When I first met my husband I told him the color of his eyes reminded me of ponds in Bengal, green, blue, grey. On train rides and car rides through the Bengal countryside I have passed many such ponds these colors. Their quiet empty surfaces punctuated by rain drops that fell on them like dreams. Sometimes lotus leaves, sometimes a frog, at other times a woman with a sari wrapped around her bathing, sometimes children wading or throwing stones. Mostly empty, blue, green, grey expanses of water behind a house or on the side of the road. I want to go see if those ponds are still there or if they have all been dug up to make way for more housing. I don’t know what I dread more that are all gone, swallowed in the mouths of human consumptions, needs and desires or that they are choked with plastic and rubbish, overt markers of the same.

On sides of the roads, sometimes next to these ponds, women sit together in groups, their backs turned to the sun, their hair open, wet and black like tangled fish nets. They dry their hair like this while their voices and laughter float up to us who were passing by.

Here I am in a Cornish village seated yet again on the wooden floor, my back also turned from the sun to let my hair dry; here I am, but my memories pull me back to the villages of my childhood, especially those in West Bengal. At night the sky is full of the stars that we could never see from the cities we have dwelled in, during my early morning walks the air is heavy with the smell of smoke and mist, mingled always with remembrances of times past, of temps perdu.