Half the Night Is Gone
Amitabha BagchiI saw you outside the electric crematorium, you wore a grey sweater
inside the tweed jacket your tailor had made for you from the cloth I had
bought you when I was in Himachal writing Iske Liye . There was a cold
wind blowing down from that same Himachal that day. It had snowed
there the day before. You said something. I think you said: ‘I knew you
would choose the electric one.’ Or maybe you said: ‘I didn’t know it was
at the electric one.’ And I said something about how electricity was the
purest form of fire, that it was the culmination of the process of
domestication of fire that began in prehistoric times. You did not say
anything to this but I think you were worried I had lost my mind, and
maybe you worried about whether I had any more writing left in me.
Perhaps you thought: That’s okay, even if he can’t produce anything
new, at least the old books continue to sell. No, I am being unfair to you.
You would never think something like that. But it is true, the old books
do continue to sell.
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