About a week ago, I got an email from my father informing me that Abhay Mama, a long-standing staff member in my father's bookshop and a de-facto member of my family, had met with an accident. A couple of wayward kids on a motorbike had knocked him over on Fergusson College Road, as he was on his way to presumably execute one of the several hundred tasks he silently and uncomplainingly dispensed on a daily basis with a n almost robotic mentality, adding his invaluable bit to keep the circus of the boo kshop running. He had suffered serious head injuries and was, by all accounts, counting his minutes until he was granted freedom. As he lay in a coma in the hospital his assailants had been humane enough to deposit him in, I found myself unable to divert my thoughts away from this gentle soul. His soft voice, virtually a whisper, kept ringing in my ears stridently enough to subdue the cacopho ny of Manhattan down to muffled and inconsequential static. I kept thinking of him, reme...
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