A Debt Overdue

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?

That's a poem by Thomas Hardy
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy)

I love it.

I had Hardy for English Literature in college - his novel Mayor of Casterbridge. I went on to voraciously devour his other novels as well - A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure... Those were toothsome times - youth, relative poverty, unrequited love, college canteen, samosa chai, all route bus pass, delhi winter and Hardy's attractively unlucky men & women.

Few years later, at the FTII admission interview, I had blabbered something about liking Hardy's gloomy romanticism. I would like to believe that got me in. Nothing else explains my good luck, having had to follow worthies like Anup Singh Bhatla and Anant Balani (later my classmates in Direction) in the interviews. Their long duration inscrutable tête-à-têtes inside had put my subsequent short & sweet interrogation in perilous perspective.

It was raining that Pune August. Or was it...