis and also because you missed your friends in Bangalore. Perhaps friendship was what you sought in me, may be not having any other friends at the beginning had misled you to believe that I could be a good friend, especially surprising given my lack of interest in the well being of anyone other than those very close to me. Whatever it was, you decided that I was to be your friend, and you faithfully added me to the list of people you worried about. Your arrival also coincided with me finally getting a job to teach at the University of Washington, which was good because it was the first time I was going to have a full time paying job in this country, after studying and doing part time odd jobs and research assistantships for more than five years. Despite my best efforts, and protestations to the contrary, I did have a couple of close friends here. I had gone to engineering college for four years with Amit and Sudhir back in Calcutta and now we all stayed within five miles of each other. Since they both were a year older than me, married, with children, I had been delegated the role of a younger brother to their wives, the ones they had left back in India and could not longer pamper anymore. They in time had become my closest friends here, and slowly in that first year in Seattle, they became yours.

♦

There was absolute chaos the morning of our embarkation, precipitated by the fact that in our excitement, we had failed to pay attention to our briefing the previous evening, and that we had to bring our luggage down to the lobby by nine in the morning, so that it could be loaded on to the ship. After we had somehow managed to hand our bags over by holding the last van leaving for the ship, we lazed for a couple of hours over breakfast, checking and responding to our mails for the last time for the next twelve days, calling our respective parents, me assuring them that they would hear from me only after I got back and you reassuring them that you will most certainly get a message through to them from the ship every couple of days. My assertion and intent of a voyage devoid of quarrel and full of mirth and general merriment had been received the previous night with a “Oh c’mon Kim, not now, I’m tired,” post which you had proceeded to surf the net for two hours, which was not uncommon, because I was a morning person and you were a creature of the night. You did not want to be serious and worry till you absolutely had to, and I had been pathologically geared not to be able to stop worrying.

Though Ushuaia was basked in sunshine, as we stepped out of the hotel finally around noon for lunch, there still was a nip in the air. Between the lofty mountains on the north, which were still snowcapped in the middle of the southern summer, and the waters of the Beagle channel on the south, the small town of Ushuaia was about 4 avenues deep and about 20 blocks wide. Directly overlooking our hotel, down a slope, less than half a mile away was the harbor, where we could make out the crew working hard at loading supplies onto our ship, which was dwarfed by a couple of much larger traditional cruise ships. By mid afternoon we made it to the ship, and fell in love with it immediately, and though it was small, and would hold only a hundred of us guests and about 35 expedition staff and crew, it was the most charming ship we had seen. When I was looking for expedition options late last year, I wanted one with a small and intimate group of people, which would allow for a more personal experience. As we dropped off our bags in our cabins and headed out to the deck for the first time, I finally saw a huge beaming smile on your face, an unadulterated look of pure happiness. As we stood quietly next to each other on the upper deck, I thought in all of life’s vagaries, I was happy that we at least had had this moment, and nothing could ever take that away from us.

♦

        I had a crush on you the very first time I had seen you in your office in Bangalore, not quite realizing it till I was on my flight back to Seattle and had found myself quite inadvertently thinking about you, and being embarrassed by both the fact that I was thinking about you at all, and also that I had referred to it in my own mind as a crush, a word which anyone besides gushing teenage girls would not be caught dead using. I had instantly been drawn to the effortless mix of warmth and playfulness that you shared with everyone, the way you made every stranger feel like an old dear friend. By the time you had settled in, and even though both of us had started new jobs, and even though we rushed through the initial weeks totally immersed in our new worlds, mine in teaching Embedded System Design to a freshman class, you in programming for the first time on a gaming console, we were not strangers anymore. You were getting used to staying with a guy for the first time. It was definitely different for both of us, and perhaps a little awkward as well, till we took our first trip together with Amit, Sudhir and their families, a large group of eight people in three cars, to Vancouver. I loved Vancouver, the wide open expanse of Stanley Park overlooking the Marina, quirky Gastown and the lovely drive to Whistler in case one wanted to ski. I was happy it was here that we had planned our first holiday that thanksgiving break, maybe it would bring us closer, something which strangely enough is impossible to do when living in the same apartment. Our friends were nice enough never to ask us about what our relationship was, never made a careless flip remark making either of us awkward. But Vancouver did bring us closer, without us even trying. After the first couple of days sightseeing as a big group, the third day we snuck out early on our own, and walked around the city whole day, stopping only at the farmers market in Granville Island to have lunch. In the evening as we crossed the Capilano suspension bridge, it swung wildly due to a bunch of over excited kids coming from the other direction, causing you to hold my hand to steady yourself, and which you did not let go for the next hour as we crisscrossed the Treetop walkway, huddling together for warmth as we braved the cold gusts of winds of late fall.

♦

        We had our welcome briefing that first evening in the forward lounge, most of us still trying to figure out the nautical jargon and confusing the starboard side and from port side and the stern from the bow. We would be at sea for the next 48 to 60 hours depending on the weather, and would cross one of the roughest open seas, the Drake Passage, made famous as a sort of right of passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. We had seen “I crossed the Drake” T shirts in Ushuaia, and heard tales of people being sea sick, but had not paid much attention, and even though we were carrying scopolamine patches, we had not expected that we would need them. Regardless, most of us tried our best to avoid as much of the delicious three course dinners as possible and retire to our cabins early, intending to get as much rest as possible before the Drake showed its full clout.  The hundred or so people on the cruise were a pretty geographically diverse bunch, though a fair majority were Americans, but the group trended far younger than I had expected, helped though by the fact that there were three groups of graduate students from various US universities on class field trips. Most of them bravely decided to ignore the Drake Passage and head to the small lounge cum library, connected to a rather well stocked bar named after the famous Russian actress, Lyubov Orlova, after whom the ship itself was named. I retreated to the cabin however to recover from the severe stresses of over socializing that had been required, as in any first evening in such a long journey, with such a small group. Your friendship juices were however on an overdrive and you decided to head to the library, leaving me nursing my cup of coffee and one of the four books I had been saving for this fortnight.

“You want to come” you said though before leaving, trying as you always did, “It will be fun, you might make some friends,” knowing despite your efforts, I would not listen, that I did not want to make small talk with people I didn’t know.

