JOST A MON

The other day, the boy and his amma and I watched Dear Zindagi. He has been a fan of Alia Bhatt since he saw her in Student of the Year. He thought this film would be as fun as the schoolish one. All the psychoanalysis left him slightly bored. When (spoiler alert) it turned out that Bhatt's character was suffering from the psychological consequences of childhood abandonment, he grew pensive.

Later, he had a conversation with his amma.

"Are you happy with me?" he said.

"Of course, sweetie," she said.

"You don't want any other kids?" he said.

"No," she said.

"If you had another kid, would you leave me with my grandparents?" he said.

"Don't worry, sweetie," she said. "We are really not going to have any more kids."

"Ok," he said.

Then he said, "If you don't want any more kids, why doesn't atcha get a vasectomy?"

"What!" said his amma."Poor guy, why should he go through all those procedures?"

"It's no big deal," he said."It won't hurt at all."

A few years of working in Delhi after graduating from IISc, I took up a job in Chicago. Once there, I began to reach out to old friends who'd preceded me to the US. Emails were becoming quite standard at most workplaces and it was easy to track people down. The acquisition of a discount phone card also meant I could call half the planet with impunity.

I heard on the grapevine that one of my classmates was moving to the US. She was working for Tata Consultancy Services. They had tentacles everywhere. Their engineers would usually rent a big flat or house and share rooms, just like in college. I called my friend in Bombay and her father answered. We'd met before and he knew who I was. We exchanged a pleasantry or two.

"May I speak to such-and-such?", I said.

"She is at the airport, flying to the US later this evening," he said.

"Ah," I said. "Where is she flying to?"

"San Francisco," he said.

"Is TCS sending her?" I said.

"Yes, she'll work at a client site," he said.

"Is there a number I can reach her at when she arrives?" I said.

He gave me the number.

A day or so later, thinking she'd have arrived and probably settled down in one of those TCS shared hangouts, I called the number.

A guy picked up the phone.

"Hello," I said. "May I speak to such-and-such?"

"Hello," he said. "She hasn't arrived yet."

"Ah ok," I said. "When does she get there?"

"In about 4 hours," he said.

"Who is this?" he added.

"I'm so-and-so," I said. "We were at IISc together."

"Ok," he said. "I'll tell her you called."

"Will she be staying there?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"At that same address?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"So I will be able to reach her at this number if I were to call tomorrow?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"She's on assignment with TCS, right?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Are you working on the same project?" I said, just to be friendly.

"No," he said.

"Ok, thanks," I said. "Bye."

"Bye," he said.

A few hours later, my friend called me, fairly sizzling in outrage.

"What the devil do you mean," she said, "by asking my husband if I am going to stay with him?"

"You're married?" I said.

"Yes, of course, I'm married," she said. "Didn't you know?"

"How the dickens would I know?" I said. "You never told me. And your dad didn't tell me either. We spoke for nearly ten minutes and he never mentioned it."

"Well, now my husband thinks I know some seriously weird people," she said.

"Next time you get married," I said, "Be sure to tell me."

Years later, I still haven't met said husband. My friend still occasionally brings up the story of how I called the man to ask if his wife would be living with him after marriage. I should protest every time, but a blog post is better.

It appears that J P Vaswani is still going strong, nearly a century after he was born. While he is known for his spiritual teachings, at one time his c.v. also included a line to the effect that he was the nephew of T L Vaswani, a boon companion of Mohandas Gandhi himself, and a founder of a mission. I was never clear on what that mission's mission was.

Back in Jakarta in the 80s he would visit our school frequently. As a Shukracharya for the kids, he would hold forth on a variety of topics for our moral instruction. We'd sit in the assembly hall, wilting with boredom, and listen to him go on about matters of the soul and supreme powers and the like. Once in a while he'd come out with an illustrative story or two. We rarely paid much attention.

One day he was talking about the immensity of God.

'Do you know osmium?' he said. 'It is the heaviest metal in the world.'

We stirred.

'It is so heavy,' he said, 'that you could not lift a spoonful of it.'

At this point half the class turned to look at me. I was no less than JP at throwing out random assertions.

I shook my head in teenage outrage.

'He is wrong,' I said through clenched teeth.

After the lesson, my classmates laughed at me.

'Come on, guys,' I said. 'Work it out.'

A spoon is about 15 millilitres. The density of osmium is 22.6 grammes / ml. So you have 339 grammes of osmium in a spoon.

