The Banyan tree and other stories
Little things that tick the contentment meter!
Some really simple things can so easily be overlooked. I went to buy some mangoes whilst I was in Baroda, India, this year. And what do I see? A squirrel who had a home of its own. Made me love my hometown just a little more.
We had just moved to the UK from India and we had a car. We decided to go to the Lake District. And suddenly it was as if a curtain had been lifted - the poetry of William Wordsworth, taught to me during my BA in English Literature came alive. The daffodils came alive. It seemed like a slice of heaven was served on a plate and I could ask for more slices.
When my maternal grandmother came to live with my parents, she brought with her seeds and saplings of the four o'clock flower plant or gulbaas as it is known in her native Gujarati. Every evening, she would spend about half and hour with her gulbaas plants talking to them, holding a conversation of sorts.
There's a 1992 Bollywood movie called Khel, in which the lead pair sing to each other in a dreamy sequence, floating as they are in a surreal landscape. The song goes, roughly translated - 'this is neither the earth or the sky - where have you brought me?' I felt like in Cappadocia. A landscape so surreal, so other-worldly that all my senses burst into a song.
Nearby, a man with a skullcap prayed at the tomb enclosure that housed the tomb of Suleyman. I went there to have a peek but he encouraged me to pray. So I stood there next to him, while his eyes overflowed and his voice broke as he read out a prayer from his mobile phone. I thought of him, and of Suleyman the Magnificent and of the different passions that move different men.
The Banyan tree and other stories 