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.
On Children’s Day, 14 November 2022, author Ruskin Bond’s message to the children went viral on Instagram. Here’s what he said: “Hello, Happy Children’s Day! It’s freezing up here in Mussoorie. I’ve got my muffler out. We have some lovely sunny weather. But today the clouds came and we might get some rain. It’s so good to know that I’ve so many friends and readers on Instagram and I take this opportunity to say Hello, Good Morning! Have a great year. Have a great year next year and the year after that. Hang on to your dreams. Pursue the things you want to do in life with passion, with vigour. Build castles in the air but put foundations under them. I wish you all success in your school, in your college, in your exams, in your career later on, and I hope to stay in touch with you a little longer.”
I visit the place after decades. An invisible presence takes me down the zigzaggy route in drowsy quiet. A certain bend motions me to pause. I see a path branching off and stretching away to a blurring point.
I Allan Sealy whose latest novel Asoca: A Sutra (Penguin Random House) fetched the Book of the Year Award last year (Tata Literature Live 2021), has now embarked on writing two more books, one, the Gazetteer of the Doon Valley, and another, a sequel to his Memoir ‘The Small Wild Goose Pagoda’ (Aleph 2014).
