4) Olive Outside a bar under A green Heineken umbrella, An old woman, Tattered purple coat. Sunglasses and a gray hat. I am back in Nyack. My year in India is over. So is the covert love affair. I can't think of India or Sahaya Mary; I cannot bear their loss. Up Main Street past the bar and The drifter alone at the table. "Come here," she soothes. "You have a story to tell." I sit and tell her how I would have married Sahaya Mary, I Really would have And lived in India And spoken Tamil And had meaning And had intensity in my life. She nodded her head As if expecting every word. When I stood up, I had returned, I had returned To America. 5) Wings It is true, With you I soar ... read more

Barack Obama has a heart. That is what this election is about. For once, people have been provided an alternative to the “best of the worst” scenario that seems to inevitably accompany each election cycle. Barack Obama has given the world reason to believe that if he were to be elected, the most powerful country in the world would be steered by someone who would look at a situation, say the genocide in Rwanda, and try to do the right thing. Saying that Obama is special because he has a heart and wants to do the right thing implicitly indicts politicians the world over. Politicians as a general rule have given me little reason to believe that their intentions fall far from the planning of their next election. Records are so easy to manipulate that politicians ... read more

Hey anyone who still gets this. Its been a busy summer and we finished the first draft of the book. And before school started as we had hoped. Now, we are working on the second draft and it is coming well. I wrote this little piece as an informal assignment for public essay class. Since Ive begun writing I have been slightly scared of writing about soccer. I don't know why. I think, most likely, I was worried that writing about soccer, something so important to me, wouldnt resonate. I know that I have been put off from writing about it for some time also because I thought of it as too small a task, like somehow it was a waste of my talents. After writing this, with tears in my eyes and googsebumps on my ... read more

It was through soccer, as usual, that I made my first connections in India. And, as usual, I had brought a soccer ball with me, this time deflated in my stuffed bag. I pumped it up with the help of a neighborhood bike repairman. He set up shop in the spotty shade of a scraggy bush next to the main road, sitting on a rock until a customer came. With a newly full ball in tow, I walked through my immediate neighborhood of mud huts and cement houses juggling the ball in the air, hoping to initiate some sort of interaction. No sooner had I gone twenty yards, when a flock of young kids surrounded me, excitedly yammering in Tamil, a language which, at that point, I had yet to learn. There was a miniscule girl ... read more

A pale light seeped into the cramped bedroom from under the door. There was just enough light for John to see Patricia's pale, drawn face, if he were to have looked. But John didn't look. John stood stiffly in the middle of the room, hands on the back of his desk chair, staring out the window into the blackness. "What are we going to do now?" he asked. After a moment, Patricia, nearly hidden beneath the comforter said, "I don't know. I don't want this to happen any more than you do." John turned around slowly and stood facing the bed. He peered towards the outline of Patricia's face. Trying with all his might to be calm for her, he said, "Baby, I know you tried. I know." Soft sobbing came from the bed and John ... read more