It was still only nine, and I was not able to focus on the book, so I decided maybe it would be a good idea to unpack. We would be out of the Beagle Channel and enter the Drake Passage in a few hours, and we had been advised to keep everything either in the ample closets in the cabin, or in our bags, because of the possible turbulence. The cabin was larger than I had expected, though it only had a small porthole window, through which I could see that there was still daylight outside, even though the sun had gone down. There were two bunk beds with a small chest of drawers in between and the top had some sort of a restraining beaded rubber mat, which was meant to avoid things from falling off, when the ship rolled, which as we found out over the next few days only worked to a certain extent. The bathroom was small and one had to hold on to the handrails for everything, and take sharp turns to maneuver. Still it wasn’t bad. It would be our home for the next fourteen days.

♦

        Vancouver had changed our relationship in such a wonderful way, and yet, when we got back, we were not sure where it would lead us. We had only really known each other for eight weeks. The morning after we returned you left for work early saying something about early meetings with your development teams in Hyderabad. Not having any lectures that day, I woke up late, wondering if you were trying to avoid me. Now that we were back, maybe you were unsure about what had happened. I had some course material to prepare for rest of the week, so I decided to push the troubling thoughts to the back of my head and immerse myself back in work, which was easier said than done. I found myself thinking of you like in the flight back from Seattle, sitting alone in our study, dark except for a table lamp, and found myself grinning like a Cheshire cat for no apparent reason. If anyone had seen me then, barely typing 3 sentences in over 2 hours, and constantly breaking into a silly smile, they surely would have worried for my sanity. But I was purely, completely, utterly happy. After a while I decided to banish the dark thoughts and rejoice in the happiness and embrace all the clichés of love. I went down to the local grocery and got supplies for your favorite dinner, blackened chicken penne in Alfredo sauce, and bars of Dove Almond ice cream, the kind you absolutely adored. I stopped off at the next door florist and got a bunch of roses as well. After all if it was going to be a cliché, it was going to be done right. You, never one for melodrama, came home, looked at what I been up to, and did, what you went on to do many more times after that when something I did made you happy. You came up to me sitting on couch and sat on my lap and hugged me.

♦

        We had been briefed about the Beaufort scale used to measure the sea conditions the previous day, which went from a scale of one to twelve, twelve being when the sea was the most violent. Luckily enough for us the second day passed with barely any turbulence at all. You missed breakfast in the dining room, so I brought you some corn flakes and fruits to the room. As you sat working through your cornflakes, and thinking aloud about where to keep your things, and I browsed the pictures and videos we had taken the previous day, I realized you had no intention of discussing the topic foremost on my mind. Maybe in your mind there was nothing to discuss, this was just a trip that you had not wanted to miss, and there was no other significance, and meant nothing else.

I smiled inwardly at the pictures of you playfully posing like a diva as usual, and when I watched the video of the city taken from the upper deck as the ship left Ushuaia with you intentionally flitting in and out of the frame, pretending as if it were by chance, I chuckled aloud. That piqued your interest and you came to over to my bunk and rested your elbow on my shoulder and scanned the pictures and videos with me. For a moment it was like old times again, my heart trying to convince me as if nothing had changed. But for all too short a moment. Then we realized it was time for the mandatory zodiac briefing without which we would not be allowed ashore, and rushed to get ready in time to make it to the forward lounge. Shelly, a Kiwi, was our expedition leader, and an old hand at Antarctic cruises, this being her ninth summer here. She took us through the safety procedures, the dos and don’ts and the guidelines followed by the association of Antarctic Tour operators. We were then given knee high rubber boots, for the zodiac cruises. Thankfully although we had been asked to carry, and did end up carrying, a huge list of recommended clothing, starting with waterproof gloves, glove liners, multiple pairs of woolen socks, sock liners, waterproof pants, hand warmers, and upper and lower inner thermals, we did not have to carry these large boots. As it is I had barely managed to stay within the strict Argentine airline weight restrictions, weighing and reweighing my suitcase many times before deciding to stuff all the papers and books I was carrying in the laptop bag. Doctor Jules, a big hit from last evening when she was handing out the sea sickness pills, walked us through the precautions we needed to take when we were ashore, rules of engagement with the wildlife, which of course was quite simple and summed up in two words - “No engagement”. The rest of day was quite uneventful, with a series of wildlife lectures, staring into miles of open ocean in blistering cold winds from the outer decks, and elaborate meals at lunch and dinner. Now that all of us were reasonably sure that the Drake Passage held no terror, we made up for our frugality last night and tucked into the meals prepared by the marvelous Chilean chef and served by the ever smiling Russian crew, who were valiantly making up for their lack of command of English with their extreme politeness. The group of students from Oregon University seemed very concerned about the assignments that they had to turn in to their professor who was traveling with them as well, though that evening they tended to all concentrate on their assignments in and around the vicinity of the bar. If there was anyone checking their id to verify the drinking age I did not see it, or maybe in international waters those rules did not apply. Later there was a full house at the showing of the “Antarctica” episode of the Planet Earth series, all of us watching with rapt attention, even though many of us had seen it before, this time though trying our best to differentiate between the species of penguins, seals and whales we might see. The different penguins, Adelie, Gentoo and Chinstrap were not hard to spot, but the differences between the Fur seals, Weddel seal, Crabeater seal and Leopard seal was another matter. The only one we were sure that we could safely identify was the Elephant seal for obvious reasons. Back in our room you went through the species charts and our plans for the shore landings one more time, quite concerned that you wanted to see and remember everything. You had this endearing habit of almost always not being able to remember the names of places we had been to, that square in Amsterdam, or the museum in Madrid, or the difficult to pronounce name of the falls in the border of Brazil and Argentina. Then you would turn to me to me for help, and I would helpfully add, “Oh, you mean the Twelve Apostles near Melbourne,” trying my best to lessen your embarrassment.

