In this part of the world, we’ve a river to walk by. Ganges is to me what Seine was to Maupassant.
At dawn, when crowd is not, I stand facing it. Steps leading up from the shore disappear under water swelling by the minute. The water-level rises right up to where I wait.
A heron, the kind you find in Jhumpa’s ‘Lowland’, comes floating from across the river to alight on my outstretched palm for breakfast. Accompanying it, on wind’s wing, from the Port of Oblivion, arrives my father.
Through the feathered friend, I come into contact with his apparition.