Dregs of Yore

The old world does not end with a bang or a riot of sound. It slips away soft-footed, like sugar swirling into warm tea—sweet for a moment, then gone without a trace.  In the old bazaars, where the sun filtered through lattice roofs like sifted grain, there used to be a man who sold bangles. He called out in that rhythmic singsong that echoed across courtyards like the laughter of a household rich in daughters. His voice is gone now. And the lanes, once littered with women in bright sarees bargaining over glass and colour, lie silent, paved and drained of memory. In the India that rises now—glass-towered and software-slick, scanning QR codes and air-conditioned into sterility—there is no room for the knife sharpener either, his whetstone wheel clattering behind a rusty bicycle. Now the knives grow blunt and disappear, their edges worn down by years of bread and bone. We don’t sharpen anymore; we replace.  There’s no place anymore for the puppet master with his wooden stringed ...

Over the years, I have come to suspect that one of adulthood’s lesser understood initiations is learning how to agree and disagree with one’s parents in proper measure. It sounds simple, even banal, but the actual attainment of this equilibrium is anything but. In one’s twenties, such balance rarely arrives through deliberate introspection. More often, we are propelled into it by experience: a sudden betrayal, a financial collapse, a brush with mortality. These eruptions of life have a levelling effect, sweeping aside the insistence of youthful certainties. Voluntary maturation, by contrast, is slow and stubbornly resistant. And nothing guarantees its appearance in one’s thirties or forties either. Maturity is less an achievement than a diminishing appetite: for absolutes, for vindication, and for moral spectacle. The passage into moral adulthood does not obey developmental timetables. Aristotle called virtue a hexis : a practiced disposition, not a milestone. To reach it requires a su...