♦

        In your second year in Microsoft, your responsibilities increased rapidly. The online component of the gaming console was doing very well, and was proving to be a major draw versus other platforms. It was being heavily promoted at video games’ conferences and road shows all over the country. You had to travel a few times every month, and you would ask me every time to come along, and I would avoid it even when I could get away from work. Not being a gamer, I had no interest in spending hours at video games conferences, trying out new games, or shooting imaginary characters, all of which seemed like being a trekkie at a Star Trek convention. We had an X Box at home, and even though you tried to get me hooked, I was always happier with a far more low-tech dead tree version of entertainment, the paper book. Although we would still meet Amit and Sudhir on occasion, before Amit eventually moved to Munich, increasingly it was your friends we would invite over, or go to a Sea Hawks game with. Soon we had all the three game consoles at home, and big groups of nerdy developers with long hair and muscle t shirts ‘playing’ Rock Band, and a group that wouldn’t be caught dead going to Karaoke bar, spending hours pretending to make music. Though I was only a few years older, it seemed like I was from another generation. You of course were the queen bee, though a boss at work, you were their best friend and mentor outside the office, helping everyone through their problems, especially ensuring if anyone ever came from India the first time, to make sure they were settled in comfortably in a new country. You made countless trips to the SeaTac airport, every time someone new arrived and dropped them to a hotel that you had booked for them.

“Remember you did the same for me Kim,” you reminded me, “They don’t have a guardian angel in this country like you,” managing to embarrass me every time. Even though I think you knew, I never could tell you, everything I did for you had been merely for selfish interests. I was already in love with you the first time I saw you.

♦

        The Drake Passage was admirably well behaved the second night as well and we were likely to make the first shore landing that evening after an early dinner. Shelly and her expedition team had been sending teaser announcements all day to prepare us for our first landing and also to get us out on the deck more to watch the wildlife, which was rather scarce and far in between, apart from the variety of sea birds which seemed to have decided to give the ship company all the way to the frozen continent. Vladamir, the resident ornithologist on the cruise, a professor from University of Moscow, pointed about several species of Albatross’s, especially the gray headed Albatross, and several Petrels and Skuas to the hardy few who ventured out. But not until the Blue Whale made its majestic appearance did the decks fill up, with a bevy of expert and amateurs photographers dueling with their latest Nikons, whom the Captain aptly christened the Whale Paparazzi. The main deck of ship was the fifth deck, with the bridge being at the seventh level and another open observation deck above that. Some of us went to the top deck to get a better view of the whale, but we had to contend with the merciless sub zero winds of the fast approaching Antarctic Peninsula. To say Antarctic Peninsula though was a little misleading since were nearing the South Shetland Archipelago, which was a part of continent, but not actually on the mainland.

You though had decided to stay back in the warmth of the library rather than brave the icy winds for the first glimpse of land in more than two days. A little after five in the afternoon the hardy few who stayed outside were rewarded with the first view of the archipelago, massive ice sheets as far as eye could see. It was difficult to decipher where the ice stopped and the blue sky began, seeming to dissolve into one mind numbingly display of the enormity of ice cover. It was rather humbling to think that this was not the main continent but just a series of tiny islands forming a negligible fraction of the colossal scale of this continent. We wished we could have stayed up on the deck and marveled at this site, but we were called in for an early dinner, before a landing later that evening in Robert Island, one of numerous islands which made up this archipelago. We trudged in reluctantly, though realizing perhaps we would be sick of similar sights over the next five days.

♦

        You had a behavioral pattern, which was fascinating to me at first, but which I later found increasingly difficult to reconcile when we started to have problems. For all your kindness to acquaintances and friends that you helped, you could be absolutely ruthless when you were angry with the ones that were closest to you. Through many months of the baffling behavioral volcanic eruptions I discovered besides your parents and brother, I was the only one who was exposed to these, what can only be described as, a strange show of closeness. With other people, you would perhaps avoid them if you were irked or unhappy with them, but rarely showed your anger. For the select few that you thought of as your own, it was an altogether different experience if they had done something to anger you. When we were in love, I thought these occurrences were a testament to our closeness, and felt like the chosen few with whom you would really express how you really felt, without deception or guile. Even then it was never fun, and on occasion I would find it hard to fathom why sometime a small incident would so upset you, but I still cherished the times when I made it up to you, did something silly to make you smile. But it was not easy, for after the initial outburst you would stay aloof or detached for hours and sometime days, but once we made up, there would be a complete metamorphosis into the deeply loving person I knew, and you would spend hours saying you were sorry or finding a way to make it up to me.

Increasingly the fights became more frequent, and I found myself lashing out in return, whereas once I had been the patient one, trying to understand what was bothering you. The reasons for the fight were mostly my fault. You were a person who needed to be showered with attention, hugged and made to feel that you were loved, while on the other hand I could come off as a pathologically cold person in terms of my ability to show emotion. I could cry in front of a TV if a dog was hurt in a movie, but found it very hard to express how I felt with another human being. I would try to go out of my way to take care of you, tape your favorite shows, plan for surprise trips on weekends, but I could not find it within myself ever to walk up to you sitting on the couch and give you a hug for no reason at all. You tried to talk to me about it, but I always had my own side of the story, of how I loved you, and was trying my best. You said my behavior made you feel lonely, and at that time I failed to understand why. I did not understand your loneliness perhaps because I was lonely too, or perhaps because I liked being lonely. Within the first two years the two friends I had in Seattle had moved, Amit first and then Sudhir to the east coast. I did not make any new friends, while your circle grew. You hoped I would become a part of your circle of friends and wanted that I would make your friends my own. You viewed my sheer need for solitude as a way of not being ready to accept your friends. When we first fought about this, I would still make an effort to tell you that I knew it was my fault, but this is way I was. But as time went on I got more dug in, and did not see why I had to apologize for the way I was. Why did I have to change? Why could it not be you? I felt victimized by your unnatural expectations. It was not as if I was cheating or sleeping around. I felt I was trying my best and you did not appreciate me. Maybe you would, I thought, when I was no longer there in your life.