I'm yet to find a person who can't lift 339 grammes.

I was on jury duty a while ago. Two weeks of my life spent on my civic responsibility. Most of the time was spent waiting to be selected for a trial. During that time, I had little to do than eavesdrop on my fellow jurors.

An actor waited in the summoning room. He held forth at length to an attentive young woman.

I was called to audition for The Crown, he said. To be a doctor.

I thought to myself, do I really want to be a doctor? It is far too generic. So I declined.

I didn't want the role. It is better to chase a role not wanting it and not getting it, than chase it wanting it and not getting it.

I am going to be rather busy in the New Year, he said.

Do you know Robert Fisk? He has written a book on the Middle East. I'll be doing readings from it in Rotherhithe.

I am teaching at an acting boot camp. It is a somewhat difficult balance to achieve. If I spend too much time on any one person, they won't learn their lines. If I spend too little, they are resentful.

Last year was interesting, he said. I was in Italy. The fringe theatre scene there is incredible. It is in the most unlikely places, and inexpensive, and people turn up after a long day's hard work.

My family? Well, there are actors, he said. My sister directs. My mum runs a bed and breakfast. It tides over the lean times.

She is like you, he said, she has an arts background. But she is more practically-minded.

My sister organised a panel discussion with the remaining cast of Solaris. Yes, for the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. It was awesome.

****

You know, the real creatives in TV are the producers and the scriptwriters. The director is like a glorified first assistant.

****

Can you imagine Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman with all those kids? Here you have the best of British acting and the camera is focused at their knees and all those children milling about. Paid good money, though.

We went for dinner once with Rickman and when the bill came, Rickman stopped us, saying: "Two words: Harry Potter."

The actor was so pleased with his drawling imitation of Rickman that he said it again:

"Two words: Harry Potter."

I didn't go to Reading, not this year, at least.

Poor pun, that... What a strange, troubling year this has been. Besides worrisome politics and deaths, there has been ill-health, injury and sickness in the family, and the boy was badly bullied in his new school and had to be moved when that school showed little inclination to tackle the issue. It has felt that there was no time to truly relax and unwind. Even books, at every other time a palliative, failed to boost the spirit, except during the brief snatched moments that they could be read. A strange, troubling year.

Considerably and consistently behind the times as usual, I decided to read books by women this year. Various luminaries had encouraged us to do so. Some spent a year practising what they preached. Others created lists for interested readers. My own reading over the decades has generally been dominated by male authors. This is because the default position - in libraries, newspapers, shops, review journals - is the promotion and preponderance of males. To look for books by women is an active choice, and the effort involved is considerable because of the sheer dominance of publications by men.

Over the past few years, I've pretty much given up reading more than one book by the same author. Except for the multi-volume fantasy or science fiction cycles, it seems that there are more authors for me to discover than to explore the variations of any given one. So too this year.

Total books: 105

By women: 81

of which

Fiction: 62

Non-fiction: 19

My attention span continues to dwindle, and my memory of the contents of the average book is fairly fuzzy. So I continue to read smaller books. Not many of the books this year exceeded 200 pages. The ones that did were mainly non-fiction ones.

There were some truly superb pieces of non-fiction. A particular favourite was Marwa al-Sabouni's The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect. Born and brought up in Homs, al-Sabouni is  an architect, and her book is a thoughtful exploration of the collapse of her native city and the role of alienating architecture in its fission. She intersperses her academic experiences with the horrors of living through wartime, and she beautifully analyses both theoretical and practical considerations in the design of living spaces. An amazing thought-provoking work.

In the vein of wartime stories was the The Diary of Lena Mukhina, a sixteen-year-old girl who survived the Siege of Leningrad. The book begins a month or so before the German invasion and all Mukhina can think of is a boy in her class and why he pays her no attention. Once the war begins, in between accounts of school exams and studies, and which of her girlfriends is really a friend, she is happy to repeat propaganda that the Soviets will triumph. It is after Leningrad is encircled and there is constant bombing and food begins to run out that she suddenly steps up her game: her intelligence and empathy is fascinatingly mature for one so young. In between puppy love and friendship and Communist platitudes are truly beautiful passages describing the lives she, her family and neighbours are leading. The terrors are all too real and the terse text is spellbinding. I couldn't bear to read another page and I couldn't bear not knowing what would happen next.

