August is the month of Singapore’s National Day, and this year the state has been independent forty five years. In the district from Selegie Road to Victoria Road, where the arts institutions of Singapore are concentrated, on the lawns by Prinsep Place, some students have made and laid out a large card inviting the world to the celebration. “It is my birthday,” the card says—”won’t you come?”

I am solitary at the display, and late for the National Day of Singapore. I find many other visitors further down, on Serangoon Road, where they are buying trinkets, whereas the locals are spending boom-time cash in boutiques on the high street, and on iPods and iPads and iMacs in every Apple Store. The population of expensive cars seems to have increased. The economy is searing upward, and there is glee on Chinese, Malay and Indian faces all round, and every place is full with business, but in my three days there, the restaurants were inexplicably lonesome.

On account of the urging in my guidebook I considered McDonald House on Orchard Road, built before the great war, but famous for the bombing of March 1965, carried out by some Indonesians responding to a call (a plaque before the building says) by Sukarno to jeopardize the Malay-Singapore State which had just emerged. Three died, thirty-three were injured, and two Indonesians were arrested and found guilty and killed back in return, without delay.

It is a fine red brick building if you can block from your sight the newer buildings that surround it. It was built for the HSBC, but Citibank are in it now, their blue sign large outside. Just past McDonald House another period building is preserved, the Cathay Cinema, with a new cladding in the old style upon an old building which once served as a British radio station, and as a Japanese propaganda house during the occupation. The heritage building serves as gate and facade for a mall, the way turbaned liveried men guard the door at hotel entrances. At its brow a festooned banner proclaims the building’s platinum jubilee this year.

A few steps from there, the guards at the gate of the Istana stare vigorously at everyone looking through its majestic breadth into the pure-green rise behind it—and everyone looks who is passing the gate. Somewhere deep within that demesne is the manor built by Indian convict labor, to the design of architect J.F.A. McNair, and it was the home of a prominent planter, Charles Prinsep. Governor Sir Harry Ord bought and made it Government House, and now the President of the Republic of Singapore lives in it. Have all the great men who lived there slept well in it, knowing that their abode was made by unwilling hands marched to it from a faraway place?

The deep green leaves of equatorial trees tug at the eyes, and many trees are very old, and tortuously twisted, suggesting that they fought hard once against severe competition for the sun, and for water, of which they have unhindered supply now. An ancient jungle is turned into a garden, and buildings and bridges and highways are put in it, all teeming with business, and Singaporeans have cut their inheritance into a fine gem. In it there is abundance, of all things needed and more, and seeing and loving the city as much this time as always, I remembered that even Eden was a garden.

What can you say of a place so completely taken by Man, when you see how it is risen, by day or by night, in this brazen afterglow?

I am purging to the page every day for some weeks now and I regret I didn’t start the exercise sooner. I feel lighter, much lighter after I have written, whereas when I splash my emotions on others and see on their faces what I’ve done, I feel heavy and hopeless.

iPad photo from the Apple site

They say it is better to write by hand, that the hand is an extension of the mind, that when you feel tactile paper when pencil rubs on it, thoughts flow, uninterrupted. I can now vouch that it is true. So, I bought a pencil by Montblanc paying a hefty sum for the best in its class, thinking “what the hell,” while paying for it, and I’ve been enjoying how it rests on the web between thumb and finger, a weight just right, and cool when I rub the rings round its cap on my skin when I pause while writing.

But I enjoy belonging to this age and I hate the manual search, which I need to do often, and I want to cut and paste and rewrite, and I need to edit quite a bit—English is not my mind’s language. So, while I write into the Moleskine I’m often asking how I’ll seek out the piece I’m writing when I want it sometime, whether I shouldn’t be shifting back to the Mac for making notes and for serious writing.

But the laptop is a bother, it burns my lap, and in many public places it is unseemly to work on it, being conspicuous, and a bother to carry, though I use the MacBook Air from the time it was introduced. It is very thin but it is also very wide and it has a lid which you should keep open when you work on it.

It is two weeks since I began using the iPad, and my gratitude to Steve Jobs has doubled, tripled. My grief is that I’ll not likely ever see this man who has made my life so much fun.

It is a simple device for one who works only on its outside. The screen is as large as it should be. The keyboard in landscape is comfortable and most applications have a thoughtfully enhanced user-interface in this mode. I use only the wi-fi option because the device is not launched in India, so it will not work on 3G, and I’m not willing to ask anyone to trim my SIM card and hack the hardware. The rubber cover that sells under the Apple brand props up the device neatly in landscape.