♦

        The shore landing to Robert Island almost got cancelled. The wind had picked up and the zodiacs were getting thrashed around. It was difficult to get on or off the zodiacs from the small landing, at the bottom of the gangway, connected by foldable temporary stairs, which itself was getting blown about by the wind. But there was high level of enthusiasm about our first landing, having been cooped up in the ship for two days, and we were ready to brave the conditions. We landed on a stony pebble beach about hundred yards long, which extended inland for about 30 yards before it rose into a series of small rocky mounds, followed by never ending sheets of ice behind that as far as we could see. It was just below freezing outside and not as blustery on the shore as we had been expecting. As I dropped off the life jackets that we had to wear for the zodiac ride, I switched on the still camera, which luckily for us doubled as a pretty effective video camera, wanting to capture your first reaction to the penguins. You had been really looking forward to this, and for the past three days you had been incessantly questioning the expedition crew.

“How many penguins would we see?”

“Thousands”

“Can I touch them?”

“No”

“Can I please touch them a little bit?”

“Absolutely not”

“What if they come up to me and want to touch me?”

“Move away at least five feet.”

After sometime you had given up, determined to continue this verbal jostling another day.

There was a relatively small colony of Adelie penguins here, going about their merry way, absolutely comfortable and to completely oblivious to this sudden intrusion of the crowd busily clicking away at them. It took me fifteen minutes, about thirty still pictures and multiple videos, before I could coax you from the narrow patch of black pebble beach where we had landed and convince you to move to the rest of the island. I would drag you for a few feet, and then you would stand again, transfixed, giggling “Oh my god” like a little girl with a new doll, over and over again. As we finally moved ahead there was a group of about five Elephant Seals lazing about, blocking our way, soaking in what to them must have been the rays of the warm austral summer to them. One of them had just come up from the beach and was making its way to the group, and was making what must have been a herculean effort to move a few inches at each lunge. After each attempt it would wait and rest for about a minute, look at us in apparent boredom and then make another lunge. After watching its antics for a few minutes we returned the sentiment, and walked to the other side, which had another group of penguins, shrieking into the heavens in unison at frequent intervals for no apparent reason. Large sections of the black igneous rock in this part of the island was covered with a orange coating of the Antarctic Lichens,  which looked like a layer rusted metal on these rocks, these lichens being the only plant life that was able to grow in these extreme environs. The zodiac ride back to the ship turned out to be pretty eventful as well, with the waves drenching us all, the thrashing on the gangway managing to make more than one of us to loose our footing, and on the whole pretty happy to get back into dry clothes and rush to the library for a cup of coffee, exchange notes and look at each other’s pictures. We spent the next couple of hours in the library, with you looking at the videos repeatedly on the laptop, having gone back to your customary giggling as the penguins in the videos waddled by and sometime giving a quizzical look at the avid filming in progress.

♦

        What had seemed inevitable to both of us for a long time, finally happened. There was not much drama at all. You had said a few weeks back that you were looking for options, since the opportunities for growth within a stable product team were limited and you wanted something more challenging. I had not expected that you would ever consider working outside the Seattle area. I was perhaps thinking there was a way this could still work. But then one day, we had just finished dinner, and were still sitting quietly at the dinner table staring at the TV, not really listening, when you said “Kim, I’ve found a job in Philadelphia”. I had not known how to react. I kept looking at the screen, motionless, and you looked at me, expecting me to say something. But I had not had the faintest notion that you would move away across the country, thousands of miles away. We sat there for a while, and then I moved to the couch and slept there that night and for the next three weeks that you were there. You had explained, in what were mostly one sided conversations, since I refused to participate, that it was best that we separate for a while, that it was not working and making both of us miserable, none of which seemed like real reasons to me, just plain made up generalities. I had dug in with the tired notion that you did not appreciate what I did for you and you would soon realize your mistake. Three weeks later you were gone. You did not take your car and most of your stuff. It was decided that I would drive them over once you settled in. Despite everything, in my mind we were still friends and you could ask me anything I would still do it for you, and I believed you would do the same for me.

All of this had happened very quickly. Just before we were to leave for our yearly December trip, this time to Argentina and Brazil, and were doing the research on places to see and things to do, we discovered the cruises to the Antarctic leaving from Ushuaia, and had animatedly fantasized on how amazing it would be if possibly made such a trip ourselves. The cruises weren’t cheap and they were all rather long and very difficult to manage with the amount of holidays we could take. We had already been having trouble, and while I did not even know what I was doing wrong, I desperately wanted to find a way to move past all this and correct everything that was going wrong with a big gesture. So on the eve of our flight to Rio I surprised you with the reservations for our cruise next December. For that day and for the next two weeks of our trip we forgot our troubles and I hoped this would tide us through. But these distractions to our every day lives were only transient, and Antarctica was still a year away. I had not worked hard enough to understand what was causing this relationship to crumble, hoping material things and distractions would fill the void. But in the end, they were not enough and by the second week of March, you had left.

The arrangement was that I would drive over in early April and drop off your car and the rest of the belongings that were still with me. You still knew, and this realization made me feel there was somewhere something left in our relationship that could be salvaged, that you could ask me to drive across the country for you. Then in the last week of March my Nana, my only surviving grandparent, passed away, and I left for Pune in a hurry, and stayed on in India for a month to help Dad to take care of things. You said that was fine, and that Siemens where you worked now, would pay for a rental car for a couple of months and I should take care of everything in India properly, which I did. When I got back, I was sucked into activities for the end of the semester and it only in the last week of May, around Memorial Day, when I was be able to drive your car over. Over the past couple of months we had spoken once or twice a week. We had been cordial, civil, both of us perhaps cognizant of fact that we did not want to betray any weakness. We wanted to sound like adults, perfectly at peace with what had happened, and moving on with our lives. Regardless the conversations were short and meaningless. It would start with how each of us were, which was seldom answered by anything other than that we were each fine, and then moved to work, with was always fine as well, and then moved to a few perfunctory facts about having had lunch or dinner, how the weather was and then ended with us deciding to talk again in a few days. While I was in India, I was busy in the events unfolding there, but once I got back to Redmond I was miserable, I would sit for hours in the empty house, not able to read or watch TV. I suspected you would be missing me as well and just putting up a brave face. I was sure that once I went over there, and we realized how much we missed each other, we would be able to work out our differences, whatever they were. I drove for two days, with only a solitary night stop at a motel outside St Paul. It was a little after two in the morning when I drove up to your apartment building in Malvern. You were up, waiting for me. We decided to leave the things in the car and get them the next morning. As I entered the apartment I could see you had been crying. Drawing on all my strength to remain composed and not let you hear my voice crack up, I calmly asked you if you were fine.

