Closeness should have made me see
That my idol has feet of clay. I do.
But the sight only makes me
Rejoice that I am not that far from you.
Your nearness is my life-blood;
The sight of your tears shatters me.
Just seeing you lightens my mood,
Your smile is enough to make me happy.

Life will not go on thus forever,
Quite soon one day I will be parted from you.
Then we will meet rarely, if ever,
And I will know how true my love is to you.
Because if I forget you, get used to living without you,
As I have with others in the past;
After all the love I’ve given you, struggled so to be with you,
If this friendship was not meant to last,
Then I do not deserve to win others’ love:
To make friends with people who are caring and good:
For after I succeed in making their hearts move
I find that the friendship does not love as it should.

Every act of yours, every touch
Arouses my love, draws me to you:
More than this I’m afraid to ask,
But let me ever be a friend to you.

Fresh air blows in from the window
And blows out again.
Teasing, daring me to follow.
My lover is waiting, pleading,
Longing for a meeting.
My heart is light:
It wants to dance
To the music of love.

How can I stop it
From hearing the music?
How can I stop it
From swaying to the tune?
How can I rein in my thoughts
Who want to fly free?
How can I force my mind to study
And stop its flights of fantasy?

My foot hurts when I walk.
But that’s just the pain of being alive
Which is as good as the joy.
For it tells me that I am walking again.
I would like to run, even though it hurts,
On the path of life with friends
And not sit at home
Nursing my foot in hot water.

Outside, roses must be blooming.
The shops decorated for the new year.
People wearing new sweaters
And smiles on their faces:
Feeling the cold wind and bright sun.
I am young. And in love.
And a prisoner in my room.
How can I study?

I used to believe in love that’s divine;
Romance and passion in the moonlight:
Someone would court me with roses and wine -
But nothing seemed to be going right.

Faith soon gave way to cynicism.
I stopped believing in the power of love:
Innocence overrun by egoism.
I felt I had nothing to be proud of.

But then you forced your way into my life
With a gentleness I found hard to resist:
The past I wished to forget was in strife
With the future I was beginning to glimpse.

And through the dark clouds that seemed to envelop my future
I saw, softly twinkling, a star of hope:
Your companionship seemed to bring that light nearer -
I took your hand to help me climb the slope.

You showed me a whole new world:
Sprinkled with stardust and strewn with flowers!
High above my senses whired:
You gave my dreams new wings, new powers.

How could I resist the perfect gentleman’s charm?
How could I stop my dreams from coming true?
When my brave warrior vowed to keep me from harm,
How could I stop myself from letting you?

Days have not yet broken my dream:
The star is now a  sun lighting up the sky:
Life is not all peaches and cream -
But the beauty of life has not passed me by.

The path ahead winds so much I cannot see where it leads:
As far as eye can see, trees provide cool shade and shelter.
And even if further on, it’s thorny and full of weeds,
It matters but little if your arm rests on my shoulder.

As long as you love me
Life is beautiful.
Of deep joy sweet will be
The cup of life full.

As long as you love me
I am never alone.
You are ever with me:
Wherever you may roam.

As long as you love me
No day can unpleasing be.
All weathers delight me:
If by you I could be.

As long as you love me
Nothing else can matter.
Let the storm rage fiercely:
Your love is my anchor.

As long as you love me
I want nothing other.
What prize on earth could be
Dearer than my treasure?

As long as you love me
Let the world do what it will.
Your love will protect me
From disaster and evil.

As long as you love me
With your tenderness my love adorn,
Happiness bows to me:
I’m the luckiest girl ever born.

Every day was full of laughter,
Every moment spent together was bliss:
And now that we have to part
All that I’m going to miss.

I remember the smiles you bestowed on me,
Your tender loving care;
The quarrels, sulks and apologies:
How sweet those moments were!

The times we quarrelled were pure agony,
Being with you was my greatest pleasure:
Ah! fool that I was, I did not realise
That those days would not last forever.

I wish those days were here again,
But my wishes are in vain:
You’ve said goodbye so tenderly
And left me in such pain!

That day, when we last met,
I had not realised parting was so near,
And when I remember your sad silent eyes
I feel I want to weep on your shoulder:

But even that comfort is denied me:
I wait in hope for our next meeting
When I can tell you how much I care for you
And how I dread oh! terrible parting!

But even those moments will soon pass
And we must part, perhaps forever:
It cannot be true; I will not believe it:
No, we must always be together…

In mind if not in body, in soul and in spirit,
In love and in friendship, concern and care:
The ravages of time, the hardship of separation, our love will endure,
Oh, fate and man and heaven! part us if you dare.

