I have been reading "Robinson Crusoe" to Buramai. She gets tucked into bed every evening with many hugs and kisses, and is read to for 20 minutes by either Mai or Baba. When she was littler and feeling extra affectionate she would say 'Mamie' or 'Baba-loo', and Mai or Baba would melt to a puddle. But those days are gone. She is no longer a little cotton ball. There is another little monkey to supervise. And we are increasingly more worried about Time and Discipline and Order and Good Behavior. Bui says sometimes that Abha and I are fast turning into old, ugly, mirthless toads.

    Bui has a high bed, brightly painted in red, yellow, and green, with a little ladder to the side; and underneath there are green curtains, and space to hide in, or play, or make katchhra unseen by the parents. That is where colored chalk is sometimes powdered and mixed with water, paint, glue, with Vaseline and little colorful bits of thread. That is also where things go to hide when she is asked to clean up the litter on her floor.

    Bui lies with her little head on her special pillow with pink candy-stripes, looking down at the book so as not to miss any pictures, one hand under her head. I turn off the light overhead and, perched precariously on a little baby chair, like an obese elephant on a circus stool, I read by the light of a little lamp on a little baby desk. Bui's eyes shine so much. I could read by them alone! There is no joy in all the world like a child.

    When Bui has a question, and she often does, she tends to raise her head, her brain starts rebooting, and there is even danger that she will sit up and launch into a whole stream of whys, wherefores, conjectures and suppositions. But slowly as sleep seeps deeper into her, her head lays down, the eyes struggling close. Then all of a sudden her breath becomes even, and a rare radiant beauty overspreads her face.

    Our evening strategy is to divide and conquer. After the two chit-pits have "bessed" (Teetee's word for brushing his teeth). After Mai has successfully fought off his attempts to take a bite out of her during the exercise. After they've been bathed and dressed --- always a time of the greatest fuss and excitement --- and after Buramai is done practicing her piano, either Abha or I get to read to her. Abha has lately been reading  "Little Women", "Little Men", "Brave Black Women", "Martin Luther King: the Peaceful Warrior", "A Wind in the Willows", Tolstoy, and Jane Austen. I have been charged with Ramayana, Mahabharata, Shel Silverstein, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Tolstoy, Chekov, and now Defoe. And I have lined up for her "Treasure Island", "Doctor Jeykell and Mr. Hyde", Shakespeare, "The Count of Monte Cristo" (a book that struck a most profound terror in my heart for many years running when I was a child), Oscar Wilde, and more Tolstoy and Chekov.

    Some stuff we visit over and over again. I have read Bui "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" perhaps six times over, but not for many months now. We love those books, both of us. Except that Bui, for some reason beyond my comprehension, does not like the poem that Alice in Wonderland starts out with:

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide
For both our oars, with little skill
By little arms are plied

    My deal with Bui is that we will read that which interests us both. If a book is begun but fails to catch at the heart of either party, it shall be abandoned then and forever, and be gifted to Teetee for causes having to do with the furtherance of science. He has taken it upon himself to test the tear-strength and other mechanical deformations of paper, the sturdiness of the binding, the buckling stress of the spine, and the permeability of the paper to various kinds and quantities of writing material. The number and kinds of books he has scrawled on is not funny. The crumpled pages I chance on every other day make me weep. This fellow needs to be sent back in time to the days when books were hewn in stone only by God on a certain mountaintop. When you wish to find out what it would be like to keep a pet ape at home who will not pay heed, and who you will yet hate to scold, please ask us.

    Our all time favorite is Tolstoy's "What Men Live By". Between Abha and I we have read it to Bui at least a dozen times over. Abha says it gives her the goose-bumps to just think about that story. I most love the part where Simon the shoemaker first realizes that it would not be right to leave Michael by the shrine. "Have I become so rich," he asks himself, "that I should go in fear of robbers and not help a fellow creature that may be cold and dying."

    "He was hungry and ye gave him food. He was thirsty and ye gave him drink He was naked and ye clothed him. ... And even as you did this unto him, the least of thine brethren, ye did it unto Me," Tolstoy paraphrases Christ from the Gospel according to Matthew before he starts on the story.

    We have so far confined ourselves to short stories in our Tolstoy readings to Bui. Of those too we have left out the really sad ones like "The Prisoner in the Caucasus" and "God Sees the Truth But Waits". But we have read "Master and Man" and that made her sad. We have read "How Much land Does a Man Need" quite a few times. "But what about a woman?" Bui never fails to ask. Tolstoy wrote all his short stories in the latter part of his life, I think. After he had fallen under the spell of religion, after he had had his fill of drunken carousals, cheap gypsy women, and of the women on his farm at Yasnaya Polyana. After the clap, after having been acclaimed a prophet, and after he had renounced his great and immortal works "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", as being immoral, unsound, and trashy.

