Is it getting windy or is my umbrella getting old...

I am particularly melancholic today morning. I woke up to the news of two deaths among extended relatives.

Dadu, Jeeju's maternal grandfather passed away after long suffering with azheimer's and stomach ulcers. During our visit to Calcutta for my sister's reception, we had all stayed with the old couple, in their charming house in Survey Park, with ponds and birds and many hawkers.

And we had spent afternoons looking at old photo albums and travel memoirs. Of a graceful age, of their travel around the world, of friends, children and grandchildren.

Dadu was a scientist who made dolls out of coconut shells. He loved to sit in his balcony overlooking the pond.

I never got to know the brilliant scientist who helped set up the planetarium in Calcutta but I admired the man who silently filled up bottles of water to help his wife, when the household was a frenzy of festivities of which he probably registered little.

With my sister a few weeks pregnant, there is the unspoken but warm hope that Dadu isn't really gone.