One year and one month ago I learned, through a personal bereavement, of the existence of a crematorium just off the Eastern Express Highway, at Vikhroli. The ten odd years preceding this, I must have driven past the location countless times. 

Those slim, black, tall chimneys poking up into the sky - surely, I must have blindly "seen" them, and driven past, unknowing, uncaring, totally unaware. Just another urban structure dotting or blotting briefly, the non-descript skyline of suburban Mumbai.

10th February 2011, with my mother-in-law's moving on, changed all that.  (She always had a smile - except when talking to my FIL about his "language"!!)

Ever since, each time I cross that stretch of road, automatically my eyes look up at that pair of chimneys - quiet, forbidding, silent sentinels of our temporary existence. Some days, they stand simply. More often, though, I see the black smoke rising up through the top, a soul moving up to Heaven, perhaps. Somewhere, someone has moved on, again - leaving behind memories, people who live on slightly diminished. 

Not just at Vikhroli, it seems now that I can recognise these gateways to heaven across Mumbai - chimneys in Jogeshwari, Malad, Mulund, elsewhere, a clan of chimneys bound together in an unearthly function, each serving a neighbourhood/ Each driving home the point - no man is an island.