To walk in the morning light, the dark leaves still by your side. The rain has cleared things up, and you smell fresh earth after a long while. The icy northern wind: the grass trembles, and your teeth chatter like an old man's. The mud is compact, full of crystals.Reflected light held in a calm puddle of water. Walk on, like someone discovering a new world, or the straggler left behind, surveying what remains of a settlement.The wind howls in the empty corridors of the half-completed building.

In the dark intervals between, you found yourself.Lost, as always.I can read, I can write. Is that the sign of the humanness in the human, like the strawness of straw?

Things get misplaced. You worry about that for a while. What direction is this, you fail to understand. No step brings us closer.Winter has brought a kind of clarity; you see yourself without shadow, pared down to the essential, or at least the minimum. The fundamental questions still applying as time goes by.Life, thought, as opaque as ever. The seasons of discontent. The generality of it all.

The other day, buoyed up by the prospect of this blasted term finally coming to an end ("closure", as the Americans love to say), you suddenly see one of your better students in a corner, pensive, quiet. Is everything okay?, I ask. She starts to cry: it appears that one of her cousins has killed herself. Just ten days ago N had told me a similar story about one of her relatives. What can you say? That there's a distribution of pain and suffering and joy in the world and that it will reach each one of us in its turn? That we are here but to fill in the slots, the individual names not being important?

Of course, this thought struck you even during those sensuous dances. (What a bundle of fun you are b!, I hear you say). Why should beauty remind you of death? But no, it wasn't that, or just that. Rather...I bumped into one of my old friends at the re-union. At first I couldn't recognize him. Don't think I've actually seen him for 20-odd years. He was, and remains to this day, one of the most down to earth and soft spoken people I've met.

"How have you been and where have you been?"

He sort of shrugged off these questions and just said: I've been kind of anti-social". His hair used to be jet black, plastered to his head. But now, it was all wavy and grey. His eyes were sunken and he looked not unlike a figure out of a Durer picture. Forget which one. A strange sort of madness, or half-madness if that's the right phrase, in his eyes. I looked at his name-tag. Who was this, after all. Then it clicked: he was the one who'd been in jail for the last fifteen years on a murder charge.He was the one. It could have been anyone.

In the early hours of the morning, with most of your friends sloshed and the initial charm of the dances wearing thin, you walked around and talked to those of your friends who could still manage to speak clearly. One friend, extremely rich, told me of the terrible time he'd had over the last seven years: litigation and family disputes; another of how he was racked with guilt over his kids not being able to speak Urdu, about them not being able to communicate with his grandparents. Behind the surface, the cigars, the girls, the booze, there's the old familiar heartache.

You think to yourself: get the hell out of here, get out quick and don't look back.