Recording at the Radio Station done—a talk on Ernest Hemingway—he felt thirsty.

Hello Ka, do you still write poems these days at the drop of a hat? Stopping by at mysterious nooks at odd hours waiting all-eyes-and-ears for its birth with a notepad and a pencil, sharp as a quill, resting between your finger and thumb?

Train and my mouthpiece: how could you separate the two?
Homeless, he spent years inside a rail-carriage, almost like Penelope Fitzgerald did on an old barge.

Quite early one morning I was crossing on foot the bridge on river Ganges. There was noone save a lady coming from the opposite direction. As we got closer, I could sense she was shooting repetitive glances my way. When we were about to pass each other by, she waved her hand as if to say hello and said: “Your face rings a bell. Although these days I have memory lapses, didn’t I meet you at this very place many years ago?”

The motorised boat left the ghat. When we reached mid-river, I could asee a floating black dot near the shore just left behind moving in our direction.

Last month I was at Oxford Book Store, Park Street, Kolkata, one of my favourite haunts. As I stepped in, I did not pause at the New Arrival sec- tion near the entrance as is my wont. As if drawn slowly but inexorably by something at the far end on the right-hand corner just past the stairs, I kept ambling along. Then I found myself near a shelf stuck to the wall, my hand reaching towards a book placed on top of it: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

He’s pounding the pavement late night incognito. A Street dog espied him and showed him around.

The train was still. Achromatic gloom outside. No station in sight. His eyes, blinking groggily, narrowed to a circle of luminescence, dimming and brightening, waning and waxing. Was he hallucinating, he couldn’t be sure.

It was one early morning in Bournemouth in the year 1885. The mountaintops were concealed in the pre-dawn mist. Inside a cozy room in an old mansion in the small town, Robert Louis Stevenson was fast asleep. All of a sudden, Stevenson let out a series of piercing shrieks, which startled his wife, Fanny.

I make landfall here every so often. Trip’s last leg is an hour’s toxin-purging travel by car uphill. With Pine aroma wafting in the air, I bounce back, away from sensory onslaught and humdrum of metro-life.