“You must have something to eat,” you said, avoiding the question, and over my protestations, heated some rice and rajma for me. You had cooked. I had never known you to cook, except for brief periods when the bug to learn cooking would bite you, primarily to prove your mother wrong, who would jokingly needle you endlessly about it.

“You cooked?” I said smiling, “Are you sure it’s safe. Maybe I should first get a taster to see if it’s safe,” wanting to keep saying something irrelevant, anything, to lessen the tension. You smiled back weakly, and sat down facing me. You waited a few minutes, as if trying to find the right words.

“Kim there is something I need to tell you,” you finally said, as I sat working there through the food, “and I know it won’t be easy for you, it’s not easy for me, but I know you have moved on, and I need to move on too.”

I just kept the spoon down on the plate, and stared at you, searching in your face for an answer of where I had moved on. You spoke slowly, looking down at the table the whole time, visibly upset, but without tears or any tremor in your voice. You said were seeing someone else, you did not want to say who it was, it was early days anyway, but you thought it was best I knew. There were not too many details, not that I wanted to know the details or could handle any.  It seemed you had practiced the words many times in your head, perhaps trying your best to find the words so as to not hurt me, but at that time it did not seem that way. The rest of the food remained untouched.

“Ina” referring to you by name, which I hardly ever did, reserving it for times when I wanted you to feel that you were very distant from me, “I think may be I should bring up your stuff now. It’s best I take the morning flight.” Even though my flight was booked for Monday morning, three days away, I needed to leave right away. I spent the next hour bringing up your suitcases, boxes full of journals and papers. I did not say a word, after you stopped speaking, even when you kept saying “Kim are you all right?” and “Can’t you stay back just for one day?” But the physical activity of moving the things was the only thing keeping me sane. I had to keep moving. I could not sit and think about what your words meant, not there, not in front of you. Once the cab got there, I transferred my bag to the cab, went up to you, handed you the car keys, kissed you on the forehead and left.

♦

        It was almost midnight but the lounge and the library was still buzzing with excitement, especially for those, like you, who had landed on their seventh continent, a level of wanderlust not very common in any other collection of such diverse people, but was the majority in this group of hardy travelers. The college crew, as we were calling the students from the universities, were still up at the bar, you with them somewhere, not quite the queen bee yet, given it had only been three days, but had managed to gather quite a few loyal subjects. For once I did not feel like turning in early either. It had been a great day. I had seen you genuinely happy, in something we had done together after a long time. It was not like old times, I reminded myself. This was temporary. This would end in few days. As I sat back remembering that night in May, in your apartment, listening to your words, but not quite believing what I was hearing. It had to have been expected, but I had been fooling myself the whole time. You called me many more times the next day, but I had not answered, and finally after a week I had sent you a text message saying I was alright and would call you sometime. But I never did. I played your statement over and over in my head about me moving on and never grasped how you could have ever deduced that. I had not moved on, and I did not intend to either. I could not just dismiss my love for you, pick up the pieces and simply move on. Over the next few weeks your younger brother, Ashu, called me regularly, checking if I was alright. I was very fond me of Ashu, and he thought of me as an elder brother, and saw no reason why that should change because of what had happened. He forced me to call your Dad, whom I had met in India and before this happened, would speak to occasionally to wish them for Diwali or New Year. They were worried about me too, and so I spoke to them to assure them I would be fine. I was touched by their concern. Through them I still felt as if I had some remaining connection with you. Even though they would be sensitive enough not to go in to any details, through them I would find out that you were doing fine. I felt the urge to call you every day through those months, but I did not know what I could have said. Any words I would utter would either be to act normal as if everything had gone back to the usual staid every day existence, or it would be to spew all the pent up anger and rage about what had happened. Neither was an option for me. The one day in early September you had called, suddenly, without warning. I was rushing out of the gym and picked up the phone without checking the number, and you said “Kim, it’s me. Have you thought of what to do with the cruise reservations?”

I had not thought of it at all. We had paid up in full last December to get a better discount and in the ensuing months it had not crossed my mind at all. As I stepped into the car, my mind was racing on multiple different tracks. Why were you calling me after so many months? Why did you want to know about the trip? Did you want to go with someone else?

“Hi Ina,” I said in an effort to stall.

“Hi. Is this a bad time, I’m sorry I should have probably let you know I wanted to talk to you.”

“No of course not, did you want me to check if Quark would the change my name and add someone else,” by now reasonably certain in my head, that you wanted to go with someone else. I just wanted to do whatever it is that you wanted, end the conversation, and stop the explosions going off in mind head.

“No Kim,” you said, with an inflection in your voice that seemed to suggest as if none of the past few months had happened, “There is no one else. Can we talk about that some other time? It was just that I heard the other day a colleague was taking a Quark cruise, and it reminded me of our reservation.”

And then you paused, as if waiting for me to say something.

“I meant, maybe you can check if we can cancel it,” you went on, maybe noting my hesitancy, “No point wasting the money, right?”

“Sure Ina, I hadn’t thought of it, good you reminded me,” and by then with my voice distinctly cracking up, I said, “I hope you’re doing fine. I’ll talk to you later, ok?” and hung up.

Quark was very appreciative of the situation, but no, they would not be able to cancel it without a fifty percent penalty, though yes, they would be able to change one of the passengers of the twin cabin we had booked. I waited for a week, trying to figure out what was the right thing to do. What did you want? Were you or were you not seeing someone. Did you want to go with me, and if so, what did that mean. Or did it mean anything at all. After a week of vigorous debates with myself, and arriving at no conclusion, I dialed your number.

