The Sense and the Sound of Sentence   I have been in awe of printed word, for as long as I can remember. Even in childhood I was never away from it for long. In my school years, I mostly read Hindi. I read magazines, comics, and abridged, translated versions of English classics. English books were a luxury we could not afford freely. (Unlike today, books were expensive. Publishers like Penguin, Hachette, Harper Collins hadn’t come to India yet. Their books were imported and were exorbitantly priced. Only inexpensive foreign print media we saw were the Russian magazines like Sputnik and Russian novels of authors like Tolstoy and Gorky in translation. These were dirt-cheap. They were sleek. Magazines were printed on thick glossy papers with colourful pictures. I do not remember reading these. They made excellent covers for our school text books. Novels were bound elegantly in imitation leather with the title embossed in gold letters. Even a small town that we lived in then, boast

  ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ of Corona*   I am embarrassed to admit this, but I have to face the truth. Corona, the most dreaded word in our lives today and the fearful virus at large in our lungs, brought many pleasures in my life and I enjoyed them unabashedly, though maintaining a stoic façade.   I returned from Sri Lanka after a weeklong holiday in mid-March. My hospital advised me home quarantine for seven days. Sri Lanka then had fewer cases of Corona infection than our state. There were no quarantine guidelines in country. I was peeved at this irrational decision. But it appeared, hospital was keen on proffering me with a little furlough. I remonstrated but accepted the decision with appropriate forbearance. Next day I took off to visit a friend in a nearby city: two holidays, end to end.   Hospital’s corridors forever crammed with visitors, like the lawns of India Gate on a sunny winter noon, became desolate overnight, like the grand avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi, lin