My first notebook from my travels in India is from the year 1996.

Ten years earlier, in 1986, I had left India and gone to the United States for graduate school. In the years that followed, I returned home several times and wrote reports for Indian newspapers and magazines. There were terrible riots in Bhagalpur in late 1989. In the summer of 1990, I went by train from Patna to Bhagalpur. My companion was a woman, a medical student, whom I was very much in love with.

I have a memory from that train journey. The sun was about to set and the western sky was bright with light. The sight of a row of gulmohar trees in bloom at a small mofussil station put me in a new mood. The train car was crowded but I wrote down words, words full of desire, in my notebook and passed it up to my lover who, in a bid to escape the press of strangers, had chosen to sit on the upper berth. She would express her amusement on the page and hand my notebook back to me. Then, I would write a new line and pass the notebook up.

Those pages are no...

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