Again on the theme of war was Lizzie Collingham's magisterial account of the battle for food and the maintenance of its supplies for the soldiers and the home front during World War II: The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. This is well-written, often fast-paced albeit saturated with statistics. It was clear to the Nazis that they could never produce enough food to feed their armies and the Fatherland, and to this end they were willing to sacrifice any number of lesser beings in Eastern and Southern Europe to repopulate those lands with Germans who would, of course, be the most productive farmers ever. Meanwhile, Churchill was willing to sacrifice the health of the colonies (in particular India) to supply his armed forces, and is directly implicated in the horrors of the Bengal famine. The Japanese left their soldiers to forage as they advanced through Asia, resulting in more  military deaths from starvation than from actual fighting. The Americans, on the other hand, amped up their agricultural production so well that their civilians and soldiers remained the best-fed and healthiest on the planet, and managed to feed many of the Allies as well. At the end of the war, the US was the dominant agricultural and industrial power on the planet, and everybody else was in ruin.

Lest you think I was solely immersed in sanguinary matters, I'd like to highlight the fact that I looked up to the stars as well. Lisa Randall's Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universeis an exciting overview of the search for dark matter and an elucidation of her theory that explains why the Earth faces periodic bombardment from comets (among others leading to the death of the dinosaurs). Of course, nobody has seen dark matter, and nobody has a model that explains all aspects of cosmic evolution and the distribution of the galaxies. And this makes the situation exciting both scientifically and sociologically because there are various theories fighting to overcome each other as the cosmic model. Priyamvada Natarajan, another fine astrophysicist, wrote Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos, a rather good explanation of the latest scientific thinking. 

This morning I was frustrated to find that the entry gates at the local railways station were blocked by milling commuters. One woman kept touching her Oyster card to the reader and it kept beeping back to her without letting her through.

In some impatience, I said, 'Wait till the light turns yellow.'

'I did,' she said, 'And it turns red.'

I reached across her to brandish my Oyster card at the reader, just as its indicator light flashed yellow.

It turned red. So did I. The gate remained resolutely shut.

The woman grinned at me.

'That will teach me to pontificate,' I said.

We stood there alternating Oyster cards at the reader while the queue behind us grew and grew. 

'Oh dear,' I said, and moved to another line.

Just then the gate opened and the woman nipped through.

The other day I was in Brussels to see high school friends with whom I'd been in touch phonewise and WhatsAppily but not actually set eyes on for decades and I thought I should try a bit of French with the locals. Arriving, per directions, at a crossroads not entirely sure which of the streets led to Neelu's house (streets being unmarked and I not trusting Google Maps since it led a rail replacement bus badly astray not two months ago after I attended a wedding at Newmarket and strove to get to Cambridge), I decided to stop an elderly pedestrian and interrogate him.

'Ahem', said I, 'Excusez-moi, monsieur. La rue Coubertin est où?'

He stopped and looked around and a pensive mien descended upon his face.

'Attendez', he said, 'attendez.'

I attended.

'Un moment,' he continued.

I gave him a moment.

The pensive mien ascended and he brightened. 

'Là bas', he said.

He did not point. I bethought myself of his panache as he made a fish of his hand and whipped it around the periphery of the crossroads, wriggling his fingers in unison and making the following noises.

'Zut', and 'phwzzz' and 'bopp'.

The last sound signified a street diametrically across from where we stood.

He smiled.

'Merci', I said.

We parted.

So, 2015 is over. This was the year my blogging ground to a halt, my habits became even more sedentary, my achievements negligible, and my travels were to Orlando, for heaven's sake. Another year like that and I might as well throw in a nearby towel and take up life on some bend in a river, pondering the existence of fish.

To be honest, this year is not off on the thumpingest of starts. My washing machine conked out and the delivery guys of a new one couldn't install it. My patience with incompetence is also thinning. I've been lugging heaps of apparel to a laundrette and obtaining a renewed appreciation for subcontinental people who breaks stones with clothes. At the same time, various neighbours and municipal councillors have been casting beady eyes on a bit of renovation we're planning. I have half a mind to invite some illegals to occupy the jungly garden at the back and encourage them to throw nightly parties just to keep the neighbours bright and interested.

The reading was down on the previous three years. I managed 118 books. In this I'm way behind that powerhouse, M. Orthofer, doyen of the Complete Review, who polishes off probably three hundred books a year and manages to review ⅔ of them.

Some books were brilliant and others were absolute dogs. This is no news.

