Two of my friends have lost one of their parents….one in Atlanta lost his mother in Mumbai; and the one in Irvine, Cal, lost her father..she is the youngest of a large family, too.

Though we wasted two and a half hours first waiting for the suitcase and then lodging a complaint about its going missing, thank goodness, it has been located at last, and will, hopefully, be delivered home some time today….I realized that though it contains many things, I am now in a position to say that I could have got along without any of the stuff…good, perhaps I am making some progress on the path of non-attachment….

I will talk about my missing suitcase later…came home and switched on the gas cylinder to hear a horrible hiss and a dangerous stench (a stenching agent is added to the odourless cooking gas for just this purpose) and called my gas agency. I waited the entire morning and finally someone ambles in at 3 pm. (Well at least it prevented me from sleeping due to jet lag). He then pokes into the cylinder with a screwdriver and then announces, first, that “the washer has gone”, and then that “the regulator has gone”, and that I must change the regulator.

Whenever I tell an Indian-American that we are visiting our daughter and will be in the US for 6 weeks, the answer is, “such a short visit!” and when I say the same thing to an American-American (you know what I mean) the answer is, invariably, “a very long visit!” People may be the same everywhere…but this IS one cultural difference I have found!

This time, we only got to spend a few hours in New York..or to be precise, with our favourite place in NY, Manhattan. Our luggage was booked through (ah, one of the 4 suitcases hasn’t come to Bangalore, that’s another story, the story of a loooong saga at dawn at Blr airport this morning) so we were free to take the AirTrain to the NYC subway and thence to Manhattan, where a friend’s daughter lives practically on Times Square (W. 43rd Street). Then another friend who works close by met us and treated us to dinner at Carmine’s, an Italian restaurant on Broadway . The food was superb and came in mountainous quanitities(but I was surprised, when googling for it, to come up with several less-than-complimentary reviews too!)…then, in spite of the flurry of snow, we walked around until it was time for us to take the subway back again.