The wife was watching that cooking show on the big TV last night, mamu, while I was cleaning a brass lock. The laughter seemed too loud, like the *jhol* they make has too much masala and not enough patience. I kept wiping the sandalwood oil on my hands, thinking—this is the noise my son in Bangalore probably has in his hostel mess every evening. He calls and says he is happy, but I wonder if this kind of entertainment is what is slowly keeping him there, away from the quiet of our Guwahati *hawa* in the evening.

My son sends me clips from the Bangalore fan park—boys standing shoulder to shoulder, singing, no fancy seats, just the jhol of bodies and the hawa of the night. It reminds me of our Guwahati bus rides, packed tight, everyone squeezed but no one complaining. That is how football should be, mamu—cheap enough for the chai-wala’s son to stand and shout, not priced out by some economist’s theory.

The old Filmistan poster of *Caravan* has started peeling from my workshop wall—the one with the jeep careening through the desert. Every time I see a new splash about that *Fast & Furious* series, mamu, I recall the time I tried to fix a throttle cable for a young fellow who wanted to race his modified bike up the Shillong road. That cable snapped before we even reached Jorabat, and he spent the afternoon drinking chai while I showed him how to braid a proper jute knot. You can put all the engines you want in these films, but no machine survives Assam's hawa and our potholes—it's the man who patches it by hand who truly knows what adventure means.