God was in my world, the farthest I look into my past. My parents were not fastidious about religion. I do not remember they ever talked to me about religious doctrines. They were not aware of these in their own religion. Their religion centred around celebrating major festivals as a cultural event. On these days house was cleaned a bit more assiduously. My mother prepared special dishes, specific for each festival. I eagerly awaited them. On some of these days she told us parables. I heard them year after year and knew every word. But I still looked forward to the evening when she would wear a special sari meant for these occasions, dress us up, sit with us on the floor, savouries arrayed around as offerings to the gods, and narrate the story. My mother had her hands full with household chores. A little spare time she salvaged from these cares she spent with books. She prayed only on the days of festivals. We had some framed pictures of gods arranged on a shelf. My father would ligh

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham The Eternal Story Apart from the freedom to say truthfully that grey in your hair bespeaks your experience, age brings many compensations. Not the least of these is the ability to contemplate past calmly and indulge once again in certain innocent exploits that gave one much joy in the past. For past now looms large in life where future seems to be shrinking fast. I now find indescribable pleasure in books that I read many years back, and whose memory, I would hate to part with.   I first read  Of Human Bondage  about three decades back. I had discovered Maugham recently and had fallen headlong for his books . Until my memory is swayed by the lure of nostalgia, I can claim that I found it ravishing. I read it again last year and once again relished every word. Of Human Bondage  was published in 1915, when Maugham was forty. In preface to an early edition of the book, Maugham tells us how the book ‘came to be written’. He wrote it first when he

In a world not simple by any reckoning, time is the weirdest phenomenon. It is universally felt and effortlessly perceived. But it treads so softly that one doesn’t notice its passage in the daily grind. Nearer sixty than fifty, it is inexcusable to maintain an illusion of youth. But I remember and experience my past so vividly and with such force that the day I joined college, was married, my children were born, do not feel to belong to last millennium. Ageing profile of a college mate whom I haven’t met in decades, occasionally viewed on a social-media platform, remind me of the incessant flow of time; so do events that put the adulthood of my kids in spotlight. Mirror then speaks the truth for a little while.   An obstetrics resident, friend of my wife who was studying pathology in the same college, held her in a tray resting on her extended forearms, as she exited the operating theatre to show me my daughter. ‘Oh! She is so small, is she fine!’ was the thought that came to my