As pretty as it is, Notes communicates with the laptop only via mail, so I took a tip from Creativist: I write on Simplenote, which syncs without a hassle with Notational Velocity on the laptop, from which I take the plain text into Scrivener for final editing, and then I publish. My office notes and all other notes I write daily files also in Simplenote, which I transfer at the end of the day from Notational Velocity to MacJournal. I maintain two journals in MacJournal, one a Work Journal, another a Writer’s Journal.

Calendar, address book, mail, none of them need a mention, they just look good while they do their job without ever calling for attention.

Keynote, Numbers, and Pages are applications I work on at the desk in the office, but I have them on the iPad and are good for light use, though among them I use Numbers the most, my spreadsheet work being always light. Evernote is a fine application, but I hope they include sub-folders soon, because it is difficult to store masses of gigabytes all in main folders, but the most fun is Dropbox into which I have moved my entire Documents folder on the Macbook Air, so they are all available to the iPad, whenever I connect.

Holding the device, feeling really like I’m holding a mere notebook in my hand, I feel again the spirit of my boyhood, the lingering excitement when I wore the compulsory new clothes for festivals. When I wake up I reach for the iPad and begin writing; at night, in bed, I tap into it a few words of happiness before I turn off the light—with a fervor I never experienced with a laptop.

I went round and round the slab of stone in a corner dank in the humid of the monsoons, and went and saw the rest of the simple church and came back and stood about the stone again, and sat down on a bench by it. A woman came up with two kids and whispered “Vasco da Gama” and all sound receded altogether. He had been dead fourteen years from 1524 under that stone in Cochin, and then they took him away to a church in Belem in Lisbon, which is where he is dead ever since, under finely ornamented stonework with a statue of him supine on top.

When I read of him when I was young his story was all of valor and adventure; when I grew up and read of him again the accounts were of intrigue and intolerance and unspeakable brutality; now I’m grown even more and I’ve begun this week to read Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s scholarly understanding of him. The reason for my enduring fascination for the man, I don’t know still, but he will surely bother me for many more years.

After living a life causing and suffering great dangers, at age 55, he fell to the Cochin mosquito on a Christmas eve.

A Dutch cemetery is close by the church, its gates locked, neat and clean and maintained by the Church of South India. And the Chinese nets are near too, still working, centuries after the Chinese installed them at the edge of Fort Island, at the mouth to the sea. When I was there last week, one of the nets was manned entirely by young men, who called out insistently to an attractive young white woman to come on up for a photo. She coped with their attention with silence, and her man with bashful nays on her behalf.

On the narrow road from these foreigners’ remnants we passed tiny churches in which lamps (candles?) were lit, and they were performing western customs in the local manner, somewhat like the arti in Hindu temples. The Fort area is clean and pretty with bright, spruced-up colonial houses used as home-stays—Christians, my driver Salim Kumar informed me, weighting the word.

The entire coast on Mattancherry that faced my hotel, the Taj Malabar, was lined with colored fishing boats where a bustle was about, because the ban on fishing was coming off that night, with the monsoons having eased their grating on the sea. Behind the boats are the line of ancient warehouses, bastions of the spice trade, to which the captain of my rented yacht took me as close as he could and said is in the control of the 20,000 strong Gujarati community. Their children don’t advance much beyond school, he told me. They are quickly put into the family business, one of the measures the incumbents have taken to foil all competition.

That shouldn’t bother many, now during boom time, when plantation land and the spice trade are less coveted than the business of concrete and construction that you can do anywhere where you can wangle some land and people will buy at your price. And, across the strait from Mattancherry, a new foreign hand is shaping Cochin, this one from Dubai, building a modern port that plans to compete with Colombo for mother vessels. The development is swelling land prices and the locals are dazed and amazed at how rich they’ve so easily gotten.

Cochin is the only South Indian urban center without a majority Hindu population and is hence a hospitable home to many gods, big and small, local and foreign, who have been accepting ardent reverence for centuries, occasionally making room for a new god seeking welcome. I couldn’t make time for the synagogue, so I have a strong reason to go back there, soon.

From the plane, I searched the land below for at least a sliver of brown, but it was green everywhere, even in the places where men have played with sharp objects. They call the place God’s own country, and tourists come believing it and they leave saying it is true, but when you’re on land you can see without looking too hard that Man is working overtime to wrest God’s country from God’ giving hands. It is petty to wish failure for him.