The rain felt different that year. Before, rain had brought dirty clothes and laundry refusing to dry. It had meant upset schedules and frequent colds and frayed tempers. Never had it meant this music that lifted our hearts, this excitement that shook our bodies.

We rarely got a chance to be alone. Sometimes, we would steal a kiss in your room, if your roommate was away. But mostly, we sought privacy in our walks in the rain, when no one would stand and stare at us, when we could talk of all we thought of.

Do you remember the time we danced in the rain? It was the first shower after a searing summer. It was a Sunday evening and we were all sitting in the lawn of the college grounds. We were preparing for the contests that started the next day. You and I were practising for the debate. A group behind us was singing.

The clouds took just a few minutes to assemble, and the rain pelted down without further warning. All of us were too shocked to move to the shelter of the verandah. We just sat there, the rain feeling our bodies. And then you got up and started to dance. I laughed, and you pulled me up by the hand to dance with you. Someone turned on some music. And we all danced till the rain stopped.

I was hoarse for the debate the next day, and I blamed you that we lost.

I lost more than that contest. I have never danced in the rain since.

I have lost you too. You are a near-stranger now, a friend-who-was. You will be polite, I’m sure, if we meet again.

But why should I lose the rain? I will go up now, to the terrace, and let it touch me again.

The Middleman was recommended to me by a writer I admire. I am grateful to him: without his recommendation I was likely to miss it completely.

The book is set in Calcutta in the 1970s, but it might well have been another world. The book highlights the widespread unemployment of the times with outrage and sensitivity. (Millions are unemployed in Calcutta at the time, a character informs us.)

What I didn’t like so much about the book is that it seemed to be overcome by pity for the unemployed protagonist and others like him. It is a difficult perspective to understand for us who have found work when we looked for it. Moreover, the protagonist Somnath and his friend Sukumar seem to be trying only for jobs that are suitable to their education and ‘status’ and don’t consider trying out a menial job or a small business that might give them something to do and a little pay. Circumstances at the time may have been such that this course of action would have proved unfruitful: but the fact that they don’t even try holds you back from really feeling sorry for them.

Those were more prejudiced times, but the fact that the protagonist refuses to move outside of the narrow stereotypes of class and gender precludes much of the sympathy you might have felt. Somnath feels humiliated when his girlfriend pays for lunch, and refuses to marry her even though she’s facing pressure from her home to get married soon. His friend Sukumar is worse:  he gets offended when, responding to his criticism of her cooking, his sister asks him to help in the kitchen.

The author does provide us with an educated, somewhat independent heroine who is probably ahead of her time. So it seems reasonable to think that the author himself does not agree with the prejudices of his hero.

The book ends with a melodramatic coincidence. Yet how do I object to coincidence when such distinguished writers as Charlotte Bronte have used them?

The book is undeniably well-written – in spite of the difference in culture it draws you in and makes you want to know how Somnath fares. It draws a faithful picture of its time, and is worth reading if for that reason only. What was the most impactful part of the book for me was its afterword: much of the story that I had felt melodramatic was, the author reveals, actually drawn from reality.

Like most sequels, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs does not live up to the earlier Ice Age movies. In my opinion, the movies have been descending the scale, with the original Ice Age being by far the most engrossing. Even Ice Age: the Meltdown was pretty good. This latest one is like a badly engineered clone, retaining some of the core of the first two movies but little of their adorableness and interesting plotlines.

The movie retains the main characters from the last two movies: the mammoths Manny and Ellie are going to have a baby, Diego is scared he’s losing his touch, the possums Chuck and Eddie are as annoying as ever, and Sid is the same stupid lovable sloth. There are a few lovely cuddly baby creatures added in, a courageous but eccentric weasel and (you guessed it!) lots of scary dinosaurs. I wished we had seen much more of Diego, who I’d always found the most complex and interesting character – but he’s relegated way to the side.

The movie is so obviously a fantasy that you know everything is going to come right in the end, that however many dangers (and giant dinosaurs!) the friends are pitted against, at the end they are going to be back in their safe, happy world. Even the play area Manny had lovingly created for his to-come-soon baby and which is wrecked through Sid’s unintentional but unbelievably stupid actions, miraculously becomes whole again in the end.

The movie does provide a few laughs, and the animation is great. A nice way to spend a couple of hours, but little stays with you after you leave the cinema.

