Hard to believe that it has been more than a week since I last came here. I was on a visit to a Tier-3 city for 2 days last week. Vast open spaces, green fields and slow-paced life was a welcome relief from the daily grind that has become a norm for us city-dwellers. Laugh at me if you want, but the air there smelled different as well - probably the scent of pollution-free air that we sometimes get a whiff of on late winter nights in the city, if we are lucky. Otherwise it's a commodity that's not even available in bottled form.

Try as I might, I simply couldn't tear myself away from the open balcony of the Inn where we were put up for the night. It wasn't warm but it wasn't bone-chilling cold either. I just sat there with John Grisham's 'The Litigators' open in my lap - wondering whether to read the novel or stare at the little cottages that dotted the country-side, the road that broke off the highway to bring the vehicles to the city and the trucks that plied on it from time to time - blaring some Hindi song or other or blowing on the horn that emitted weird sounds. The sun had already gone down by the time we arrived so I didn't have much idea of what lay in the empty space adjacent to the Inn that was shrouded in the dark. For all I know, it could be a huge garbage dump - though I would have got a hint, or should I say a whiff, of it with the night air and I didn't.

As I stared at the little cottages and huts - little squares of lights forming puddles outside their windows - I wondered what the occupants were doing. Were they watching the saas-bahu dramas that are churned out on all the channels during prime time each day? Or are they having dinner? Then I laughed at my own thoughts and tried to concentrate on the book in my lap. Grisham is good but somehow that night his words failed to match the magic that the winter night in the Indian hinterlands was working on me. There was no full moon bathing its beams in the clear pond, no scent of jasmine filled the night air, no heavenly music floated from far across but does magic really need all these things to hypnotize you?

Complete silence is unnerving most of the times. What I needed that night was silence punctuated by sounds and voices. And by some grace of God, I got what I wanted :-)