Why didn’t the sea smell of itself in Cochin? I realize only now as I write of it.

All about town I was looking for a sense of bloody battles, for lingering spots of debauchery that lie with billeted troops, for a feel of tanks rolling in, for the American Consulate and for other terraces from where the superpower scrambled out of Saigon. In the War Remnants Museum, and in the Reunification Palace, I searched the faces of the (mostly young) Americans, looking for remorse on faces of people who weren’t even born when their nation was engaged in war there. Now, back home, I’m squirming like I’ve been a voyeur.

I went to the former house of the late Ambassador Henry Lodge and looked in the rooms for the air of brutal politics. Only four other visitors were in the building, which is now owned privately by a Vietnamese, who allows visitors to walk about the house as in a museum, and shows a short video on what the Vietnamese call the American War. The visitors were young Americans learning to cook Vietnamese style, making rolls this afternoon.

While watching the video my thoughts turned inward to a memory in black and white from when I was four and on my way to the kindergarten, when another kid only a little older than I—who was squatting beneath a tree cobbling a slipper—stopped me and asked me to go home because school is closed because a great man, the President of America, has been killed.

The war was ended by the activism of masses of unarmed, conscientious Americans, so, even if America lost, Americans won. In the War Remnants Museum, the American faces in which I searched for remorse were nevertheless somber. While on the ground the heart broke for the Vietnamese peasants and soldiers and the children and the aged, and the jungles defoliated by Agent Orange, the pictures on the walls on the upper floors broke the heart a second time, this time for the American kids—fresh-faced kids with the looks of Hollywood stars, doomed in trenches and watery terraces and alien jungles. They didn’t deserve the war as much as the Vietnamese didn’t, so how is one to estimate whose tragedy was the greater? Theirs who lost 58,000? Theirs who lost 3 million?

Graham Greene’s Thomas Fowler says of the Notre Dame which terminates the Dong Khoi Street that it is hideous. I liked it, and sat at the Coffee Bean and watched it over a cappuccino. Some young men were shooting a lovely little lady who posed for them astride a scooter; I went over and took pictures of them all; they turned round and shot me. The next day they were shooting two girls, one in pink ao-dai, another in black western.

From the Cathedral the Dong Khoi street runs all the way to Saigon River. It is a shaded street, and must’ve been lovelier in its avatar as rue Catinat. Now it is taken by cafes and hotels and restaurants and art shops selling paintings depicting young Vietnamese women in ao-dai and the conical hats, in the fields, on bicycles, in rickshaws, and sometimes in gardens, enveloped by the autumnal foliage of temperate places, making leisure under conical hats. The favorite is of a lady in purple ao-dai alighting from a carriage onto cobblestones, in the moment the toe has touched the stone and the heel is still high—the picture was on every storefront.

From the window of Vietnam House, on rue Catinat, where I ate lunch, I could see the Lhuong Sen Hotel, which offered buffet lunch & breakfast, sauna, jacuzzi, pool, and, of course, foot massage and body massage. So much on offer, and yet none went in, and none came out, at any time I looked in the pauses between courses, all the three days I ate there.

A short walk from there, the Ben Thanh Market was desolate also, but for a very few, white people pinching cloth and rolling beads on strings hung on stall-fronts. It is a clean market, also where they sell fish, where as I watched a lady washing fish in a tub also thoroughly rinsed her face in it. The main aisle is wide and attractive, where they sell nuts and such, and further on, the sideways are so narrow the clothing on one side brush the dresses on the other and walking through them is as going through a car wash, a dry wash in this case.

A cool place to rest the feet after a walk in the 34-degree sun was Gustave Eiffel’s Post Office, on one of the curved benches at the entrance, exchanging looks with a clear complexioned Ho Chi Minh sporting a face beaten neither by weather, nor by war—just kind, and friendly, and good looking. The hall is pleasing. Even if people flowed constantly it wasn’t crowded. Slender steel columns are topped by gilt capitals on either side of the hall. Green arches connect the capitals broadside, an arch for every counter, and the vaulted ceiling rises from another set of gilt stucco bases rising from the capitals.

