Reflecting on the meaning of a friend’s respectful words on my book. She holds a PhD in science and loves literature, she says:

“I have been reading your book as and when time permits. More and more I read I get closure to the essence of emotions and psychology involved in human relations and interactions. It conveys a detailed account of emotions, beautifully expressed in words enabling a complete visualization of the moment being described and depicted.”

This is high praise indeed from an Indian scholar who knows literature intimately, who is married to an avid consumer of literature. This scholar, whom I met in New Delhi, has such an astounding relationship with spirituality and beauty chooses these words to describe my book: ‘a detailed account of emotions, beautifully expressed…’ One experience she knows is love. Her family is motivated by love and goodness and joy as only an Indian family can. How much the Subcontinent and Subcontinental people inspired this book. How much love I felt in that extraordinary land where destiny calls the traveller like an unexpected power: a power that seems uncanny in the dying pretensions of the West.

I am still not sure I know anything about “human relations and interactions”–I honestly think I have missed so much of the meanings in the words of others. I read their faces and see things they seem to be denying. But is this right? This might be more of the breakdown than the communication, but there is another life in beauty and love where these perceptions matter. They matter so deeply and everyday life robs us of these precious affirmations of love and life in the eyes of others.

Thankyou for your words, my wonderful, loving, educated friend.