The fragrance of jasmine flowers enchanted the child in me. I used to sleep with my grandpa in my first 7 or 8 years of my life. We did not have jasmines in our garden. But I would smell the coffee flowers early in the misty mornings in the yard behind my house. I used to wake up smelling those flowers and as soon as the first rays of the sun descended into the courtyard, I would dash down the gravel path leading to the house of a quarry worker at the speed of an arrow and put my brakes right in front of the jasmine flowers crept all over his house’s boundary walls. His wife Janki would wake up then and come toward me with her usual smile and greetings for me and then help me gather as many flowers as I need. I would then head back to my house smelling those flowers umpteen times on the way.Janki’s glowing face and jasmine fragrance used to fill most of my childhood mornings. I used to keep the flowers in a tumbler of water or make a garland wit them. I loved the fragrance as if it emanated from within my soul.

We have all our parts to play. However small it may be. That’s the spirit of Ubuntu.

My avatar has lived 63 years on this planet so far. I still have some unfinished work. In my teens, I thought 40 would be the crescendo of my lifetime and then I will wane quickly and disintegrate. It did not happen. I have only a few scant memories of my childhood. It was a remote village tucked away in the mountain ranges of the western ghat’s southern tip of India in a state called Kerala. My parents were high school teachers who took the grooming of their 3 children in the sixties very seriously. I was the eldest followed by two sisters and later followed by a brother after 13 years from my birth. A small traditionally conservative Christian family according to the village standards.