A Time of Solitude . . .

It used to be that I had no difficulty falling asleep at night.  When I was a young girl still in my 20s, growing up in Lajpat Nagar colony in New Delhi, I would lie in bed as the night deepened. I would hear the sounds filtering in through the open window on hot summer nights—stray dogs barking in competition from neighborhood to neighborhood, the occasional truck rumbling by, someone singing lustily from the embrace of the night—a drunkard or  a laborer returning home late—the drone of an airplane, the rustle of a mouse scurrying across the tiled floor of the lavatory, the sound of a door opening or closing here or there on the middle floor of the three-storeyed home we lived in. I would lie secure in the precarious knowledge that this was a world known to me.