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).

Not wanting to flop around abed like a burbot on hook, he stepped out on the porch bathed in moonlight.

Legend has it that once a lady journalist for an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned up at the appointed hour when the author was about to step out with his wife on some errands. The writer asked her to join them. When they got back, the interviewer approached him for the promised interview. The writer replied that he had already given it to her. He further said that journalism was probably not meant for her and that she would do well looking for some other job.

When the surrounding hills retreat, and the hamlet goes dead quiet, I see this pair coming on tiptoe. They don’t get to watch me watching them.