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  • The Orange and the Ice Cream

    The road had been unkind since morning. Somewhere past the eightieth kilometer, the tar gave way to gravel and loose red earth. The highway near Kannur was being widened, and what should have been a ribbon of shade-flecked asphalt had become a churned, sun-blasted climb after climb. There were no trees worth the name for miles, no awning, no petrol-station overhang, nothing between the sky and the skin except the thin cotton of a cycling jersey gone the color of dust.

    By early afternoon the heat had stopped being weather and become an opponent. It sat on the shoulders like a hand pressing down. Every rise in the road announced itself as a small betrayal. You’d see the top, believe in it, and then the road would bend, revealing another one behind it. Sweat had long since stopped cooling anything; it just ran, and left salt in its wake.

    Then, at a bend where the terrain finally relented for a stretch, a banyan tree appeared — old, wide-skirted, its aerial roots grown thick as pillars, ringing a raised platform of packed earth that generations of tired travelers had probably used exactly the way I was about to. I leaned the bicycle against the root-wall, and let it rest there patient and dust-covered like something poured out. For a few minutes there was only the indifferent quiet of the Kerala afternoon.

    Then a bell rang.

    It was thin and metallic and utterly out of place in that silence – a school bell, somewhere just past the bend, announcing the lunch hour. Within minutes I heard what a solitary cyclist learns to recognize immediately. Footsteps in numbers, and the particular pitch of children’s voices rising as they run. They came around the tree in a loose, curious knot, nine, ten, maybe more, all somewhere in the fifth or sixth standard, in the checked shirts of a village primary school. They had found, apparently, the most interesting thing to happen to their lunch break in weeks – a stranger, a loaded bicycle, and a story.

    The questions came before I’d even sat up properly. Where was I going? Where had I come from? Was that my house on the bicycle? Did it not hurt to sit so long? My Malayalam was broken at best, but I did what I could, answering in fragments, filling the gaps with hands and gestures and the international language of pointing at a map that didn’t exist. They filled the gaps back with patience, the way children do when they’ve decided an adult is worth the trouble.

    One of them, studying me with the frank assessment only a ten-year-old can manage, said simply that I looked tired.

    I told him — yes. Eighty kilometers already, since the morning, and not a scrap of shade the whole way.

    It was meant as an answer, not a request. But something shifted in the group, a small current passing between them that I only understood a moment later. A few ran off toward a bottle and came back offering water, which I drank gratefully, gulping in that particular hurried way you drink when you’ve been rationing all day.

    Then two hands appeared, pushed forward almost shyly through the others. One held an ice cream, already sweating in its wrapper in the heat. The other held an orange.

    I understood, looking at them, exactly what they were. Not leftovers, not something produced from a family’s kitchen, but small purchases, made deliberately, with coins that had been meant for something else. Pocket money. The particular currency of childhood, usually spent on nothing more urgent than sweets or marbles or the next day’s snack, handed over instead to a sunburnt stranger under a tree because he’d said, plainly, that he was tired.

    I have climbed passes since and crossed longer stretches of empty highway, and none of it has stayed with me quite the way that orange did, offered without any expectation of the story being remembered, let alone written down. The road, I’ve found, gives you many things when you travel it alone and unguarded – heat, silence, the occasional cruelty of geography. But every so often it also hands you, through the smallest and least likely messengers, a reminder of humanity

  • What the Water Taught Him

    The water had looked calm from the shore. That was the first mistake.

    He had swum this stretch of coast before, always in daylight, always with an eye on the tide charts. But today the current had a mood of its own, and somewhere beneath the surface, hidden from any warning, a fishing net lay coiled around a bed of boulders — abandoned, forgotten, waiting.

    The net had not always been a hazard. Some fisherman, days or weeks before, had cast it out over the boulders in search of a catch, then pulled up his lines in a hurry — a coming storm, perhaps, or simple carelessness — and left this one behind, now snagged on the rocks below. No malice in it. Just an ordinary oversight, the kind anyone might make, now lying in wait for whoever happened to swim through it.

    His foot caught it without warning. One moment he was cutting through the water with the easy rhythm of a man who had done this a thousand times; the next, something closed around his ankle like a fist. He kicked. The net kicked back, tightening, and the weight of the boulders began to drag him down into the cold, indifferent dark. He hadn’t caused this. He had simply arrived at the wrong place, at the wrong time, in water someone else had left unfinished business in.