♦

       I had been wrong about predicting that we would be fed up of this landscape quickly. Over the next five days we spent an average of four to five hours ashore, and many more getting in and out of the zodiacs, in and out of the many layers of clothing we wore every time we went ashore. We spent even more time discussing what we had seen, the penguins fearlessly running around the sea leopard lazing on a floating block of ice, or the massive tabular ice bergs as went deeper into the peninsula and even the “Casino” that the residents of the Argentine Esperanza research station built as perhaps their only means of recreation in this desolate part of the world. On Christmas eve we spent a couple of hours out on the zodiacs, cruising slowly though the pack ice, past the towering ice bergs in a myriad different shapes and shades of blue, and then dressed up warm for a barbecue dinner out on the deck in temperatures barely above freezing. It was a little after seven and the sun was still shining brightly over the horizon. Despite the sun, the conditions were far from comfortable, but the gathering was bound together by the warmth and camaraderie of this varied group of people who had acquired a kind of kinship, which was transient no doubt, but very real for the time we spent there together. On Christmas day, our last shore trip was to a long abandoned nineteenth century whaling station, built on the edge of a submerged volcano crater in Half Moon Bay. For once not it was not for gawking at the wildlife, even though a few penguins and a seal looked on as the hardy among us took the polar plunge in the freezing waters of the bay. The expedition crew, using every possible psychological mind game and trumped up past polar plunge statistics, managed to induce more than half of the group to partake in this seemingly inane exercise, which turned out to be the most fun we had had on this trip.

Christmas dinner had been planned as a special affair but the oncoming Drake Passage had put a dampener on most spirits. The voyage back across the Drake Passage would start sometime in the middle of the night and perhaps this time we would not be so lucky. Our trip too was coming to an end. If this trip had a special significance to you, besides the obvious, I still did not know. If it did mean something more to you it was still a mystery to me.

♦

“May be then we have no choice but go, at least one of us has to go, isn’t it?” you had said when I called to tell you what Quark had said, “Or did you want to go with someone.”

I knew what you were getting at, maybe I even blamed you a little bit for it. I thought you were being opportunistic, maybe you were using me. You knew very well there was no one, no one else I would want to go with.

Yet you said, “Kim, tell me if you want to go with someone else, that’s O.K. with me.”

“No, you can use it,” I replied, a little annoyed by now.

“Would it be so terrible if we went, together, as friends? We are friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes Ina, we are friends,” I said.

I said it because that was what you wanted to hear. We were going because you wanted to go. We spoke a few times after that, never for more than a few minutes, always about the planning for the trip. Air tickets had to be bought, visas to be done, and weeks of searching online for bargains on the appropriate clothing. As usual I would find out what need to be done in terms of preparations and you would say to all questions, “Whatever you think is right Kim.” We never spoke about what was going on in each others lives, besides token comments about our work. I did not for a moment believe the comment about being friends. I did not want let my guard down again. This trip was a promise I had made to you and I intended to keep it, regardless of how much pain it caused me. But I was not prepared for it to be anything more than that. I knew there was no future to us beyond that.

♦

        The passage was rougher the first night back then on our way over here, and at breakfast we heard the forecast was for rougher conditions for the next twenty four hours. Scale nine to ten winds were expected, so we were advised to eat quickly and go back to our cabins. The decks were declared out of bounds. We had taken the sea sickness pills the previous night and in the morning and were lying on our backs on our bunks, a position which felt the most comfortable when the ship rolled about. We had nothing else to do but stare at the roof of our cabin.

Just when I thought you had dozed off, you said, “So what have you thought,” in Hindi, your favorite line which you always spoke in your mother tongue, especially when you wished to confront me, and always with that all encompassing seemingly general query.

“Thought about what,” parrying back, having been part of these exchanges with you many times.

“Kim, you know about what,” sounding serious, almost pained. Were you crying, I wondered.

“Are you crying?” I said.

“Have you decided what to do with your life?” you said, your voice breaking up, “You cannot just waste away your life because of what happened. Every time I speak to Ashu he seems to blame me for it. He doesn’t say it, but I know. You don’t go anywhere, you don’t make any friends. How long is this going to go on?”

I lay there a little stunned. I could have easily said, “Why did you care after all this time.” After all, it was you that had left. You had never asked how I was before. But I knew you asked because you cared, you were worried. I knew that much about you.

“I haven’t thought anything,” I said, “I am not really sure I what I am doing, and I’m not sure I really care”.

“You know we have never spoken about this, may be we should some day. But what happened was not my fault or your fault either. We are the way we are. Neither of us can change each other. We have to leave that behind, in the past.”

By now the ship was rolling wildly, but I sat up in my bunk and looked at you. Tears were flowing down your cheek. I reached down to the box of tissues that had fallen to the floor, and handed you a tissue.

“But that does not mean we cannot be friends,” you continued, “that does not mean I don’t need you as a friend. Doesn’t this trip tell us know that we can be around each other and just be friends and be happy together, and happy for each other. Is that too much to ask Kim?”

I was not sure if you were right, but I wished you would stop crying. I could not see you crying. I went over to your bunk and held you, and said, “Its O.K., we can be anything you want us to be, don’t cry”.

We held each other for a long time. The ship was rolling violently from side to side. It was almost like trying to sleep in a roller coaster. I thought how unfair I had been to think that you had come to this trip for yourself, that you were using me. You had come to this trip for me, for us. After a long time, still holding me, you said “So what have you thought, mister. Didn’t you like any of these college girls?”

♦

The sea finally calmed down when we entered the Beagle Channel, about five hours from Ushuaia. Our trip was over. We hadn’t had either lunch or dinner the whole day. We opened up a box of cookies and a bar of chocolate we had been saving up. We spoke through the night. You told me about Alex, and how your relationship  with him had ended, how you had begun to doubt yourself, about where you had gone wrong. I was able to listen to you talk about having fallen in love with someone else, calmly and not have a violent physical reaction to it. I never would have thought that would be possible.

Years ago, out of the blue one night, you had said jokingly “You know Kim, you are my family. I will tell Dad to adopt you”.

At that time I had joked, “So what do I get for my becoming a part of your family?”

“Dad will give you ten lac rupees,” you had replied.

We had had that conversation many times after that. Whenever you were miffed with me, you would say playfully, “I will tell Dad to disown you. You won’t get the ten lacs.” It became a running joke between us, getting the ten lacs was a test if I had been good.

As we spoke you reminded me of that conversation. You said you had realized, when we loose something in life, when we are sad, when every turn seems like a dead end, all we have left is our family.

