Perhaps the only way to understand my country is as a monster possessed of a violent schizophrenia. Peace and Love satyagrahis who turn around and slaughter trainloads of their own neighbours. Intellectual, arty spiritualists who turn around ready to auction their souls and convictions for that extra rupee. Perhaps the moods of its people are like the vagaries of its weather; to be taken at face value and endured, rather than sifted and analysed. Torrid sun or violent monsoon, there is always a propensity for the larger-than-life, for gargantuan appetites and in-your-fucking-face emotions. Hospitality and savage brutality, insaniyat and apathy, reason and faith clash and collide and consume each other (and humans unlucky enough to live where such Grand Ideas reside) like balls of hellfire.

If a storm breaks, you just take shelter and wait for the clouds to part, braving the lashing rain and clutching your coat closer to the body (if you're lucky enough to have one). Perhaps there is no such thing as real shelter. Perhaps cruelty is permanent and inevitable, like bad weather, punctuated by brief interludes of warmth and the compassion of strangers.

As I look past pellet guns and human shields; past dying farmers and Gauri Lankesh murdered in cold blood; past Dadri and past border forces firing pepper spray and stun grenades on desperate men, women, and orphaned, dispossessed children fleeing slaughter at home, I look at a now-meaningless Tricolour and hope for such an interlude. Ah, if only Hope weren't as flimsy and ephemeral !

Films do a terrible job of representing the textures of memory or its ambiguities. To make matters worse, the clunky device of a flashback dispenses with Memory itself as just another mode of storytelling, a (merely) parallel arrow of narrative time. No, no, that won't do. Remembering occurs through a succession of still images, through tableaux vivant that blur into the present moment.

Of late I am quite reminded of a particular image: September 29, 2015. I am reclining on the grass of a sunny afternoon in Dublin, surrounded by friendships (two of which melted away, no floating platypus or molten clock to recognise them by), rosy false dawns, and an ephemeral bliss...Le bonheur écrit à l'encre blanche sur des pages blanches. Voilà.

Perhaps the most moving of acquaintances are made under a fleeting sun, not through years of having known the other. We do not ''go way back,'' but the drowsy acceptance of soft grass and the other's comforting presence thaws our souls. Sets us free. Even in the act of remembering how it was. Even through the distortions of formaldehyde. Joy is impossible to describe, but instantly perceived.