Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers

  I am grateful to my friend Roger Hobbs for sending me the photographs of Jack Neale’s hundredth birthday party, held on 16 January 2026, somewhere in England. I am far away in Kolkata, yet the digital photographs travelled in a trice. They stopped me for a while. Jack Neale, displaying the note from the King and Queen, with Joan To see a man at one hundred is a rare and fine thing. To see Jack at one hundred is finer still. The framed note from the King and Queen says it plainly and says enough. He earned it. In one photograph, Jack is with Joan. She looks wonderful. There is ease in them both, the kind that comes from years lived well together. In another, Jack is with his daughter, Susan, and his brother, aged one hundred and two. It is a family at peace. That settles the matter entirely. Longevity, it seems, runs deep in the Neales. Jack, his daughter, Susan, and his 102-year-old brother I first met Jack in 1965. I was a young PhD scholar then, finding my way in the Structural...

 T. S. Eliot begins The Waste Land with the austere provocation, “April is the cruellest month.” I have carried that line with me for decades. Eliot remains my favourite poet, and this poem my most revisited text, each reading yielding fresh meanings, like sediment stirred by a returning tide. Yet poetry, for all its authority, must sometimes yield to place. Where I live, in Kolkata, and across much of India, it is not April that deserves Eliot’s epithet. It is December. Here, December is the cruelest month. In December, the sky sinks low, like a heavy lid. Atmospheric inversion traps air near the Earth's surface, allowing pollution to settle and stagnate. Smoke lingers. Dust drifts but never disperses. Visibility dims, as though the city were seen through breath on glass. The air thickens, turns coarse, almost chewable. Cold does not cleanse. It constricts. To breathe becomes an effort, and then a risk. Kolkata's Air Pollution in December - photo courtesy https://bit.l...