It was even cooler over drinks on the nineteenth floor, the Club Floor, of my hotel. The sun was an orange and yellow splash on the Saigon River, whose skin was wrinkled and unmoving. The Prudential Building was tall and proud on the left, and the Park Hotel was very tall also, on the right, at about the spot where, in the film Indochine, a nice Citroen dealership showed briefly behind Catherine Deneuve when she crossed the street to the Continental. Down below, about the foot of the hotel, the tiled tops of colonial buildings were squat among lawns that looked like neat green mats.

I’m home now, in this moment on my couch with Vietnam for the connoisseur and National Geographic’s Vietnam on my right and Matterhorn on my left, upset with myself for having returned seeing so little of the place. I’m going back in November, to Saigon and more.

At the Global Investors’ Meet, Mohandas Pai was ready to speak but the introducer droned on about Pai’s achievements and didn’t notice his hand urging a stop to the paraak, so Pai walked over and squeezed the man’s shoulder and silenced him.

Pai threw down facts on what IT has done for India, and of what is in store, that IT and like businesses will deliver a five-trillion GDP to India in twenty years, which means an additional two-hundred million “high-quality” jobs. He had the entire hall in his thrall, and I was stirred when he tossed to the Labor Minister: “The village model is dead, sir! The only solution is urbanization!”

I didn’t like it when I heard it. I saw without feeling that urbanization would work splendidly for his IT and (on a smaller scale) for my Manufacturing. Now, after some days, I’m veering toward his drift, like on this evening when I saw the paintings on the walls flanking the street linking Mysore Road to Majestic—village girls carrying water in urns on their heads, which is all right in a painting on a Bangalore wall, whereas for the girls the deal is dirty water, low-yield labor, and opportunity denied.

But the road that drew that thought showed also grime and noise and an absence of joy. And in Majestic when we turned toward the flyovers, the misery multiplied. To arrive into this from the village!

Still, I am not intelligently tuned to Pai’s drift. I can’t objectively train my mind toward what the city, or on the merits in the “village model” that Pai might have overlooked. My emotions for the city overwhelm me when I try to imagine the village, whose reality is for me linked to my childhood.

I love the city for many things: cafes, promenades, ponds, avenues, boulevards, quiet side streets, restaurants, bookshops, unisex saloons, cineplexes, some malls, stationery stores, crowds when they are thin, and people with a lost look on the face. Also, the city makes everyone some shades more beautiful.

I have a passion for city centers like Ginza district in Tokyo, for the entire length of Orchard Road, and in the last decade I always added Chicago into a trip to USA so as to walk endlessly on North Michigan Avenue. Hong Kong is exquisite on both sides from the ferry, and from the windows of bars and restaurants, but I abhor its streets. I love walking in the Huaihai street in the former French Concession in Shanghai, in the sun and in rain, and in the streets that lead from Huaihai to the Garden Books store. When in Istanbul before the merging waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, I have felt I should be frozen there forever. Here at home I loved MG Road once—I don’t believe them who say they’ll make it better than it was.

I have enjoyed walking also in dismal Bangkok and acrid Phnom Pen. I’ve been moved most in Jerusalem, and also in Munich where I have walked so many streets so many times for so many years, just as I have in Helsinki.

My greatest nostalgia is for the scores of times I walked on the narrow road in Mysore that connected my part of town to Jayalakshmipuram, the Open Air Theater of Manasagangothri on the one side and the Kukkarahalli Tank on the other. Mostly I walked there late nights when none were out, and occasionally a car would pass, slow and furtive and amorous, and, as it seemed in those days, amoral. There was often the moon above, down close like a friend, and the air, I realize now, was clean and crisp but in those days I had no thought for it, having surrendered to the cigarette.

Indeed, it is the urban I have always loved, the bigger the better, where I delight when I pierce the genteel air of swank places, where I spend cash only rarely—mostly I drink coffee there, watch people, and have the monthly haircut.

If it is true that the expanse that brings peace and joy is not that which is outside of us, but that other which should be unraveled in the mind, then that expanse is accessed as much in the city as in the village, in condo or villa or slum. It is possible to dwell in that expanse even while experiencing the things of the city that I don’t like:

Garbage, even when it is in neat black plastic bags, or in green tubs with lids shut; crowds; processions stalling me on the way to work; the cut-outs of India; the sight before restaurants in the morning; neons revealed during the day; children going to school (which sight is lovely in the village); the debris of buildings brought down, and the raw of unfinished buildings; glimpses of unpleasantness beneath veneers, behind facades.

