I travel on impulse. At one short notice, I headed for the holy city of Ujjain. Great distance away. To meet monks at Kumbh Mela. I met one on the bank of river Shipra.

It’s not widely known that once when struck by a tragedy–the sudden demise of his wife, just five years after his marriage—R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), the Indian writer par excellence, had decided to give up writing.
“The writer’s personal tragedy,” said Graham Greene, “has been our gain.” Greene couldn’t have been more right. Narayan’s self-imposed exile didn’t thankfully last for long. After a gap of few years, he wielded the pen once again, this time with a much surer and greater hold.
“To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need”, wrote Emily Dickinson. R. K. Narayan, who was particularly fond of the English language right from his childhood, and who is now reckoned as one of the major writers in the language, had once, in a university entrance examination (1925), failed in English.

I couldn’t immediately determine how long I sat in morning meditation when my eyes fluttered open.
Instantly I became aware of its presence: a rearing cobra, few meters away, standing on its tail with its curved hood.

Last month (21 March), the news of Parsi New year being celebrated brought to mind the gifted Parsi writer Nergis Dalal (born 13 June 1921) who I met at her residence in Dehradun one and a half decades ago.
Exactly four months after I interviewed her, she wrote me a letter: “I really marvel at your enthusiasm and energy in conducting all the interviews with writers in India… I look forward to meeting you again some time.” I visited Dehradun a few more times after that maiden meeting with Nergis, but the second meeting with her somehow never took place.

I’ve a penchant for one particular gazebo in Mussoorie. Most of my concerns dissolve once I chug my way up there.

I cherish the freedom
To be left alone in a total switch-off mode
In a cafeteria overlooking
An aha-moment-inducing lake.

Past the tunnel
The Pullman stops dead on the track.

The train was about to arrive. I went to station bookstall looking for the day’s paper.
One hand clutching the daily, the other pulling a trolley, I sat on a bleacher with difficulty. There’s hardly any space anywhere, so crowded was the platform with people returning to Kolkata from Puri.

There were times when I booked a hotel room over the phone or through an agent only to regret it later. Not because there’s usually many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, but because of the fact that the room allotted to me could not offer a breathtaking view from the window or the balcony. But on occasions when the trip was taken on an impulse and I had to book it on the spot, I managed to get a room of my choice and came back home with memories to fall back on.
Let me briefly recount what happened at Kausani, a hill-station in Uttarakhand, and then at Manikaran in Himachal Pradesh. On reaching Kausani from Almora we tried a few hotels but somehow none of them could satisfy us in terms of the unobstructed view of the mountain ranges from the room itself.

Visiting a bookshop or a library always offered a surprise to me. l invariably came back home with some books that sought me out rather than my seeking them. A book tucked away on the far shelf, or a sight not exactly within visual range, can draw you to it taking you unawares.
For instance, one particular evening, quite by chance, you decide to take a different route back to your nest, and you get to see the pulsating path of magical silvery light cast by the just-risen full moon upon the river Ganges. On a couple of occasions, one in Coochbehar, and the other in Dehradun, while on the road, I distinctly felt someone invisible taking my hand and guiding me to a picture-postcard perfect setting.