    He had read, once, that drowning doesn’t look like drowning. There’s no thrashing, no crying out — just a quiet, private struggle, invisible to anyone on shore. He believed it now. His lungs burned. The light above him grew smaller, the color of the sky through water gone the pale grey of something ending.

    Then he saw the shark.

    It came the way sharks come — unhurried, certain, a shadow with intention. He stopped struggling, not from calm but from the particular stillness of a man who has run out of options. He waited for the pain.

    It didn’t come. Instead, the shark’s jaws closed once around the net, not around him, and the net gave way. Severed, the boulders fell free into the dark, and his body, released, floated upward on its own.

    He broke the surface gasping, the sun startling and enormous, the sky wider than he remembered skies being. He was alive. He hadn’t earned it, hadn’t fought his way to it. It had simply been given back to him, the way an inadvertent accident sometimes undoes itself before the harm is done.

    Since retiring from coaching, he had filled his days with writing and touring. Long stretches on the road, notebooks full of half-formed reflections, a quiet second career taking shape one page at a time. This swim had been a small pause in that rhythm, a morning to himself before the words called him back.

    A small fishing boat found him twenty minutes later, exhausted, sun-blind, barely able to pull himself over the gunwale. The boatman hauled him aboard, wrapped a tarp around his shoulders, and listened, wide-eyed, as the story spilled out of him in pieces — the net, the boulders, the shark that had freed him instead of feeding on him.

    “That’s not an accident,” the boatman said finally. “That’s a second life. A thing like that, you don’t get to keep to yourself. You have to do something with it.”

    They sat with that a while, the boat rocking gently, gulls circling overhead as if waiting for their own explanation.

    “What did you do,” the boatman asked, “before today?”

    “I coached tennis,” the man said. “Good players, some of them. A few made it to the ATP tour. One even played Wimbledon.”

    The boatman nodded slowly, then smiled in the way of a man who has just seen two unrelated pieces of a puzzle click together. “I run a sports academy,” he said. “No tennis program. But I’ve been wanting to start a squash program for years, and I don’t have the right person to build it.”

    The man laughed, the first laugh since the net had let him go. “Squash and tennis aren’t the same game. I’ve played it, but I’m no expert. I couldn’t coach it properly.”

    “You don’t need to be an expert,” the boatman said. “You need to know how to build a player. The strokes are different. The instinct for competing, for improving, for pushing someone past what they think they can do — that’s the same in every sport. You’d probably learn as much from them as they’d learn from you.”

    The man said he’d think about it. They exchanged numbers, shook hands, and went back to their separate towns, separate lives.

    A week passed. Then two. The man settled back into retirement, and the strange morning on the water began to feel like something he’d dreamed rather than survived. He didn’t call. He assumed, the way people do, that it had been offered in the heat of a rescue and not meant to be held to.

    Then the phone rang.

    “Do you remember me?” the boatman asked.

    “Of course I remember you,” the man said. “You saved my life. And then you offered me a reason to use it. I thought that part was just something said in the moment.”

    “It wasn’t,” the boatman said. “I meant it. Have you thought about it?”

    “I have,” the man admitted. “More than I expected to.”

    They met at the academy a few weeks later. The man walked the courts, watched a handful of squash players move through their drills — raw, hungry, clearly talented, clearly missing something no one had yet given them. He recognized the missing thing immediately. It wasn’t technique. It was someone in their corner who believed in what they could become.

    “So,” the boatman asked, “what do you think?”

    “I think it could work,” the man said. “But I need to be honest about what I can give. I can’t hand over all my time — I still have my writing, and the traveling that feeds it. Let’s start with a few hours a week. A month, on my side, at no cost to you. At the end of it, we’ll both know if this is something worth building — for the players, for you, for me.”

    The boatman agreed without hesitation.

    And so a man who had nearly drowned in the sea found himself, a month later, standing on a squash court that wasn’t his sport, coaching players who weren’t his specialty, in a life he hadn’t planned to have, built on nothing more than an honest account of what he could offer, an honest account of what he couldn’t, and the willingness to let a stranger’s offer become something real.

    Looking back on it later, he understood the shape of what had happened to him. The net had been a hard season of his life — unasked for, tangled around him without warning, dragging him down before he even knew it was there. The shark, the thing everyone had warned him to fear, turned out to be the very thing that cut him loose from it. And the stranger on the boat, arriving from nowhere with no reason to help beyond simple decency, had handed him something no one could have planned for — an opportunity that asked nothing of him except to be honest about who he was and what he could give.