But it takes just a moment to turn away, only a few seconds to walk back to the liberating wombs of the city. Even the greatest urban sprawl is experienced mostly in confined spaces, but the anonymity it offers, and the opportunity to jump from confine to confine, and the ease to shed this life for that, makes city life a mind game with infinite possibilities.

So, “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,” I feel contentment in my “deep heart’s core.” I’m beginning to be convinced that if the city is where the citizen is better served, and if the city gives the citizen varied opportunities to serve in return, and for profit, it might be that increased urbanization is the better solution for the human. Whereas Innisfree is for poets, and their number is small. I wonder if Pai has read the poem, and if it describes, at least in part, the “village model” that he mentioned.

His skin was the color of night, washed down a shade by the moon. I’d been reading, using a clip-on LED light, and I raised my head when Sujaya exclaimed in a way I’ve never heard from her before. Did he rush across the highway? Was he loitering in its middle? I saw him just when the taxi went into him, the driver cursing in his breath. The moments after that are a daze. Did the driver back up? What motion caused the multiple knocks I heard? I got off and rushed to the rear, expecting the body there, run over, and lingered a few moments looking around in the dim of the tail lights; but he was lying ahead of the car, curled up, foetal, and the volume of rich blood in the pool of light was disproportionate to his emaciated body. He was young. A soiled green piece of underwear over his privates was his entire clothing.

Vehicles began to stop, and a driver in whites called an ambulance, and some young men urged me to tie a cloth round the wound. A portion of the cloth, a cleaning cloth that my driver handed me, fell over his eyes and the crowd recoiled and asked me testily to fold it back. Except for that moment of tension, they spoke in hushed tones. But the truth is that neither they nor I knew how to handle a man who had bled like that, and I wondered as I fumbled with him whether I was getting anywhere. When a burst of fresh blood gurgled from his mouth I knew I’d lost him, even if he was still warm. I lost my mind as well, I think, because I tried to feel his pulse in the pit of his chest. There was a thick film of sweat in it.

The ambulance wasn’t coming, so we took him to the hospital in a rickshaw that has stopped to inquire. We were four men in that little thing. The ambulance passed us when we were two minutes from the hospital, its beacon and its siren both surprisingly loud.

The attendant brought out the wheelchair first, took it back upon the rickshaw driver’s advice, and brought out the stretcher. He and I fumbled with the body, and he announced as we loaded it on the stretcher that the man was dead. The doctor on night duty came from a ward somewhere and he too confirmed that the man was “no more.” I went out and sat on a plastic chair. After a few moments I called the rickshaw driver from the corner in which he hovered and paid him and asked him to go. A policeman arrived and asked me and the taxi driver to go with him to the police station. The doctor asked me to take a shot and then changed his mind and asked me if I have any cuts or bruises and said it is okay, I don’t need a shot, and so I washed and went out with the policeman who was alert but also at ease. The driver followed me. He was so struck by fear he was pooped. I noticed that his uniform whites were as spotless as when we had started the journey.

The Inspector in the police station was already reporting our accident over the phone to his boss. He asked the driver a question without cupping the phone, and, when the driver took a second longer to reply he shouted the question at him but cooled after that. He was rough when he asked him for his driver’s license but he changed his tone immediately after I interrupted and told him that the driver was a good man and that he was not driving fast, and we all saw the man too late.

The inspector’s boss sent a message asking that I should call him. He consoled me after I finished the story: “Accidents happen. You did well to bring the man into a hospital, and not run away.” I told him I had to go to Hassan right away, because I had a wedding to attend tomorrow morning. He sent a separate message asking his men to arrange another cab for me.

I hesitated to give my contact details to his staff. The hall was brightly lit, but in the lock-up cells it was dark. One of the two cells was for women and was empty. In the cell for men, the prisoners sat on the floor with their legs spread out before them, bored and lost. They had done a dacoity some days ago and had been quickly apprehended. Two children who seemed like prisoners huddled outside the lock-up in a corner, shivering in the warm night, though they didn’t seem afraid, only they were huddled too tight in the corner. They had clear faces, fair, and they looked at no one, and none of the many policemen were alert to them either.

The office-maid was talkative. “That man was a thikla,” she said of the dead man, meaning he was deranged. “And he has no relatives.” That was the assurance the men on the highway had given our driver. “Go to the police station,” they had told him. “He has no relatives, and he is loose.” He had followed my rickshaw into town in his car.