But here are some stats to start off:

Fiction - 80%

Women authors - 30%

Translations - 43%

Countries (non-English) - 14

Languages other than English - 25

My first Basque translation, I think, and my first book by an Eritrean author. And my first Dogri and Rajasthani translations.

Language	Count
French	6
German	4
Italian	4
Russian	4
Spanish	4
Arabic	3
Portuguese	3
Finnish	2
Hebrew	2
Polish	2
Swedish	2
Assamese	1
Basque	1
Catalan	1
Czech	1
Dogri	1
Dutch	1
Gujarati	1
Korean	1
Oriya	1
Rajasthani	1
Slovenian	1
Turkish	1
Urdu	1

For a quick roundup of recommended titles, I start with non-fiction.

Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History: a riveting account of the Moscow Kremlin, from its earliest to latest incarnations, and the worrisomely brutal types that lived in it, destroyed it, refashioned it, and bent it to their own interpretations of history.

Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance: what an incredible repositioning of the human experience bang into the centre of the Universe! One of the biggest advances of science has been the demotion of humanity and the Earth from their egocentric position in the cosmos and the realisation that in almost every respect and at every scale of the Universe, we are negligible and not special. But Scharf reveals the latest thinking in cosmology and quantum physics that shows this 'Copernican' principle needs to be modified in the light of all sorts of special events that should have taken place for the Universe to be as it is, for the solar system to have developed, and for our remarkable appearance at a particular juncture in time when we can actually learn something of the Universe. Superb.

Mariusz Szczygieł, Gottland : Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia: Indians would no doubt fondly recall Bata, that ever-present purveyor of shoes. The story of his ruthless rise to power is well told in this Polish author's superb collection of essays (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) on lesser-known aspects of Czechoslovakia's Communist and capitalist avatars. As a fellow Iron Curtain survivor, his insights into the paranoia and delusions of the Czechs are sympathetic, accurate and mordant.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets: a wonderful, detailed and erudite study of what water means for a planet, how it gets there, what happens to it, how it escapes it, and - the atmosphere! plate tectonics! evolution! life! extraterrestrial worlds! It's all mind-blowing and absolutely superb.

I should mention Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which was a best-seller in India, if less covered in the mainstream press in the UK: although it purports to be a non-Eurocentric perspective of world history, to me it did seem more like a study of the effects of the rest of the world on Europe than a proper history of that rest of the world. I'm not putting it very well, but ultimately it disappointed me for its lack of coverage of enormous swathes of the planet - Africa and Latin America were almost completely ignored, and Oceania and China were given rather short shrift. There was much talk of trade links but very little of scientific and cultural cross-pollination. I suspect a properly non-Eurocentric world history can be fashioned from this one, using its superb bibliography, which by itself is worth the price of the book.


Now a bit of fiction.

When I read bildungsromans like Stefanie de Velasco's Tiger Milk, it occurs to me I completely missed out during my teen years. No sneaking out of the house at odd hours, no wild parties, no unprotected sex with people with mid-life crises, no adulterated liquors, no drugs, no creativity. Damn. I was a nerd, so that might explain much of the relative joylessness, but the young girls in this German novel (translated by Tim Mohr) are bright and sensitive and yet get into such heaps of self-inflicted tribulations, I'm glad (in retrospect) I grew up completely boring.

Alena Graedon has fashioned a very scary near future in The Word Exchange where people's addictions to their smart devices and information retrieval via instant Google searches can be co-opted for profit by private enterprises. Already there's research showing people think they're smarter than they are because they can look up facts on the internet, and simultaneously there's a devaluation of people and cultures that are not present on the web (note the widespread consequences of gender and cultural biases in Wikipedia). Graedon's dystopia is only slightly incredible but it's frightening - grab it for some sleepless nights of worry.

The Sudanese writer Amir Tag Elsir's Arabic novel African Titanics (translated by Charis Bredin and Emily Danby) is the story of desperate emigrants trying every way to get to Europe. Topical, of course, but adumbrated by the stories they tell each other, this book lends another perspective to the horrors of their crossing.

(I'm in awe of Charis Bredin, who I think is still a student and yet she has a couple of translations published already. In awe and deeply envious.)

I was so taken up by Esmahan Aykol's Baksheesh, (translated by Ruth Whitehouse), one of her series of crime novels featuring Kati Hirschel, a feisty Istanbullu detective-book-shop owner, that I went and created a Wikipedia article for the author.

