We left Sossusvlei quite early. The journey was through Solitaire, a kind of way station for topping up fuel, using the restrooms and having a coffee. It’s famous for its apple strudel. It’s a strange place in other ways too. The owner of the car repair garage must be an eccentric person who collects…
Red Dunes of Sossusvlei
Arnold, our guide, picked us up from Villa Vista after breakfast. Breakfast was on the roof, looking out to Windhoek and the distant hills. Another couple was having breakfast, a German couple, both about our age. The man had short grey hair and like me wore his beard short and, well trimmed. His wife…
Bamako Style
We were on our way to Paris. We caught the Eurostar at St Pancras. The overnight stay at Comfort Inn and Suite was hardly comfortable. The suite, an ironic term, for a pokey room with a cupboard for a bathroom and barely enough space to swing one elbow and the other (or as the…
Hudson River Valley
Up here on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum, New York’s skyline juts up like a range of jagged cliffs piercing the dark sullen clouds. The breeze too was picking up and the vine leaves on the pergola were fluttering. The displays of statues were surprising. There were several dinner tables- one had a young…
Early Autumn in Darien
We walked down Nearwater Lane to Weed Beach. It was already 18 degrees Centigrade at 8 am. We walked along the shoreline, looking out to sea and, watching the flock of seagulls and the solitary heron. Here at this time, there were very few people. There were only one family and a young woman in…
Lamplight at Popovica Ulica
Our first evening meal was at Konoba Insula. We ate alfresco, sitting along a wall in the narrow, impossibly narrow Popovica Ulica. It was well past 8 pm and dusk was quickly turning into night. For lunch, I had grilled bass in sesame seed and that night I had seafood risotto. There was much…
Writing in cinnabar red ink
We arrived by train at the station in Oranienburg, the self-same station that the inmates of this concentration camp arrived in. They would have been met by SS and marched to the camp, a distance of just over 1 km. The houses along the road are detached dormer-type homes with shiny glazed roofs. The…
Vallejo on the 1550 to Euston
My train is hurtling towards Euston. It's that time of the year when all the trees are freshly green and resplendent especially in the full afternoon sun. We've just gone past Rugby. There are no more stops before Euston. The fields to my left have yellow buttercups bordered by Mayflowers. There's the occasional hedge of…
Octavio Paz and Me
I don't believe that I've told you how much I was influenced by Paz. Here was a writer who was constantly seeking the gap between what is real and known and that indefinable domain of the imagined and ephemeral. And in that gap, even though words too are deficient and far too inadequate to the…
Titan Arum
It takes 11 years for Titan Arum to grow from a seedling to this remarkable 2 m fleshy spike and 3 m circumference of leaf-like structure. And, there we were standing before one of these monsters, barely 48 hours away from the spectacular inflorescence. The inflorescence itself lasts 48 hours if you’re lucky and is…
