Sometimes life gives you angels in power suits and shoulder pads when angels with wings desert you without a by your leave.

All I had was a wary belief that there were more things in heaven and earth, as the Bard said, that one could explain. And perhaps we were not meant to explain these, perhaps we were only meant toexperience these, live through them, and emerge, bearing on our bodies and our souls the carbuncles of the lived experience,now fastened onto our selves.

Creatures from the damp earth emerged from their homes in the ground, slitheringaway on the damp overgrown grass, onto the stairs, the patio and squirming their way into the house. Survival, it was, riskingbeing squashed underfoot over being drowned in their homes.Earthworms, snails, small snakes, insects. Life survived seasons and inundations, and poured itself out onto higher ground.

We could love, I realized, without the promise of exclusivity that one had been raised on. And there was no shame or guilt in that, it was just the way the human heart was, four-chambered, with an infinite capacity to contain others, more than it could contain itself.

There are no ghosts, Pappa said. But Maa always smiled softly when he saidso. There were ghosts, she knew amongst the living and the dead, ghosts of the living and the dead, and often one couldn’t tell the two apart.

Perhaps there was nothing to be said, and there was nothing to be heard. Perhaps all we were destined to be were moths to the flame, burn ourselves out in the pursuit of the next light we saw. This light had burnt me out. And all I could do was wait till I rose, phoenix-like, only to be burnt again.

Home was perhaps just this body I inhabited and this too was alien to me at times, its folds and creases, its pains and needs. Home was everywhere andnowhere. Home, I realised now, was anywhere the heart slept in peace. Home was where one unpacked one’s cares and settled them into the wardrobe with one’s clothes. It was where one was complete.