04 February,, 2026
10.48 AM

On my way back home from office in a crowded bus, someone had sneezed right on my face. Long ago.

And, however irrelevant it may sound now, I woke up this morning recalling the feverish night that followed. In the darkness, I had fumbled for the thermometer on the bedside table. Which was foolish, since I wouldn’t be able to read the temperature without switching on a light.

The thermometer in its turn crashed on the floor and I heard the tinkle of broken glass. Not being able to read my body temperature was not as fatal an event as you might suppose. The fever subsided soon enough even in the absence of the thermometer.

The case of the broken thermometer bemuses me till this day. For the thermometer was a memento of sorts from my graduate school days in America. I can’t remember what led me to purchase it from a supermarket across the street from my home. Nor the sales girl at the counter.

I cannot delete the thermometer from my memory though on account of what was etched on its shiny body in tiny letters. Made in USA. It was a museum piece of sorts. I doubt that you can buy a thermometer in America anymore that’s not produced in China.

I tend to believe that my thermometer is as irretrievable as the Bamiyan Buddhas. Their relative sizes notwithstanding. Unless of course, Mr. Trump’s tariffs have helped thermometers reappear from America’s factories.

12.16 PM

This brings up yet another memory. About thermometers once again. In Japan, where it is not easy to get by without Japanese. I had picked up a smattering of the language and could socialise with aid of audio and hand waves.

The lady next door looked worried one afternoon. I understood that her little daughter had caught a bad cold and was running a high temperature. As high, she said, as 40! This took me by total surprise. For most people I had known till then, a high temperature would be somewhere around a hundred and five.

I stared at her face in total confusion for a few seconds, but retrieved my self-respect soon enough. She was obviously talking in Celsius. But I was unsure all the same, because my arithmetic has never been good enough to help me convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. Mentally that is.

12.57 PM

According to Hindu mythology, a single day for Lord Brahma equals 4.32 billion human years. Google confirms the number. I have no idea how big a number that is. Arithmetic was never my cup of tea, as I admitted above.

I used to be afraid in my junior school days of those complicated sums known (quite inexplicabily) as simplification. They consisted of scary series of additions, multiplications, divisions, subtractions and an abstract operator called “of”, all captured inside a maze of parentheses, braces and square brackets. The correct answer to most simplification problems would invariably be a solitary 1, or some other single digit. Unfortunately and invariably, I used to end up with something as ugly as 64178/32895 and my mother with a sharp slap across my cheek along with dark forecasts about the unenviable future that awaited me.

A street sweeper I was destined to be. If not a porter in Howrah Station, or a hawker selling undergarments in Serampore, or, at her soothsaying worst, a nothing at all on earth. This last bit worried me the most I guess, since mankind had not yet made its way to the moon.

My tryst with such unenviable predictions concerning the future did not end at home alas. In the school I went to as a sixth grader, one Mrs. Grocer (May God rest her soul!) coronated me with the honourary title of “Our Great Mathematician”, much to the merriment of my classmates and other teachers.

It was a small school with asbestos roofed, tiny classrooms without doors and sometimes without walls separating them. What went on in each class was clearly audible in adjacent ones, with the result that the story of my mathematical acumen was available in the public domain, travelling Sinbad-like to distant shores, including the homes from which other students in the school had arrived.

2.07 PM

Brahma, as we all know is the root of the Sanskrit word Brahmanda, which translates literally to Brahma’s egg. And means the universe. The universe is Brahma’s egg. Brahma is a male God of course. Even if we were to leave this curiosity alone, one cannot help wondering who had fertilised the egg. It could have self-fertilised for all we know. A Hindu version of Big Bang Theory!

2.21 PM

Eggs remind me of Twinkle. She is permanently divorced now from TOI. Or, so I think.

Fortunately however, she hasn’t stopped publishing her columns. As would appear from her latest book, Mrs Funnybones Returns. It was released in November, 2025.

Amazon lets you view a free sample of the book. A woman here declares that on a certain hot day her ovaries started popping out boiled eggs. Her sister reprimands her. “If your ovaries are popping out scrambled, fried, boiled, actually any sort of eggs at all at this age, then it’s a miracle.” I have no idea how old Twinkle is. Or, the woman in the book for that matter.

This book is a sequel to Mrs Funnybones: She’s Just Like You and a Lot Like Me. It arrived several years ago. August, 2018.

In its Foreword, the reader is told that “the woman in the book … is slightly lazier, a bit more high-strung and her jokes are a lot funnier than mine”. I assume “mine” is T herself, but it could be the other woman too you know.

9 PM

It’s hard to ruminate over Twinkle without remembering her mom. Dimple of Bobby fame. The economist Bagicha Singh Minhas, was my colleague in the Indian Statistical Institute those days. He was revered as an economist and feared for his no holds barred expletives. He described the film to me as a pile of horse shit. Or something worse probably. I am not imaginative enough to reproduce the exact language he used.

I was surprised and not surprised by his opinion of the film. I was not surprised that it was not worth his precious time to watch it. But I was more surprised than not surprised. Endlessly surprised in fact that he had watched it at all. Those were days when OTT’s didn’t entertain you in the comfort of your living room. Professor Minhas had actually gone to a movie theatre and sat through Bobby! I never tried to clarify the matter with Minhas and cannot do so anymore alas. He’s been in non-cogito non-sum state for many years now.

Not that I do not admire Dimple’s acting skills. I enjoyed her acting style in other movies, whose names, quite unforgivably, I have forgotten. News had it that Basu Chatterjee was playing with the idea of directing a Hindi version of Anna Karanina with Dimple in the title role. I was delighted and looked forward to watching the movie. Much to my disappointment, the project never fructified. Don’t know why. Which reminds me of a similar possibility many used to talk about. Satyajit Ray casting Suchitra Sen as Debi Chaudhurani. This one too never happened. Some suggest that Ray’s producer couldn’t afford to pay the price the actress demanded.

11.06 PM

Last Friday, my phone rang around 2 AM in the morning. It was a FaceTime audio call from US. A strange number. I didn’t answer and tried to go back to sleep. Without success. Didn’t Trump wake someone up in Venezuela in the middle of the night and fly him over to the US to
be …

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