    But more than any of that, what stayed with him was what the ordeal itself had taught him. He had spent five years believing his life was already whole — full of writing, full of travel, full of the things he had chosen for himself. The net had shown him how quickly that fullness could be undone, how little control he actually had over the current beneath the surface. And the shark had shown him something stranger still: that rescue doesn’t always come from where you expect it, and that the things you fear most can turn out to be the very thing that sets you free. He had come out of the water not just alive, but paying closer attention — to how fragile the ordinary days were, and to how much he owed it to himself, and to whoever might need him, to meet the next unexpected thing with an open hand instead of a clenched one. That, more than the coaching offer itself, was the second life he carried with him.

  • Beyond the comfort zone

    Daily writing prompt
    If you had to give one life-changing tip, what would it be?
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    Move beyond your comfort zone.

    Once you become comfortable with your work, your routine, or your circumstances, step outside that familiar space and challenge yourself again. Stay with the discomfort until what once seemed difficult becomes natural. Then repeat the process.

    This does not mean abandoning stability or taking reckless risks. Growth is most meaningful when it rests on a secure foundation. At every stage, preserve your independence—financially, emotionally, intellectually, and practically. Independence gives you the freedom to take risks without becoming dependent on others for your security or self-worth.

    This principle can be applied at any age. There is no point in life when learning, changing, or beginning again becomes impossible. Each time we move beyond what is familiar, we discover abilities we did not know we possessed, encounter people and ideas we might otherwise have missed, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.

    A rewarding life is not necessarily one without comfort. It is one in which comfort is never allowed to become a cage.

    Build stability. Step beyond familiarity. Grow into the challenge. Then begin again.

  • What you seek is seeking you – Rumi

    A reflection from a coastal cycling tour through India

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a quote that perfectly describes your outlook on life?
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    There’s a particular kind of silence you find on a coastal road early in the morning – before the fishing boats go out, before the heat settles in, when the only sound is your tires on wet tarmac and the sea breathing somewhere just out of sight. I’ve been chasing that silence for days now, thinking I was chasing distance. Kilometers logged, villages and towns crossed off, a finish line somewhere further North. But somewhere between the backwaters and the temple towns, I realized the math was wrong. This trip was never really about the distance.

    I keep thinking about that quote — “What you seek is seeking you.”

    I used to read it as something poetic and a little abstract, the kind of thing you nod at without really feeling it. But out here, it’s stopped being abstract. It happened in small, specific ways. The old fisherman who waved me in for chai without either of us saying much, because some hospitality doesn’t need language. The sudden monsoon shower that soaked me completely and somehow felt like a blessing instead of an inconvenience. The stretch of empty beach at dawn that I didn’t plan to stop at, but stopped at anyway, because something about the light made it impossible to keep riding.

    None of that was on my route plan. I didn’t seek it out. Not directly. But it found me anyway, at exactly the moment I needed it, as if the coast knew something about my pace and my mood before I did.

    I think that’s the real shape of a journey like this. About life. You set out looking for scenery, or fitness, or solitude, or whatever story you told yourself or goal you set before you started. And the road and life gives you that, sure. But it also gives you the things you didn’t know to ask for – the encounters, the weather, the stillness. Somehow those end up mattering more than anything you planned.

    So maybe seeking isn’t just an act of chasing something forward. Maybe it’s also a kind of opening , a willingness to be met. The horizon doesn’t just wait at the end of the road. It moves toward you, a little, every single day, if you’re paying enough attention to notice.

  • Taking the middle ground

    My dreams have changed over time. As I grew older, they matured. Now that I’m approaching my senior years, I realize that my biggest dream has, hopefully, evolved into something more reasonable — from wanting to come first in class, to becoming a good scientist, to doing well in my career, to publishing papers, to earning patents. Those were all dreams that made sense at their particular time.But my biggest dream now — the one I believe will last — is to take the middle ground: to be happy with what I’ve achieved, without either chasing more or renouncing everything. To me, this means living minimalistically — not out of restraint or deprivation, but by deliberately choosing to keep only what truly adds value and letting go of the rest. It is a choice for simplicity, not a sacrifice, and in that simplicity, I find real contentment. I believe this balance brings peace to the individual, and on a larger scale, leads to less conflict in society, a cleaner environment, and ultimately, a more sustainable planet. That has become my biggest dream.