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Evenings Dusk and Twilight

As the sun slowly begins to slide down, spreading a brilliant orange glow over the blue daytime sky, it is the beginning of yet another daily spectacle. The sky fills with an intense red, changing to a burnished orange, giving way to a lilac twilight. I watch enchanted, the divine hand using broad strokes to change the hue every 30 seconds. Seated on rock looking over the valley or walking along a winding hill road, I watch the orange ball sink behind the faraway mountains. I marvel at the magic brush painting the vast canvas of the sky every evening. I have stopped and gazed at this daily phenomenon as a teen when the Delhi sky wasn't grey. Watched the same orange ball drop into the ocean and the horizon slowly inking over. I see it while driving through vast green fields and along winding mountain roads and on evening walks in the woods. Each time I am struck with the powerful emotions it evokes. Love and wonderment welling up inside, when in the company of th

The Mystery of the Cool Drink

   When I was just a little girl...my father ticked me off for offering ‘cold’ drinks to guests, gently admonishing “you must say ‘cool’ drink!” I retreated in embarrassment over this massive linguistic blunder. Every year, every summer, I heard this refrain, it is “cool” drink, not cold drink, you know! Now, my father was neither an English man nor an English teacher, so what did he know that all the others didn’t? I wondered because no one in my whole wide world (limited of course to home, school, friends and teachers in Delhi) used this expression. The skeptic in me, however, never verified this from any other authoritative source. Then years after Papa was gone, the little girl now a woman discovered Papa’s secret in Kerala. Travelling by train through the length of Kerala and by road through its towns and villages, I saw signboards offering ‘cool’ drinks for sale at every shack, shop and restaurant. My father was a travelling tradesman selling his wares in Kerala, six mont