“And Kim you are my family. Maybe sometimes we will fight, maybe we are not meant to be together the way we had thought we could be. It will hard to us to accept that. But I believe in my heart we are always meant to be friends, more than friends, we are meant to be family.”

When the ship docked in Ushuaia, it was snowing and still quite early in the morning. But everyone was already up. The lounge and library was full of people saying goodbye, exchanging address and email ids. Many of us gathered in the dining room, happy to get something to eat after we had endured the Drake enforced fast. The storm had gone up to scale 11 that night, one of the highest she has seen, Shelly said. As we left the ship, I was sure you and me would see many more storms as well, may be weather them together. Yes we were family, though I wasn’t yet feeling magnanimous enough to ask you in return if you had liked some guy on the ship as well. But what you called a family had no social definition. It was a bond only in our hearts, difficult to articulate, impossible to explain to other people in our lives, and balance against their expectations from us. It would be tested by time, distance and by others who will invariably become part of our lives and those we will learn to love anew. But as I was beginning to realize, and as you said it best, when everything else would deserts us, at the darkest hour, when we would needed it the most, we would know that we would always have us, this memory of us.

It’s a shame for me to admit myself, but it gives me a compass of the movies that I should like. Let me explain. I’m a Bengali, AKA the biggest cultural snobs in India. Traditionally a very cultural community, it does though tend over do the love of culture shtick. I’m therefore by birth somewhat of a cultural snob myself, if I do say so myself, rather shamelessly. I tended to like only ‘artsy’ movies growing up in India, which generally were shot in low light, with a lot of realism and poverty thrown in for good measure. And I watched a lot of ‘foreign’ movies i.e. Oscar winning Hollywood movies and a fair sprinkling of French and Italian movies as well. Though I would like to convince myself I really liked those movies, I am not sure whether it was because they were critically acclaimed or won a fistful of awards.

I have had arguments with friends, big movie lovers themselves, about choice of movies and found them sometimes to have a far more open mind. Let me give an example – True Romance. It had a stellar supporting cast, though it won no awards and got mixed reviews. I loathed the movie. On the other hand “Pulp Fiction”, which one might say was in the same vicinity in terms of genre, but it won rave reviews and awards. I loved Pulp Fiction. Further confounding my choice of movies is that I love romantic comedies, I am a sucker for emotional ‘the underdog finally triumphs’ kind of movies and get misty eyed without fail in such situations. I love comedies, regardless of critical appreciation, especially if it is smart, verbal and not overly slapstick.

So one could conclude that my choice in movies is suspect, snobbish and all over the place, which brings us to the Oscars 2008 and the current crop of movies. The whole world (at least the ones paying attention) seems to love Slumdog Millionaire, and even though I was proud at the attention it was getting as a Hindi (partly) movie in a theatre in the middle of the American South (Durham, North Carolina), it left me distinctly underwhelmed. The screenplay centered more around ten questions (rather than the love story) woven around the lead characters life, seemed rather forced, the acting stilted (especially when India actors spoke English and British actors spoke Indian English) and the Mumbai underworld don enactment downright childish.

I left the theatre wondering why I couldn’t like the movie when everyone else is ready to do cartwheels and break into a Bollywood song and dance routine to celebrate the movie. I can think of scores of things that I can find wrong with the movie, but am still left with the nagging suspicion that perhaps I am too snooty to enjoy it since it is too close to the song and dance Bollywood masala movie that I love to loathe.

But I’m still rooting for it on Oscar night. If “Gladiator” and “Departed” (sorry I didn’t like it, especially not over “Letters from Iwo Jima”) can get the nod, surely Slumdog should win over the twice warmed Forest Gump masquerading under the alias of Benjamin Button. 

But no one should confuse the movie with its character and should not assume Slumdog Millionaire despite its name and lineage is an underdog and that should hardly be the basis to root for it on Oscar night. Fox Searchlight is a past master at promoting movies for Oscar trophies, which over the years have increasingly morphed from an artistic exercise in rewarding the best movies of the year (if it was ever that), to a full fledged campaign. Millions of dollars are spent in promoting these movies for the Oscars, often crossing the budget for the movie itself and of the box office proceeds as well.

It is hardly a democratic campaign though, with only the film industry’s version of the House of Lords (the Academy members) voting for it. So every year the Academy bemoans the fact the interest in Oscar are dwindling but still its modus operandi for choosing the winners remains distinctly bourgeois. The most well known India film award (Filmware Awards) in comparison is selected by both the public and a committee of experts. That is hardly foolproof either since the movies that win the Filmware Awards are generally the big budget blockbuster bollywood masala movies while the small indie movies are methodically shut out.

So this leaves us with a conundrum, much like my own personal choice of movies. So what should we do? Does one go with the mass or the class. In politics we are told we get the government we deserve. So in terms of our movie awards should go with the popular awards that we ‘deserve’ or with go with the ones we are told we are supposed to like.

You decide.

And I did pay for it dearly too.

Besides some meager savings in mutual funds (again made at being threatened at gun point by sis), all I had was a bunch of stock and stock options for the company I work for. In the past few months a massive fraud has been discovered in my company and its stock has lost 95% of its value, wiping out that part of my savings.

So when I say I do not understand finance I am not being merely rhetorical. I really do not. Even though I majored in business management in grad school, I never showed more than a passing interest to economics and finance, just enough to score the necessary grades in those papers. I did not follow much of financial news, never updated my financial records even my sister created it in the first place. All I did was refreshed, few times a day, the stock price ticker of my company’s stock, till it crashed due to the fraud revelations.

But these are scary times.

Not just because the threat of joblessness is very real, but because nothing is sacred anymore. Venerable institutions like Merril Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear and Stearns getting sold or closed down, the biggest banks and financial institutions all over the world are getting bailed out and still there are no signs of being able to survive without a respirator, entire countries (Iceland) are being led down the path of bankruptcy. There is rampant joblessness and record government deficits. One is left with no option but to sit up and take notice. 

But if one does not understand what is going on, one looks up to economists, heads of governments, captains of industry to tell us what is going on. It is apparent to all that this crisis will not be solved in a hurry, but populations of entire countries are looking up at their political, thought and business leaders to step up and say - “Yes we understand the problem, these the steps, and these will work”. But all we have seen for the last 6 months are a series of seemingly confused and bungled steps and very real palpable fear, helplessness and confusion in the eyes of these leaders. They have lurched from the “Japanese” solution of the 90s (which of course did not work), Swedish Bank Nationalization, to the job creation philosophies of Keynes.

