My mother told us: never try to make pets of wild creatures, like peacocks or deer; they yearn for their wild places, and their longing brings bad luck to their captors. But who holds me captive, and in what hunter’s net? I remember the images of the poem my mother used to recite so long ago, Kalidasa’s poem about the cloud messenger, carrying love messages back from a man in exile to the city where he’d left behind his beloved, letters of infinite longing. And I, too, want to send such messages home on the back of a rain cloud, those messages about the net that I’m trapped in, trapped like the peacock who had only wanted to escape captivity when he heard the rain fall, smelled the earth’s longing, listened to his playmates’ cries. But I have nowhere to send my messages to: only the rainless place in which I am a stranger now. I too have built myself a net of words and images in lieu of a home. Other people’s words. And sometimes I imagine myself escaping that net: rising as vapour then dissolving and dripping away, drop by drop, to become not the exile who sends the messages, but the cloud that carries them, to rain down my longings on the dry, dry earth of my past, the land I left behind.

Your loving M.

In December, with the days drawn in and the sleet and the rain coming down in murky sheets, he thinks about that other rain, and the rainless city of his past; of the odd yearnings for greener landcapes he had throughout his childhood in that rainless place. He picks up his old black notebook, in which he had written regularly until he started teaching. He writes for a day or two, or rather a night or three. He writes about his parents and their garden, about the sound of songs and the rain. He’s always found it hard to give his yearnings a shape, and when Marvi reads it she says: ‘It’s beautiful and nostalgic, but autobiographical writing is a bourgeois indulgence that doesn’t take the reader anywhere and neither does your piece. Overflow is what this is, just a novice writer’s confessional overflow. Stick to translating poetry, you’re good at that. You’re an interpreter of other people’s words.’