Dregs of Yore

A man who sets out to write about the ethos of a community must, at some point, wrestle with doubt, not least because the act of doing so invites criticism from those who believe it impossible to encapsulate the lived experiences of many within the confines of language. One might argue, for instance, that the attempt is reductive, that no single life can hold the measure of a people. Others will insist that to speak of a "community ethos" is to deny the individuality of its members, reducing them to an indistinct collective. Such objections are compelling but also paralysing. If we feared oversimplifying so much, we’d never speak of anyone or anything. So, I am willing to tread on this precarious path, to paint a picture of one of the communities I come from—a picture that is, at best, incomplete, but honest in its intention. I was born into a marriage that was itself a sort of map of India—my mother’s people, Bengalis from West Bengal, where words bloom like flowers and art ...

Two men sit at opposite ends of a diner. One listens and the other watches, but neither speaks, and in the silence between them is a vast difference of intent. The journalist uncaps his pen with a purpose fully formed. He listens for the bones of a thing, the sturdy facts, the names, the sequence of events. He sees a woman in a red coat at the counter, the way she stirs her coffee, the way she glances nervously at the door, and he thinks: Where is she going? What does it mean? His business is to find out , to take the dirt off a buried truth and to present it in clean lines. The writer, on the other hand, is a digger, not a dust-brusher. He sees the same woman and wonders what brought her to this diner and whether she’s lonely. He notices the imprint of a ring on her finger and wonders whether she is a woman who spurned her lover or the woman scorned. His purpose is to find , not the hard and polished thing that is called truth, but the truth of how things weigh upon the soul. The jour...

It happens slowly, like the wearing away of a stone under a steady drip of water. You don’t notice it at first. The rock is sturdy, immovable. But as the decades pass, one day you see it—the edges smoothed, the surface hollowed. So it is with patriotism. Not gone in a flash, not ripped away in a single moment, but eroded over time.  Perhaps the fault lies in the confusion between two things that are not the same. Patriotism—an old love, like a farmer’s love for his land—is too often conflated with nationalism, which is a louder, often cruder sentiment. A man who is a patriot does not need to tell you that he is one. He carries it in his bones, in the way he speaks of home, in the way he worries over its troubles. But nationalism has a way of puffing itself up, of making a man feel big by making the rest of the world seem small. And in this confusion—a confusion that is deliberate at times, careless at others-— something of the tenderness of patriotism is lost. History is full of ex...

Every once in a while, I like to write about places I have been to, places that have left a strong impact on me. These can be places with overwhelming natural beauty, or places that are steeped in the richness of culture or history, or just places that spoke to me for one reason or another. Today, I walked into one such place, a place not of towering mountains or history-soaked temples but a bookstore—small, cramped, and stubborn—in the heart of an upscale Delhi market. Faqir Chand and Sons , lodged in a quiet corner of Khan Market, does not announce itself with neon signs or grand displays. It simply is. It stands there, watching, as the glassy storefronts rise around it, as new money and new tastes rush past its narrow wooden door. It has watched the world change, and yet, it refuses to. It was established in 1931 in Peshawar, in present-day Pakistan. When the partition came and India was still piecing itself together in the wake of the horror that followed, Mr. Faqir Chand fled to N...