Similar to awareness meditation, distance-swimming involves a suspension of one's impulse to surrender to fear. Recent reports of sharks in Manhasset, not far east in Long Island, have me swimming with my head up; my tinted goggles color the water a turbid Atlantic darkness, and the wind and chill create a mysterious and somewhat threatening atmosphere that I understand will be exciting, once I shake off the fear and restlessness in my mind. All I have to do is execute my plan—reach my destination—and then I can turn and sail back with the swift current, head down, and return to my rented floating palace. I press on. The green is already turning calm and pleasant. Whatever darkness is in this swim is largely a product of my own stress and exhaustion, overwhelmed from my move.

Having spent the better part of yesterday's afternoon and most of the long night at the Baba Lokenath festival—a Bangladeshi Hindu gathering devoted to the 18th-century saint-philosopher—in Flushing for a performance, I'm feeling rather overwhelmed with prasad. The amount of auspicious food I've consumed is enough to make me not want to eat for the next six weeks: khichri, mishti dohi, and all sorts of yellow and white items full of kela, kaju, brinjal and aam; rosogollas, shondesh, boondi laddoo and kalajaam; fruit chaat and endless heaps of lychee, cherry, watermelon, harpooz. The day before that, it was a rich dinner at a friend's—that was just one week ago, a world away—and the real prasad of a lovingly home-cooked desi meal, from people I know and trust. The Baba Lokenath scene was something else. saree-hawkers, booksellers, and khichri-slingers; the faithful swarming the hall, all on cell phones; the pandit with his strangely artificial coiffure, a swath of saffron in the midst of an enormous pile of fruit, flowers, sacks of rice and other offerings; the goonda-like organizers beseeching the room for calm, then bellowing orders verging on threat; the hare krishnas backstage changing out of their veshtis after making an enormous and divine ruckus that just caused everyone else to shout louder into their cell phones for well over two hours. With not much else to do, I suppose I should feel blessed, as if one big part of my life—my former immersion in South Asian music, poetry and culture—had landed up again to endorse my current endeavour, to shove off, so to speak, and set me asail.