But what is different this time. Everybody say’s “This is not your grandfather’s depression”.

But why is that. What is different this time?

1. Complex Financial Markets - I do not just mean that it is difficult for a lay man to understand. This world of derivatives, credit-default swaps, packaged and repackaged mortgages is beyond anyone’s comprehension and difficult to regulate and hence rampant in fraud, corruption and reckless suicidal risk taking. The ‘drunk with bonuses’ financial markets perhaps overlooked the fact that there is fine line between judicious risk taking and recklessness.
2. Global Economy - We are no longer national economies, largely self dependent and doing some amount of trading. Now we are global economy, so intertwined and interconnected, we are like a cat with a ball of wool, caught in our own trap. We’re all connected and no one is in control.
3. Spending Binge - Though things have changed over the last few decades it is still true that the United States (and maybe a few Western European countries as well) consumes and rest of the world produces to keep up with that insatiable demand. With fall of the Soviet Union and the victory of capitalism, the whole world too is moving in that direction as well. Everyone wants to replicate the American Dream. What is ironic is that in America itself the American Dream is a fallacy. The perpetual image that has been perpetrated that every American deserves a home of their own and it was seen as a birth right even though many cannot afford them. They even went a step further and overdosed on credit card debts, easy mortgages, ‘pay it later’ loans and home equity loans. People in developing economies have been known to be much more prudent and conservative in terms of credit based consumption and adhered to a much higher level of saving. That too has changed somewhat in the last decade in India and China in terms of higher consumption and living recklessly on easy credit.

So what now? 

Thomas Friedman writes “I have a friend who regularly reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-story building, for 79 stories you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you”.

Is that going to be our end as well? As you must have figured, I don’t think I have any inkling. But the scary thing is I don’t think anybody does either.

There are things which I don’t understand and it is a rather long list.

E=MC², Quantum Physics, Theory of Relativity, why the hell Germans in love are screaming sweet nothings on Valentine ’s Day, what kind of morons would see American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, you get the drift. What might have also have been shining through above is my love for humanity and my natural gift for endearing my fellow human beings. Tongue firmly in cheek.

Well anyways, if you weighed things I did understand and things I did not, well, it would be just too lopsided. And let’s not even get started about things I think I understand, but actually do not because even as I write this I am constantly under the delusion that I am smarter than I actually am.

Dimwit I maybe, but I do realize that none of the other things that I do not understand have not caused such untold human suffering as my favorite pet peeve - Religion. Or to be precise organized religion. Sure, maybe E=MC² (and the atom bomb, get it?) falls in that category, but there are important distinctions, and I must not digress.

I also must make perfectly clear is that I am not comfortable with the label of atheists or a long winded discussion on whether god exists or not. For me that is a rather simple question. I do not know and I am not going to spend my paltry grey matter on something that no one can possibly know. So even if someone wants to argue with me till they are blue in the face, it’s going to be a one sided debate, because I simply have no arguments about the matter. Especially since my ignorance is due to not having met the Gentleman (or to be politically correct - Lady, and because we have to avoid lawsuits from PETA - Animal), yet. “Yet” because I don’t want to be accused of having a closed mind either.

Same goes for the other big bugaboo - ’soul’. I once met a gentleman once (retired recently from NASA) who kept a group of us up till 3 Am in the morning trying to drill into us that the important part of our body is the soul, from which he deduced the befuddling concept that we must not have sex till we are 18, among other noble notions.

Also I do not wish to include spirituality, faith or belief in this brief tete-a-tete. Even though my thick skull cannot fathom those profound concepts, I do not think they do very much harm in isolation. So let me put it as succinctly as I can, I do not grudge, argue with, or make fun of, ridicule another person’s faith, beliefs or spirituality.

So all we are talking about here is organized religion. I am sure there are countless lengthy theoretical treatises dealing with the subject and copious amount of dribble written to counter that as well. This is not my point by point damning evidence to prove my point (sic), but simply my belief, as I am frequently told that I must believe in something. So this is simply my belief. And not totally unsubstantiated either. Let us briefly look at the havoc organized religion has caused over centuries, if not millenniums. It has divided people, caused wars, justified planned genocide, led to hundreds of years of disputes and bloodshed over tiny tracts of ‘holy’ land. It has justified murder of non believers, discrimination against different classes and races of people (including women, widows, lower castes, gays, non whites), been used a means of controlling power, money and influence in multiple instances, over centuries.

This is not to say wars do not happen otherwise and there would not be discrimination and persecution without organized religion. But those instances are demonized (like Nazism) like they should be. But everyone is afraid to touch the lightening rod of religion. But for those who believe in a higher power, a God, is it not for them to realize these atrocities are being done in God’s name, the god they love. That their collective silence or cooperation or coercion is being used to perpetrate these crimes on humanity.

I also realize that various religions do undertake various charitable and philanthropic activities and I do not mean to discount those. It is important however to note the main reason for much of these activities are the spread of the concerned organized religion.

I do realize that my words would hurt my friends and family who might think this is a personal attack on their religion, on their god or on their belief. This is not intended to be an attack. It’s my interpretation, things that I believe and also that things that are baffling to me that I cannot understand what so many billions of people seemingly understand and live their lives by it.

Some might say it is not merely enough to tear down these social walls built and reinforced through the ages, but one must proffer their solution. What must be done? I must submit I don’t have any answers that apply to all. Nor can there be ONE answer. But if I might share my view, perhaps one could look at it this way. Spirituality, beliefs and faith are very personal. Could it not remain that way? Is it absolutely essential that must we build a pack like wolves with everyone from our belief’? Must we build these packs and attack another pack with another belief. I know as long as human kind roam this earth wars, discrimination against fellow human beings, injustice towards the weak and poor will go on. But can we take god out of the equation and not blame God for what causes us to act this way - Our own basic primal animal (sorry again PETA) instincts.

So this is what I believe and you are welcome to yours.

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Here are Argentina pics. Enjoy.