What is the use of those obscene Emiratis and Saudis and Qataris who do nothing of any artistic or scientific consequence with their immense wealth, in comparison to the indigent Egyptians and Maghrebis and Syrians? Take the writer Ali Al-Muqri's Hurma (translated T. M. Aplin) - what an insight into the lives of Yemeni women and their desperate attempts to take ownership of themselves in a claustrophobically patriarchal and hypocritical society.

I should also mention Jacob and Dulce, a bitingly satirical dissection of Indo-Portuguese life in Goa in those pre-Independence days by Gip (nom-de-plume of Francisco João da Costa; translated by Alvaro Noronha da Costa), one of the very few really readable translations from the Sahitya Akademi.

And finally the sharply observed short stories of Ahmed Essop, South-African writer of Indian origin, Hajji Musa and the Hindu Fire-walker are well worth the read.

Since I began blogging - a bit late to the party, but early enough to catch the up-wave - I've been rather fortunate in being able to meet up with other bloggers. For some reason, London proved to be a strong attractor. People were either moving to live here, passing through, or just generally visiting. And so I got to know several lovely people - Veena, Space Bar, Singaporean in London, Sakura, Bint Battuta, Szerelem, Rochelle.

Most recently I met up with Aishwarya. Mucho gusto!

All we need now is for Arkady (or Kim) to turn up in London and introduce themselves, and 2015 will be complete.

You cannot feel sorry for Durrani.

This is a man with an eye on the main chance. To obtain it, he doesn't care how many people he steps over. He doesn't care how he achieves that main chance. Were he only a little bit smarter, he might even obtain it.

Durrani gets married early to a Pakistani woman. The marriage does not last very long, and when it falls apart, we expect Durrani to be upset. Durrani does not appear to mind. He continues to behave in the same optimistic yet pushy way that alienates his wife.

Then he marries a Hindu woman. He looks as pleased as ever while his new wife begins to look wan.

One day his father-in-law calls him home.

"I want you to divorce my daughter," he says. "How much money do you want?"

Durrani doesn't think long.

"250,000 pounds," he says.

"For far less than that, I could have you shot and disappeared," says the father-in-law. "Think again."

It's not clear how long they negotiate or what sum is agreed, but soon thereafter this marriage also dissolves.

Meanwhile, Durrani's career is on an upward trajectory. Somehow he manages to impress bosses, alienate his colleagues, and progress from one juicy contract to another.

He also gets married a third time. This marriage - to a Muslim woman again - looks quite successful. He has two kids. He buys a fancy house in a fancy part of town. He continues to pull in the bucks at a prodigious rate.

One day he goes home and said, "Good news, honey. I've made the final payment on the mortgage. We own the house now!"

"Very good," says his wife.

That night, she gives him a bunch of papers.

"I want a divorce," she says.

She wants custody of the kids and possession of the house. Based on his earnings, she wants £7,000 every month.

Durrani's lawyer thinks that is excessive. The case goes to court.

The judge listens to the arguments. He awards the wife £8,000.

Soon after, Durrani loses his lucrative contract. His pay rate plummets.

Any other person will be crushed by these whammies. Durrani is unfazed. He continues to keep his eye on the main chance. He talks of new plans to make money. He keeps sucking up to his bosses and he keeps pissing off his colleagues. He is unable to keep up the alimony payments, which are calculated at the peak of his earning days. He does not look particularly bothered.

As I say, you cannot feel sorry for Durrani.

Sometime after the boy's seventh birthday I told him not to get too attached to his name. When he is around nine years old, I said, his name would be changed.

He was disbelieving at first, then delighted.

"Can I be called O'Henry?" he said. He stretched out the name like so: H E E E N N N R Y.

"No," I said.

"Why not?" he said.

"The Queen will decide your name," I said.

"What will she call me?" he said.

"Bhaktavatsalam Arumugam," I said.

"What?" he said.

"Bhaktavatsalam Arumugam," I said.

"I can't pronounce that!" he said.

"You have two years to learn it," I said.

"Are you joking, acha?" he said. "Are you being ironic?"

"Does it look like I'm being ironic?" I said.

"Wait till the letter from the Queen comes," I added.

Every once in a while I'd remind him that his name would soon be Bhaktavatsalam Arumugam. He went and told everyone at school. His teacher asked him to bring a letter from his parents explaining that his name has been changed.

