In Mexico when they celebrate el Día de los Muertos, it’s believed that during that time,  the departed souls return to earth, and it’s for that reason that Mexican people will go to the graves with ofrendas of food and drink and incense.

Driving tonight – five years since September 11, 2001 –  I was  watching the two blue beams known as the towers of light that appear at sunset, hours after the names of the dead have been recited and flowers and personal tokens left at Ground Zero.

At one point they disappeared into  some clouds, piercing them, and it looked much like a velvet curtain on a theater stage.   You  could almost imagine the families left behind on one side, peeking through the gap at those who died, as if there were an opportunity for the two sides to meet, on this night only.

And these towers play hide-and-seek, appearing straight ahead sometimes, on your left at others.

I can see them before sleep tonight.  

In a few hours they’ll be gone, for another 364 days.

One does occasionally tear oneself away from the movie / TV / computer screens and actually crack open a book.

Thanks to a mercifully kind soul who lugged a copy of the 3.5 pound Vikram Chandra novel Sacred Games thousands of miles across the seas from the state of Tamil Nadu to the state of New York, I had the pleasure of discovering one of the best lines I’ve read or heard anywhere this year, spoken by Sartaj Singh, after encountering the tearful, abused wife, Mrs. Kamala Pandey, whose  husband  has just thrown their white Pomeranian, Fluffy, out the fifth-floor window of their apartment:

“Love is a murdering gaandu.”