When I continued toward Hassan, in another cab, I asked someone if I shouldn’t go back and inquire about his funeral. “No need,” I was assured. “The government will take care of that.” I wondered if I’d be able to sleep, but I shouldn’t have worried because I was sleeping even when the harsh morning light had flooded my hotel room, until eight o’clock.

I didn’t tell anyone at the wedding of what happened, fearing they’d see an omen in it. I’m still arranging my emotions of that night, sifting them to see how much was a show of grief, how much was real, and what kind of a man I was in that incident.

Vikas Swarup, author of Slumdog Millionaiore, was quoted in the Shanghai Daily, that the Indian pavilion at the Expo is “stunning,” so I went there first. That author is a career diplomat now located in Japan, and he writes (he says) to fulfill an urge to use his talent. At the Indian pavilion the line was several coils round and I was terribly impressed and I went up to the elevated walkway for a better view. But the crowds next door, round Nepal, weren’t one bit thinner, and about the same number of people stood below umbrellas and waited to be let into Pakistan. Only Sri Lanka was open for immediate entry, into a red structure with a shrine for the Buddha in the middle where people kicked off their shoes and worshiped gaily. The people (mainly of their own republic) let Sri Lanka’s restaurant in relative peace, while Nepal’s restaurant did good business. The Buddhist thread was tangible.

Saudi Arabia loomed behind India and sang incessantly.

I left the Expo for an hour to quickly buy a little second-hand tripod for my Leica M9 from a genial old man who laughed easily and was patient through all my imploring to reduce the price just a bit, only so much much as the space I showed him between my thumb and index finger. He refused without a word and without losing composure, again and again, so I took the thing but gave him RMB 50 less and he made a sound neither Chinese nor English but of happy acceptance. He gave me a crumpled flimsy bag to carry my purchase, the bag that had probably brought him his lunch.

Sujaya sent messages asking me to hurry back—Indonesia had performed a dance and she was greatly excited by it. When I went back Indonesia was done, but New Zealand was doing its native song and dance: deep cries accompanied by thigh slapping with much gusto: it seemed like a war dance with potential to scare off any adversary, howsoever armed. Some Chinese (men) took off their tops and rushed onstage to imitate the dance—the Kiwis accommodated them very graciously indeed.

Africa had unified the presentation of its nations in a theme that was pleasant to the eye, even if simple. South Africa had Mandela‘s nice face upon its outside, and Egypt wasn’t a pyramid but a structure created with every form of line while playing down the straight line of the ancients, and gray and black and white like a giant boutique. It reached closing time while we were in Africa, and a short line of floats were being readied on the street for a show like Rio’s, manned by boys and girls who had perhaps been drawn from high schools.

Student volunteers were the human face of the Expo. They were dressed in green upon white, and stood at every bust stop, at all the gates, before every pavilion, at information counters, and, in short, wherever we cast our eyes. They struggled exquisitely, sometimes in anguish, sometimes smiling and helpless, being at a loss for words in English, but they always succeeded in providing assistance.

We had entered the Expo easily in the morning, and the exit was as painless, which is perhaps the world’s demand on China, the globe’s genius in high-volume management. When we reached the Shanghai Science & Technology Museum, near our hotel, groups of Westerners were heading toward the Oriental Art Center, venue for a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra—which was denied us by our early morning flight.

Vivek Shanbhag went about his affairs quietly in college. He was among the best performers in his batch, and he stood out because of his reticence in a boisterous class, so I knew Vivek though I was two years his senior, though I’ve spoken not so much as ten sentences with him on the campus.

Not many of us knew that Vivek was already in touch with the literary giants in Kannada—Shanthinath Desai, Yashwanth Chitthal, Ananthamurthy—and that he was on his way to a writing career. Now, in the same calm manner of those days, he publishes Deshakaala, each issue always on time, and presented better than all the previous.

He stumped everyone with the special issue last fortnight—it was big, attractive, and it had contributions from all the great contemporary Kannada writers, and, though a good job was expected, Vivek surpassed the expectation.

———-

Girish Karnad had arrived early. Shabhana Azmi walked in shining like a star and took the first seat on the first row, and in seconds Karnad was before her. She had performed in a Karnad play the day before. Then came her husband Javed Akhtar, chief guest. Ananthamurthy paused before Shabhana Azmi, as happily surprised as all the others, and tapped her on the knees to draw her attention. (Was she lost in reading something? I couldn’t tell, though I was directly behind her, one row removed.) She rose bringing her hands to a namasthe; he held her arms and asked her to stay seated; “not before you, sir,” she said.