Soon after his ninth birthday, he wanted to know when he'd get the letter from the Queen. By now he could say 'Bhaktavatsalam Arumugam' without any trouble. He was actually looking forward to a bit of correspondence from royalty.

He also was a bit suspicious.

In school, he advised his friends to start calling him 'Bucky'.

Then he told his teachers that he would soon have a new name.

One of the teachers huffed up to his mum and said - eyes wide as a moon, "The boy says his name is going to be changed!"

"We're just pranking him," said the wife.

The gossip in the school is that Feanor and family are peculiar.

As for the boy, he realises on one level that we were kidding. On another, he's not entirely sure.

They sure fuck you up, your mum and dad.

We woke up at 6:15.

We were out of the house by 7:15.

We arrived at the Docklands at 8:30.

We registered for the competition at 8:35.

We were told that the bouts would start at 9:00.

At 9:30, they still hadn't started.

We asked an official what was going on.

They were expecting a contingent of kids, they said.

You wouldn't want to disappoint a bunch of kids, would you? they said.

The kids arrived at 10:00.

The bouts began at 10:05.

The boy was eliminated in the first round at 10:15.

We left.

*****

The boy has been going for judo classes for a few years now, but this was his first competition outside his club.

He was the only representative of his club at the competition.

The other kids came from Hackney and Kent and south-east London. They came in groups, teams, with their coaches, all of them gung-ho.

The boy felt a bit left out when the other kids started warming up and practice sparring with each other.

I'm bored, he said. I've got nobody to practice with.

Just join one of those groups, I said.

Before long, he was running around and practising throws with his new friends.

*****

The boy was in tears after his elimination.

You did really well, said a girl. I saw you, you were pretty good.

The boy was disconsolate.

I only had two fights, he said.

These kids have been taught throws that I don't know, he said.

They cheated, he said.

They didn't bow before the fight, he said. That's cheating.

We explained that this was his first competition and that he didn't roll onto his tummy as soon as he fell.

You'll do better next time, we said. Don't feel too bad.

I'm embarrassed, he said.

I'm never going to the Docklands again.

On the train the other day it was crowded as ever and I didn't have space to read my book so I looked about and I saw a smartly dressed woman sitting with a large stack of papers with dense writing on them. I realised then that I was not bad at all at reading upside down. That is to say, I wasn't upside down, but the writing on the woman's papers was upside down. To me, that is. What I read was her to-do list.

Wash my hair 

Sort out clothes in my bedroom 

Leave out Italian hw and dictionary 

Set alarm for early departure 

Hang out washing and fold aired clothes 

Get room ready for M______ 

Leave out L___ kick boxing gear and my singing stuff 

Don't set house alarm 

Fill in parent day for L___ ice skating trip 

Book annual leave for Christmas 

Speak to mum re: dates 

Check out kami sparling blog post 

Locate video of dancing priests

The boy's had a love-hate relationship with his best friend. A year or so ago, the two of them would walk around the school playground, cheek-to-cheek, pretending to be Siamese twin babies. They were inseparable. Other boys in their class noticed this. 

"It's like you're married," they said.

Then the boy started wilting under his pal's overbearing attitude. The pal was jealous of his friendships with other kids.

"He's bossy, amma," said the boy.

Towards the end of the school year, he was trying various tricks to avoid his pal. 

"Don't call him my pal," he said. "We are not pals."

He took up games sessions he knew his friend wouldn't attend. When his friend heard about them, he signed up as well. The boy was nonplussed.

"He's sticking to me all the time, amma," said the boy. "He won't let me play with anyone else."

"Why don't you tell him you will play with him and with the others as well?" said his amma.

"He pulls me away when I'm playing with the other boys," said the boy.

"So what are you going to do?" said his amma.

"I'm going to break his heart. But not just yet," said the boy.

This new school year has found him in sarcastic mood. He snaps at the pal more often than he ever did before. He is impatient with the other fellow. The pal is beginning to realise that his hold over the boy has lessened drastically.

Yesterday the boy was playing with another boy.

"Why aren't you playing with your best friend?" said the other boy.

"He's not my friend," said the boy.

"Hey, Freddie," said the other boy. "He says he's not your friend!"

The pal was indignant.

"Of course he's my friend," he said. "Look, I've written it down on my hand."

Recently the wife and I spent a long weekend in Cornwall to celebrate our fourteenth wedding anniversary. Imagine our surprise when one of the staff in the hotel's restaurant turned out to be a Malayali girl. Born in Vienna to parents from Kottayam, she was spending the summer waitressing on an internship for her high school diploma in tourism. I didn't know there were any Malayalis in Vienna, said the wife. No, no, said the girl. There are lots.