    His religious enthusiasm was hardly dimmed by his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Quite the opposite in fact. But he was increasingly alienated from organized religion. He died unreconciled and unrepentant, and was buried without religious ceremony in his grave under the birches at Yasnaya Polyana. Perhaps the greatest work of biography I have ever had the pleasure to read is Henri Troyat's "Tolstoy". It was written originally in French, but an English translation is available. Also I might mention another wonderful biography by the same author, again of Russian subject, "Catherine the Great". Troyat was born in Russia. Troyat has also written a biography of Ivan the Terrible, I think, but I have yet to read that.

    Tolstoy himself, in the early part of his career wrote a semi-biographical novel called "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth", which I have been thinking it might be time to take up with Bui, now that she is already past the beginning age of the chief protagonist of that story, if I remember right. This before we start on mainstream Tolstoy:  "The Cossacks", "War and Peace", and "Anna Karenina"; in that order.

    Sometimes Gobindrao Teetee is also found right there, like a vighna, in the bed alongside Bui, wriggling or talking nineteen to the dozen, or climbing up and down, or pulling at Bui's hair, and not letting people read or listen, and being a general nuisance. But his proper place at that time is prone on the belly of the non-reading parent, who in turn sprawls on the recliner downstairs by the stereo system. Teetee lies there on a parental abdomen, sucking at his "nussi" (pacifier) and clutching his bottle of milk, and a bear, and a book ("Ma Aay-Bay-Say-Book") and a few other magic talismans of his babyhood. His head lies heavy on my chest, his hair smells of the Sun, and his warmth gladdens every tired bone. I keep my nose near his right ear where there hangs a certain special fragrance. He usually goes to sleep while listening to Bhimsen Joshi, Amir Khan, Padma Talwalkar, Shubha Mudgal, Pandit Jasraj, or some other magician of the voice. Bui, for many months when she was two, went to bed listening to a special pair of recording of Yaman on tape. Side A, Ashwini Bhide, Side B, Shruti Shadolikar. That was the tape she wanted every night. I hope that whenever on some evening of her life her mind is agitated and turbulent, and in need of peace and stillness, she will remember to trust in Yaman just as I do. It hardly ever fails me.

    Teetee has lately developed an inexplicable attachment to the color red, which he calls "geen", and no quantity of correction will mend that, and some evenings only CDs with "geen" spines can be played. That can be quite a nuisance if what you want to listen to is Bihag, for example, and there is no "geen" Bihag to be had.

    "Robinson Crusoe" is a very well plotted book written in very fine language. Very closely observed. I understand now, what I must not have realized as a child, what a treat this book is. To a child reading it by herself it must appear a little baffling in the length of the sentences, and in their often unusual construction --- not at all in keeping with modern English writing after Henry James. But when the book is read aloud, it is possible --- with the considered use of intonation, stress, breath, and pause --- to bring forth the spellbinding music of Defoe's language. And the book holds us both. Entirely.

    I might also mention, in view of some of the discussions we have had on Dakghar, that the Englishman, Robinson Crusoe, when his ship was wrecked in the Caribbean, was on his way from Brazil to Africa for the purpose of capturing slaves for the plantations of his European financiers in Brazil.

    Reading about Alice looking into her living room mirror in "Through the Looking Glass," wondering what the world is like on the other side of it, it occurs to me that what we call transforms in mathematics are also mirrors of reality. The image that shines back from a mathematical mirror is just as real and tangible as the reality before it. If the real world changes, so also does the image. But it is also true of a mathematical mirror that when we rearrange the image inside it, the real world responds with a corresponding and proportional rearrangement!

    On November 10, 1998, the US Office of Patents and Trademarks awarded me patent number 5835129, titled "Multipoint Digital Video Composition and Bridging System for Video Conferencing and Other Applications", which applies this simple idea to the "bridging" (phone company language) of a video conference call involving many parties, where each party would like to see every other party in windows on its screen. The windows should be independently resizable, be capable of being placed at various locations on a screen with a mouse, and be able to occlude each other. And all this should happen in real time with hardware that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

    Every reflection across a mathematical mirror requires a lot of addition and multiplication operations. So if we have many mirrors, each reflecting its own piece of the world, then it is efficient to create a new reality by piecing together all the images in a single transform space, and then reflecting the synthetic composite image back out of another mirror to obtain a new reality that will stand before us on a screen. This is an efficient use of computing resources. Therefore cheaper. And faster.