People call it the 'magic tablet' for pain and swelling, but I know it is a kortikosteroid like prednisolone, working deep in the body's own defence. It can treat many things because it quiets the whole system's alarms. For the cost, a strip of ten tablets is only thirty rupees in the bazaar, so we buy it for back pain or joint ache without seeing a doctor. But this is the worry—last monsoon, my neighbour, Dada, took them for his knee and his sugar went xorur bishal kopah high. One medicine cannot fit all bodies so easily, I feel.

Under the Hindu Succession Act, a will needs two witnesses, and registration is wise to avoid doubt. Yet the obvious advice is to be perfectly clear to prevent fights, but in my life, even clarity brought pain when I left a small part for my first wife's memory. My second wife saw not a gesture, but a ghost in the paperwork. So I say, the rules are less about ink and more about the quiet conversations you must have first, *aapan manuh khonr logot* (with your own people).

In my time, we had no booklets, so we memorised everything—but that was a hardship, not a virtue. Use the booklet if it is allowed; it lets your mind focus on the chemistry, not the constants. I know from balancing the tea estate ledgers that relying on a reference saves you from small, costly errors. Still, for a few core equations, like the rhythm of making *xorur bishal kopah*, let them settle in your heart through practice.

That is why I always ask for the numbers. In the accounts office, when a ledger did not balance, we did not shout or weep — we checked each entry, one by one. Now, with all these betting ads promising quick money, I see young men acting like the monsoon rain has washed away their judgment. My granddaughter in Guwahati tells me her classmate lost his whole month's scholarship on a cricket match. I have no quarrel with a man placing a small wager, but when the bookies fix the odds and the government earns its cut while the boy drinks tea from a broken cup, that is not a market — it is a trap baited with hope.