The day we met, he came to pick me up at my place. He borrowed a book from my bookcase. It was Maximum City. At that point in the afternoon, I did not know if I was going to see him again, least of all marry him. And the book he borrowed from me was a gift. I did not want to lose it. So he offered to give me one of his, as a sort of surety - that his book would be mine for keeping, until he returned the one he had borrowed from me.
This is a nostalgia post celebrating Ginger - a beautiful, British tomcat that had adopted us while we lived in Reading, Berkshire. He was a stray and he came to us, seemingly out of the blue and decided we were his people and that he would come to us every day.
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.
It was our first evening in Dublin. My husband had accepted a job in Ireland, without either of us ever setting foot in the country before. When we reached the service apartment where we were to spend our first ever night in Ireland, we couldn't get anyone to let us in. It would have been a very sad evening if it wasn't for the warmth and friendly banter of the Irish taxi driver who had driven us from the airport to the service apartment and welcomed us to our new life...
The Banyan tree and other stories 