When they left, I saw four or five black-and-white photographs I had taken of you, peeping from the file. They'd faded a little over time and were stuck to each other. Delicately, i separated them.

That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.

Once i watched you wake up, you had the same frown. "When one gets up, there is a moment when everything looks odd and strange.

Spoil all the walls with sellotape marks.

Whatever happens, happens for the best.' That's how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phase: Whatever happens, happens for the best.

I felt the kind of peace you feel when you come in from a hot afternoon and pour cold water over your feet.

At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.

I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath.

Once you start living together and you see the same person day in and day out, you begin to wonder: was it for this I struggled and toiled? Did he feel that way?

I sometimes go and sit there. it is my museum of broken things.