In the evening a soft sun was still hanging above the apartments on the other side of the lake as it shimmered from a clearing on the bank. We talked of a mother of a dead son, speculating whether a bond continued to exist between the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law. Did she matter to son’s wife, after the son had gone? After the link between them has become conspicuously absent, I mean.

Photographer Errol Morris talks of a photograph being decontextualized, torn from the fabric of the life it represents. A photograph cannot be true or false because it is not an opinion, a view. It simply is. A photographer omits the elephant standing outside the frame of a photograph and is there a duty on our part to place a metaphorical elephant in the frame to give it a context?

Didn’t the son give a context to the co-existence of the two women? What if we placed a metaphorical son in this our frame?  Think, I said to my wife.

The chemistry of a winter sun goes well with history’s rocks and the gnarled trees of yesterday’s leaves. Stumps of fallen trees sprawl in the rocks of history as men make their way up on polished stones of time’s footfalls. Up there is a red temple to an ancient mother alongside brown boulders warm with tender sun. The trees shake with birds chirping like the voices of children waiting for the teacher to come.

A certain village official had bought God’s jewelry from out of the State’s coffers. Here is the dark of a cell in which he had spent years before he was released on God’s intervention. But dark doubts persist as brown-winged bats that have lived till today, that come to hit you in the face from history.

A matchstick is not seen as a flame but heard. Across the boulders and the blue sky, to the King’s palace at the top to alert him of unwelcome guests.

A celebration takes place for a child of one year’s birth. We gather our cakes and candles A certain old man waxes eloquent, proud of his new grandchild . Some loud music, a little child magic, a piano shown off with a learner’s music.

Snacks are varied and eclectic. The child will now enter the preschool in the land of the sheikhs. The old man, proud of his three houses, introduces a real estate don. The don blesses the child.

 Aren’t we looking out for pretty houses? We are aliens in our space suits. We reserve our space in the vast continuum, for a few millions. The old man announces a prize for anybody who carries a spouse’s photo in the valet. Anybody? Yes, of course. We all love our spouses but we carry their pictures in our hearts. 

Anybody who is a grandmother and a granddaughter and is alive in both capacities? Yes, of course. There is somebody down there, who is the third in a lineage of five generations, A loud applause.

After-life?  When asked how are you doing now, Hitchens says, “Fine, I am dying”.”And so are you, says Hitchens to the questioner. Hitchens refused to acknowledge after-life merely because he was dying. A great soul, if he could be called a soul , now that he had refused to acknowledge after-life. If our bodies are more than stuff, that is.

The news came in the morning. A young man who had on the previous night pointed the stars to his daughter found himself turned into one .Forty four was no time for turning a star. Look at the Mars, burning brightly, he had said to a wide-eyed daughter. In the morning he was found absolutely blue. The heart stopped at approximately 3 A.M. trying to gauge the depths of an astral sky.

Did he die in sleep? Was he in a dream he never woke up to recount?

These four days I have been trying to grapple with vertigo, a frightening thing with the head when the world spins without your asking for it. It spins like a top, like the globe-earth in the ocean of emptiness that the boar-God carried on his tusks to save it from the apocalypse. Of course the spinning was in a movie we saw when were still in knickerbockers. It spun like the model earth-globe that our teacher had spun on its brass axis illustrating our geography for us.

Luckily for me it is called by a nice medical name: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. The name is truly awe-inspiring .Only the first word “benign” saves the day. In simple terms it is something that takes place in the vestibular inner ear, an accumulation of crystals leading to a loss of balance, a loss of space in the vastness of the inner ear. What do you expect in an old ear, getting ready to hang its boots?