He asked how I was doing, and when, as usual, I just said,“Fine,” he wouldn’t let me get away with it.“No,” he said. “You’re not fine, Viji.”I said nothing.

“I don’t mind if you have no faith in religion, Viji. Just as longas you have faith in the goodness within yourself.

I’m not mean about any one religion,” I said. “They’re allequally silly.

Soon, I’d setthe whole place yawning.

Celina Aunty called me into the schoolroom andmotioned me toward one of the empty desks.“Sit,” she ordered. “Write.”“Write?” I said. “Why?”

I tried a few times but kept choking up, unable to get beyondthe first sentences.

hen I saw him—scrubbed clean by a nurse, with his hair cutshort and washed and brushed—I could hardly believe it wasMuthu.

Muthu lay in beds near one another. You were each hooked upto a contraption that dripped medicine and food and water into yourveins,

“Did you use mosquitonets?” “Did you boil the water before you drank it?” “Whatmedication did you try to give her?”

“Rich boys, for sure,” Arul said. “You have to be rich to wastetime going on escapades at night instead of catching up on precioussleep

Arul placed his candle beside the others. You watched asintently as when you made your bead necklaces.

As we walked away, you and Muthu started playing a game,tossing a bit of concrete into the air like a ball and trying to catch itagain before it fell.

The drone of bloodthirsty mosquitoes had wokenme several times during the night, and my arms itched with bites.

My voice came out all panicky. I had avision of a ghost swallowing you whole.

But I cared. I cared about him as strongly as if we’d known eachother all our lives. I couldn’t imagine our future without him andMuthu in it.

But my dad was the best fisherman in our village.

I felt too excited to sleep, so I sneaked out to join him.

“Don’t you ever think about the future?” I challenged him.“No,” Muthu said. “There’s enough to worry about every daywithout worrying about tomorrow.”

You set it free, Rukku,” I cut him short. “Now it can goanywhere it feels like. That was really nice of you.”

“You really never pray?” Arul looked horrified. “Even the wrongGods are better than no God.”

It sounded like our father, O. R. T. Narayan,something something—all in English, not Tamil like Amma’sprayers.

“Give me something,” she whined. “I have to look after mybrother. See him?” She gestured at a small boy—stark naked—whowas sleeping behind her.

She sat with you, showing you ways to tie pretty knots and braidstrands together.

“No banana?”“No, sorry.”“Papaya?” you suggested.“No.”“Guava?”“No. No pomegranate, no jackfruit, no oranges, no sapotes, nosweet limes. No nothing.”

“Want to come for a swim?” Muthu grinned at you. “The water’snice and cool.”

I couldn’t help petting him. His coat was smooth. He wiggledand sniffed my hand.

“Get away from that puppy, Rukku. It might bite.”

Homesicknesspinched my heart for a moment. I thought of the rare weekendswhen Appa was away and Amma had enough energy to join us so wecould cook a meal together.

The smell of roasting chillis tickled my nose

The conductor looked at me and then at you, and stuck a handin his pocket and pulled out a hard green sweet that had melted outof shape.

he set packages wrapped in newspaper onthe cracked kitchen counter. “Presents for my girls.”

We’d just finished our dinner when we heard Appa’s heavyfootsteps. The sound of him staggering up the stairs to ourapartment told us all we needed to know.

payasam

[T.S.] Eliot stood—as he once famously said of himself—for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confirmed laudator temporis acti and in the mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. Thomas Aquinas among the scholastic theologians. (From "T.S. Eliot's Metaphysics" by Peter Milward, Culture and Civilization 2009.)

T. S. Eliot believed that the poet’s mind incubates fragmentary thoughts into beautiful ideas

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T.S. Eliot

But then his father finally said a resounding “No,” and nothing more would be spoken about it.