I met new people today. Meeting new people, truly meeting them, is always a miracle. Sometimes I feel that the things I do have only one true purpose – meeting people. I have few close friends, but an ever-growing multitude of people in my life, all of whom I love with various degrees of ferocity. There is always place for more.

I haven’t read many books since the emotional earthquake of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. This may be the longest and driest book hangover I’ve ever had and it may finally be over. Today I started A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar. I am only on page 30 or so, but I have the strangest feeling. I feel like this book touches the very core of my being. Every page or so, I stop and gasp for breath. Every little passage resonates with my own experience: a family trip to the consulate for visas, father’s love for his adult daughter, the daughter’s own experience of parenthood – everything is like a mirror held to my own life. I feel pulled in, but also genuinely scared to contindue reading. I’m afraid that whatever happens in this book, will somehow be personal for me. I suspect that it will open up the wounds that had not been healed, but had crusted over a long time ago.

A few months ago, my therapist, who is Jewish, recommended me a book about Holocaust that had had a huge impact on her. I feel that maybe the book I am reading now is similar. I don’t know what it would do to me.