A conversation with a friend the other day set me thinking about Jane Eyre. I loved the book when I first read it as a teenager, and still love many things about it. Apart from the evocative prose, there is:

1. A female protagonist who does not merely go through life hoping to be rescued by a man.
2. A heroine who is not good-looking! She does not care for pretty clothes and is uneasy when her fiancé makes romantic speeches to her. This is rare enough now – at the time when the novel was written it must have been unprecedented.
3. A heroine who, despite having been in unfortunate circumstances since childhood, is by no means a doormat. She is bold and has a sense of self-worth, in spite of being a poor, young, not beautiful woman. She knows her own mind and refuses to give in to the persuasions of any of the men in the novel.

Two things, however, leave me cold.

The first is the coincidences in the story, and the ‘metaphysical’ angle. She arrives by chance at the door of her relatives when she is lost and penniless. She hears her lover talking to her when he is far away. I club these two things together because they seem related: if you believe in a fate or a guiding hand that leads you to your destiny, both of these might seem possible. For the more skeptical of us though, these unnecessary contrivances detract from the power of the story.

But the most important thing that has me feeling ambivalent about the book is the end. The book ends on a conventional ‘happy’ note: the heroine marries the hero and has a family.

But this ‘hero’ is the same person who was about to marry her without telling her that he had a wife already. Granted, the wife was insane, and he had supposedly been tricked into marriage. (Boohoo. He was an adult and he made his own decision – the book doesn’t even give him the excuse of his parents having pushed him into the marriage.) He not only keeps his wife hidden away in a room so that eligible single women might not come to know that he’s married, but he hides his fact from Jane, who is apparently the love of his life. He then pressurises her into being his mistress, and she runs away to escape him.

Yet this is the man she returns to, when his wife is dead and he is blind. How can I believe that this fate is unambiguously happy for bold, brave Jane?

It makes me wonder whether Bronte had Rochester blinded in order to have him dependent on Jane. A Rochester fully in possession of his faculties might have been too headstrong or wild for Jane to manage. A Rochester blind and dependent on her leaves Jane the mistress of their house and of their lives. In those times, maybe this was the best ending Bronte could come up with for her heroine.

There has been no power since morning, and no water. It is Saturday, and she has a late class to teach. But how is she to make lunch with no running water, with just one bottle of drinking water in the fridge?

She rummages in the kitchen cupboard for ideas. She is hungry: all she had for breakfast was a cup of strong tea and a biscuit. She pushes aside a bag of salt and comes across a bag of penne.

It has been a long time since she cooked pasta. It has been a long time since she cooked anything not Indian: dal, rice, and a healthy, usually green, vegetable dish. Sometimes paneer or rajma, to break the monotony. She had stopped buying noodles and pasta and packs of soup powder since her son went off to college. This bag of pasta must be a remnant of his last visit.

Pasta doesn’t take as much water to cook, for one thing. Especially as she will not add vegetables and so doesn’t need to wash them.

She stirs and adds spices without measuring them. She does it all without pausing to think. It’s surprising that it all comes back to her so easily.

Her son loves pasta: she used to cook it for him at least once a week. Macaroni and cheese. Spaghetti with mushrooms. Lasagna. But what he liked best was penne, put together haphazardly, as she usually did it, but always coming out of the pan aromatic and delectable.

She sniffs now, catching the aroma rising up from the pan. She turns off the gas and ladles the food out on her plate. There was a lot of it – she was used to cooking for two – but she ladles it all out. She’s hungry.

As an afterthought, she decorates the dish with a sprig of coriander.

She wishes she had some wine to go with it. What decadence – wine at a solitary lunch! She rarely has wine now, except when she is at one of the parties her colleagues sometimes invite her to, and which she usually declines to attend except when she is afraid of giving offence. She pours out some orange juice into a tall glass.

Maybe I’ll buy some wine, she thinks. Why not? She was entitled to indulge herself. She had become too much of an ascetic. Maybe it was time to live for herself again, to put her memories behind her.

She takes the first forkful of pasta in her mouth, anticipating the satisfaction. She is sitting by the window, where the slight breeze makes the heat more bearable.

She hastily takes a gulp of orange juice. Something is wrong. She tastes a little more pasta, chewing it slowly.

There’s too much salt. She had forgotten she was cooking for one. She had forgotten how the salt would interact with the butter and cheese and spices.

It looks so inviting – cream in colour, with a sprinkle of green and red. The sprig of coriander on the side.

She takes a few more mouthfuls, washing it down with the juice.

She has forgotten how to cook pasta.

She puts the fork down. She gulps down the juice. She gets up, places the empty glass in the sink and forks the pasta from her plate to the garbage bin.

She reaches for the bread-box, realises she has lost her appetite and puts it away again. She gathers her things and leaves for work, even though it’s too early.