Notes from the middle.

Whatever the person did — the degrees, the job, the house, the savings, the love, the fights — none of it gets on the bamboo. Sit at Manikarnika long enough and that stops being a thought and starts being the weather.

Some evenings I read a chapter on Aghora and a chapter on a data warehouse, and the seam between them disappears. Both ask the same question — what survives the burning?

You don't leave Varanasi the way you leave other cities. The vibration in the chest follows you. It is harder to feel under fluorescent office light than at a ghat in the dark — but it is not gone.