It was very cold when I first arrived. For much of my life, I had longed for this kind of extreme
cold. On the summer afternoons of my childhood, when a scorching loo raged just outside the
darkened windows and doors, and while everyone in my family slept – the siesta being part of the
obligatory surrender to the heat that emptied the streets of our small town – I sprawled half naked on
the grainy stone floor and read and reread the Mahabharata, dreamily transplanting myself among the
white peaks in the religious-kitsch calendars on the walls of our old railway bungalow. I imagined
myself with the Pandava brothers in their self-imposed exile, and with the Hindu sages and seers
shown meditating next to glaciers – men whose lengthy and bushy beards had seemed to the calendar
artist a sign of wisdom and self-control.
cold. On the summer afternoons of my childhood, when a scorching loo raged just outside the
darkened windows and doors, and while everyone in my family slept – the siesta being part of the
obligatory surrender to the heat that emptied the streets of our small town – I sprawled half naked on
the grainy stone floor and read and reread the Mahabharata, dreamily transplanting myself among the
white peaks in the religious-kitsch calendars on the walls of our old railway bungalow. I imagined
myself with the Pandava brothers in their self-imposed exile, and with the Hindu sages and seers
shown meditating next to glaciers – men whose lengthy and bushy beards had seemed to the calendar
artist a sign of wisdom and self-control.
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