She told us she spoke Malayalam reasonably well, albeit mixed up with German, in which language she was most fluent. She did not say 'albeit.' She pronounced the word Malayalam with a rather exaggerated roll of the Ls. Her English was decent, even if with a noticeable accent. In her school, she said, English was obligatory, while French and Spanish were the other two languages she learned. Wowza, we said, five languages! She smiled modestly. Her Spanish was not good, she confessed.

We asked her how she spent her time off work. There was little in that Cornish village to excite a teenager. She said she would go for hikes. We said we went on hikes. She said she took boat trips to the local big town. We also took boats, we said, but had to admit we hadn't been to that particular town. She said she was looking forward to finishing her stint so she could visit London. We live in London, we said.

****

Remarkably, we had decent weather for three out of the four days we stayed. Long walks along the river brought us to medieval churches, each prettier than a picture. There were stately homes belonging to sundry ancient families. There were beaches. We were told we might see dolphins or basking sharks in the tidal estuary. We didn't. We trudged up headlands of peninsulas and down emblazoned paths. We also had some fine ice cream.

The food was mighty fine, I'm glad to report. Even the vegetarian couldn't complain. I had every variety of fish. Brill. Sole. Bass. Cod. Herring. I might even have had a pilchard or two. A crab gave up its existence to feed me. I salute you, crab, even if I'm no fan of crustaceans.

****

At one steep descent to a beach there was a sign saying that winter storms had eroded the path, which was no longer safe to use. A boy and a girl jumped over a gate and sped down to the beach. Their father was curiously unbothered. When I pointed out the sign, he said in posh tones, Ah, that notice is just a suggestion. 

****

A little fellow, not more than three years old, came scarpering out and said to me, do you want to see something? He set off at high speed down a path and disappeared into the distance. I went after him and saw him climbing up onto a bench at a look-out. There was a gap between the bench and the roof of the look-out. He put one leg into it. Had he gone through it, he would have fallen a few hundred feet onto the rocks below. I would not have reached him in time. He changed his mind and came back down.

I'm still shaken, a week later.

****

The boy, staying back in London with his grandparents, said he missed us dreadfully, and called us twice a day. He asked if he could join us on our next trip to Cornwall, and insisted that we stay in the same hotel, so he could also enjoy the ice cream, the chatter with the Malayali girl, the hikes, and the dolphins. He was not pleased to be left behind, he said, when his parents were having fun by themselves. We are a family, he said, and should enjoy ourselves together.

****

On our way back to London our train developed a fault with its brakes. So in addition to the inexpressible tedium of any return journey was added a wholly frustrating half an hour delay. To boot, I ran out of books to read. So I spent some time typing out this post on our decrepit iPad. It is no fun typing on an iPad, I can tell you that much.

After England's recent and abject collapse at Lord's, I haven't felt like telling the boy that his wish has come true. For some reason, he is vehemently anti-English these days. I suspect it's because of his half-Scot pal, with whom he had a conversation as follows:

Pal: I wish Scotland would vote for independence in autumn. I don't like England.

Boy: Did you know that England ruled over India for centuries?

Pal: I can't believe they managed to rule anyone at all.

Boy: England's out of the World Cup.

Pal: Yes-s-s-s!

Boy: India's playing England at cricket.

Pal: I hope England loses.

Boy: So do I.

Wife: But, Johnny, your dad's English.

Pal: Oh yeah...

Boris Akunin likes to trawl through old family photo-albums and gaze at the portraits and try to imagine what fates befell their subjects. Often he looks for a long time at a photograph and concocts an entire biography, and then he looks at the back of it and more often than not realises that his romantic imaginations do not match the facts.

This is a picture he posted on his blog.

A lovely little girl. Surely, thought Akunin, this is a girl who had a wonderful destiny, beautiful loves, a life full of drama and unexpected twists (after all, she would have lived in twentieth century Russia). And the girl would surely become someone, because not only was she beautiful but there were makings of an extraordinary personality.

Then he turned the photo over to the other side and learned that little Lyuba Lokshina was born March 9, 1917, and died April 12, 1929. As far as I can make out, she died when a balcony collapsed. 

As Akunin says, this is not just tragic but absurd. One can somehow get used to tragedy. But absurdity?