————

I don’t suppose there was anyone in the audience who didn’t enjoy Akhtar’s speech. So many of us respect Urdu, and some have taken to hating it for other reasons. Akhtar theme was that language does not belong to religion, it belongs to its distinct region. And, in colonial times, in the process of dividing to rule, that lyrical language was taken from the region where it was born, from the culture it had fostered, and foisted upon the Muslim people. Urdu was thereby orphaned; a culture was orphaned also; and the result shows in the literature of the region, in Bollywood, in the noisy media.

It wasn’t a short speech, but there was complete silence until the last two minutes, when a few began to shift in their seats and look about. But he was done, and he received a standing ovation.

A rifle points toward the entrance to Osho International. Its stock is aged, worn smooth from much handling. A rifle just like the other points outward from the entrance to Osho International. The metal is aged also, and for some reason the lean muzzle reminded me of the broad snout of my dog. A black helmet rests on top of the wall of sacks, in both stations, perhaps to be worn after the shooting has begun. Some officers sit out and about the bunker of sacks and chat and read the papers, in the usual manner of maistries overseeing a single mason.

Across the street from the entrance the German Bakery was still closed and its front was hid behind shamiana screens. There was no evidence of repairs going on in the three days I walked before it, last week. Nothing about it suggested the tragedy that blew out fifteen lives; the black had been cleaned out.

The lady at the Welcome Center had the face of Hollywood’s Latino actresses—only, she wasn’t as tall. She asked me if I’ve read Osho. “A couple,” I said, “but his books haven’t catchy titles that you can remember.” She laughed the laughter of disagreement: “All Osho’s books have catchy titles.” I had waited a half-hour for them to open, having arrived at eight-thirty, and had spent the time watching the inmates. Some were astonishingly beautiful, both the Indians and the foreigners; some were so cheerful they didn’t seem to need this campus to expend their good nature; a few were morose; and many seemed like they belonged nowhere but here, serene as they were, walking slowly, deliberately. All wore maroon robes, except the help who wore the uniforms of their jobs.

It would have been absolutely silent, if not for the birds, and the cousin of the cicada, and the soulful, incessant grinding of a machine in the heart of the building before the white-marble Buddha who sat smiling before a curving, leaf-filled pond.

A powerfully built Australian and a slender white man, both tall, were our unlikely gurus for the initiation. The first rites were to remove our conditioning: dancing to various styles of music including the Ramlila; screaming gibberish; jumping and exclaiming hu on each landing; collapsing in a heap after having stirred the kundalini—that is how it went. Each was called a meditation, and none required an asana: “Take is easy; be comfortable.” I could achieve neither in the half-day, and discomfort rose to a shrill in the mind—whereas I had arrived thinking that if I liked it I’d stay on, even for a week, maybe.

I ate a quick meal in their clean restaurant, a health-food kind of lunch, changed in the locker room which had no curtain, and hurried out. Back in the hotel, I relaxed a long time over a single cup of coffee before getting ready to check out and leave for the airport. Now, I’m writing this at home in Bangalore just after watching a video on relaxation and awareness, the talk delivered by him who was never born and who never died, Osho himself, and I’m thinking maybe I should go back to Pune sometime, and make a renewed effort at those meditations.

I’ve returned from a three-day trip to Mumbai, and am savoring the comfort of my own bed this morning after.

Every now and then a breeze lifts the grim green mango leaves outside my bedroom window, but otherwise they are huddled and brooding and appear sometimes to be telling me something through the mesh between us. While I watch them I think of the tree in front which had been dry until only a week ago, and brown like it had been flamed, but it was the absence of the inner flame that had rendered it lifeless. Now, every leaf on it is newborn, only a week old, and a young translucent green. In the neighborhood, the mayflowers are out now in April in the manner of that beer festival in Munich, which hurries to commence in September, even if those good-humored Bavarians call it Octoberfest.

It is promising to be a cruel April in Bangalore, whereas in Mumbai the weather had seemed better, and in the breeze of the evening I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever disliked the city. I fought down the urge to get back to the promenade and to the cobblestone environs of the Gateway of India at night when I gazed down upon it from the third floor window of my hotel room. From that height it was clear that even with a quite swollen moon above, the sea couldn’t wet the feet of the monument placed on raised ground by confident Englishmen for their visiting king, emperor.

