“Aint no sunshine when she’s gone”. “Aint warm when she’s away”. The music floated from somewhere on the platform as our train paused at the station before it moved onto its final destination to Berlin Brandenburg airport. Up to that moment, the trip at daybreak had been filled with the typical unspoken marital tension. A tension that originated from differing expectations on how to prepare for a trip back home, a trip I had decided to skip this time and a trip that would be her first, alone and across continents. Though like all disagreements, the current one brought up memories of past ones, adding fuel to a fire that if left alone, would have died on its own. As even Winnie the Pooh rightfully knew, “Sometimes the smallest things takes up the most space in your heart”. So the fire persisted silently as terrible May seemed to encroach into June. Till Bill Withers husky voice floated into my ears with the lyrics I had heard countless times before. The only difference being up to then
I have found it difficult, even impossible, to rationalise the presence of God. Definitely a more intelligent being than us existed and he or she or it created us and everything around us. However, he was in my opinion more likely to be a casual programmer who created this random simulation that we called the world than an all benevolent person watching over us and judging us on our thoughts and deeds. Though ever now and then, I have come across stories that seem to corroborate him as a benevolent and all powerful. In Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, he speaks about how his devout mother had a gun placed against her head by an abusive ex husband and how after one shot it failed to shoot despite multiple tries (she survived eventually). Even a liberal like him admitted that it was a miracle Mine was much smaller in scale and impact and perhaps it was just a coincidence. On my recent visit to India, my wife had gone to her hometown in Kannur while I stayed in mine after the wedding of a