It is a high arch, fit for a king, and hopefully he walked as tall under it as his subjects wished him to.

The woven mats were perfumed and there was not a speck on them; neither did the bright white woven napkins bear a single stain. The small, express meal for the short flight to Bangalore was alright for an airline dinner. There wasn’t a fault I could pin on either of the two hostesses. I should have been having a good time, but I had thoughts: Did their Chairman really recruit them personally? Did he tell them himself that they should treat us as “guests in his own home?” How is the treatment in his “own” home, or on his plane on whose outer body I’ve seen, I think, the names of his children printed below the cockpit door? What did the airline mean, to say we were in King Class? That each of us was king? Or that their Chairman was king, and we were privileged members of his king’s class, because we were being treated “as guests in his own home?”

Indeed, I should have been having a good time, but I couldn’t, thinking for most of the 90 minutes that there was another who was having a better time, and that he is the “King of Good Times” that the billboards proclaim. When the time in King Class was up, I struggled to equal the bright parting-greeting of the hostesses.

But I’ll fly them again, and again, just as I always fly that other airline to Europe in which you are a “Senator,” and the other one which calls you: “Ambassador Class.” I’m happy to have the strength to hold forth against people who take so much money from you and call you names.

Hassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, we went in and saw, is indeed a grave, a burial performed by nature, of what would once have been a temple, which you can guess from the pieces of granite sticking out of the mound: capitals, pieces of friezes, broken lintel, sections of columns. Some pieces are carved all round, some on one or two faces, and all of them are of the class of the Hoysala.

The mound is overgrown with grass, prickly and hard now in this hot, dry season. There are short trees over it and around, and in their shade you can take relief offered by an occasional whisper of a breeze. What is the right action regarding the dead thing that is buried there? Exhume it and put together the members that have been smashed by man and crushed by nature? Put back into the garbha one of the many idols that are strewn everywhere in this capital of the Hoysala, and consecrate it, and begin prayers? And have the Nikon and the Canon and the Leica arrive with their owners to cock a look at this photogenic art of nine centuries ago? Or is it best that bygones be bygones, and so leave alone the grass and the trees and the teasing breeze and let them soothe the body and revive the soul of the rare visitor in this small, private property?

The owner thought we were from “the department” and wouldn’t change his reading even when we assured him that we weren’t, wishing not to worry him. But he wanted us to be from the department, with the hope that there lurked an omen in our visit. He has arranged a daughter’s marriage for later in the month.

We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Before Shanthinatha, an old lady with her saree and blouse rumpled, her hair mussed up, swayed as if in a trance, and sang with the great Meera’s fervor. Her song wasn’t melodious, yet it was pleasant. But she didn’t know the thirthankara before her was Shanthinatha. Another visitor told her whose statue this was, and also that the next temple is for Adinatha, and next to that, facing the main gate, for Parshwanatha. In all the time we were there no more than ten persons visited, and two of them arrived with us, and retired to a corner and the man laid his hand on the woman’s lap, and she cut his nails.

Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they’d have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy.

The manicure done, the couple left along with us, only a few steps ahead.

The State has no doubt regarding the benefits that it can pick from the past. To add color and shine to itself, it has installed a huge hoarding before Halebid’s Hoysaleshwara Temple with pictures on it of the principal political actors in the ruling party, and of their favored guru, all arranged with due attention to protocol. The State recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of the ascension of the great Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, whose portrait is alongside the other pictures, but quite apart from them. Krishnadeveraya’s dynasty assumed power some distance north, in Vijayanagara (Hampi), soon after the last Hoysala fell to the Turk. I tried to take a picture of the sweeping view of the Temple complex, but the hoarding hogged the foreground.

Down the street from the temple, a white lady had discovered a better opportunity. Under the noonday sun, in the summer’s heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. They were doing their daily chore of washing the clothes of all the ones at home. There were enough colors and depth and width to challenge all the cameras on the white lady’s person—she had three of them, I think. Her only problem was the harsh noon-light, but she seemed to know how to handle it, so intense was her focus. I wanted that picture, too, but I hadn’t the courage to raise my camera at women who had lifted their dress to the knee, and were quite wet. So I went a distance on the bund and took aim with my Leica X1 with its 24 mm fixed lens and got no color and no story in any of my many shots.

I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala’s Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.