It's the city of a million church towers. It's the city of the forked tongue - once split evenly along St.Laurent boulevard into an Anglophone West and a Francophone East, now muddled in an Allophone melange. It's the city of the meticulously beautiful - conscious enough of appearances to border on fakeness - and the flamboyantly care-free. It's the city of escaliers - snaking stairways on which the snow falls in sodden silence on white wintry nights. It's the city of the beastly northern cold - colder than Moscow during frigid February nights. It's the city of laughter, fireworks and summer jazz. It's the city of subterranean lights - where consumerist kitsch tunnels through miles of underground shopping malls like a glowing earthworm. It's the city of the "biblio-ambulists" - those with the uncanny ability to navigate through crowded public spaces while engrossed in a book. It's the city of Haitian and Lebanese cabbies, Chinese & Persian deppaneur owners, Indian restaurateurs, Albanian hairdressers and million other enterprises from a million other corners of the planet. It's the city where the weekend party begins on Thursdays in the numerous pubs and clubs on St.Denis, St.Laurent & Crescent. Beneath it all, Montreal is the city of dropped gloves...

On any given winter day, as you keep your head down and gingerly navigate the icy pavements, you can find a few dozen gloves punctuating your path. Colorful baby mittens, sleek and stylish leather gloves, thick fingerless ones from hands that dread the cold, functional ones that'd snap snugly unto workman fingers... Soft inner-gloves fashioned out of New Zealand Merino... Water-proof over-gloves...  They all lie on the sidewalk, in slowly thawing pools of icy snow, often trampled under heavy snowboots, or on rare occasion, fresh and bright like unlikely flowers in the snowbanks... You may see them, you may not. Owners might look for them, they might not. Kind souls might hang them up like lynched outlaws at cafes and offices or truant young feet might kick then around in the slush... But the gloves are there - strewn along the city's sidewalks amongst cigarette buts like little amputated hands...

Montreal has a thousand stories to share if you'd light up a fire and stretch out with a drink! Of the long-forgotten Iroqouis Hochelaga at the foot of what would later become Mount Royal, of the French trading outposts, of how enterprise sailed up the St.Lawrence and built it's capitalist defences against the North Wind, of the '60s socio-commercial heyday and Expo-67, of how the Canadiens once sent tremors through the ice of Montreal Forum and how they descended into relative oblivion like the city itself. If you are willing to listen, any long time Montrealer will wax eloquent in French, English or often both, of long hard winters, Viva Le Quebec Libre, bagels, the sixties and more... But are these the city's story? Doesn't Montreal live as much through the fast disappearing footprints on the fresh snow as it does in the timeless edifices of Vieux Montreal? Isn't a city's story best elucidated by what it forgets? Then, Montreal's story is best written on the wrinkled, withering, stamped out fingers of a zillion gloves...

There are tales that only the gloves can tell - tales that were never written and shall never be. Tales that float through ever fading voices until no tongue shall remember, no ear shall yearn for and no heart shall care... The tales of the millions who have called this city home over the years - their life, their lot, their joys and sorrows... While the city trundles past them in its staid linear journey through the years, the forgotten gloves still retain the warmth of hands in a parallel space-time continuum. They open doorknobs to take the tired home... They retrieve car keys in hasty thrusts into jacket pockets... They fumble clumsily to disentangle a cigarette from the pack... They hold waists gently when passionate lips can't wait to get home... They channel ancient wisdom through when the old hold young hands for a walk across the generations... And sometimes, when a Chinese hand shakes a Lebanese one, or a Peruvian a Quebecoise, the gloves learn to draw unseen strings across the seas and weave them into the city's tapestry. Oh, there are tales only the gloves can tell... Amidst all that we forget in winter's early evening darkness, they constantly murmur Montreal's tale into the howling wind...

I moved to Montreal on a pre-winter evening when freezing rain fell like incessant reproach. And for over two years now, I've called this beautiful city home. Predominantly French with an economy that's dwarfed by behemoths like NYC, Chicago or even Toronto, Montreal didn't seem to hold enough to sustain me through more than one winter. And yet, last night, as I stood out on a friend's porch in La Prairie, staring at Montreal's city-lights brightening the low, snow-laded ceiling in the Northern sky, I realized I don't want to move.

I've learnt over these past years that I'd probably never be able to drop anchor anywhere. There's the global economy and the restless race we all run... There's the unmistakeable Indianess (or SriLankanness or whatever) that sometimes tugs at the heart pulls it South-East... There's family and the hope that one day we'd indeed settle down in rural India that B and I both so love.

But for now Montreal is home. In her own way, B has made a whole bunch of friends... Indians, Canadians, Chinese, Moroccans, Italians, Quebecois, Lebanese, French  - they all drop by for magical evenings of rich Italian red wine and B's excellent food, where we all talk about our distant homes. During these nights, our varied pasts somehow morph into a common dream that we all shared the previous night - full of South Indian rice-fields, Sezchuan grandmothers, beaches in Casablanca, orange orchards near Beirut, soccer evenings in Rome, they all mesh into a dream that zooms into starker recollection as we all speak of it. And slowly yet surely, the gloves weave us with unseen fingers into an unknown fabric.

May be some of us are just not meant to drop anchor and stay... May be all we can afford to leave behind are a few gloves on snowy sidewalks... Montreal and it's beautiful people have kept my tropical heart warm through three winters and I'd like to stay forever. But if I don't, there's a couplet already written for me in the black and grey gloves of which I lost one each in the last few months. And on we all walk, me with my mismatched gloves thrust in my pockets, towards yet another chapter of the human tale.

Orbiter Dictum: "Cinq un quatre" is 514 - the area-code for Montreal.

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Four years ago, sheer boredom and an abundance of free internet bandwidth drove me start a blog. In a rather atypical deviation from my usual supercilious wise-cracking, I started a honest and intensely personal journal with this post:

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Four years - a mere speck in a lifetime. But these four years have stretched over B-Schooling, internships, marketing - finance - marketing again and a whole bunch of travel - Mumbai, Bangalore, New York, Montreal and more. Heck, four years is longer than my longest relationship :)

I don't think I have done justice to this space and its now fast disappearing readership. But one fact I take pride in is what I swore to do in my very first post - to write only when the heart demands truthful expression. As I read through these last few years of my life, I can't recognize anything that I didn't strongly identify with.

Atticus has become an alternate identity - though those looking for a Gregory Peck look-alike barely manage to hide their disappointment when they meet me in person. Now, with 130+ posts under my belt, I think it is time to pick a few personal favorites... There are some about my grandpa, mom and aunt which are special for very different reasons. But among the other, these are the ones I like the most...

1.  Avuncular Expatiations (or) Old Uncle Atticus
Easily my favorite... A day after I posted, a girl from Bangalore mailed in to check if I was really 6-ft-10 (I had made a typo)! Three and a half years later, I am married to her :)  Dhanya, my neice, is way taller now... But she remains as adorable as ever.

2. The Peregrine's Progress
As I read this post now, I can vividly recollect every image that flashed through my mind that day. At times, we can sense those watershed points in life - where the direction, scale and nature of things would never be the same again!

3. The Many Loves of Atticus - Vol I of CCXXI
What can I say about first love...?

4. Strangers in the Night
I've let go of a lot of friends. But this one would have really hurt! Thankfully, we survived this and now have taken our frequent shouting matches to a Trans-Atlantic tele-forum!

5. All My Bags are Packed...
Good-byes suck!  Montreal and  I  wait eagerly for Her Grace to move in this fall!

6. Riding With The King...   and  Taxi Number 2-3-5-4
These two are dedicated to India's taxi and auto drivers from whom I learnt valuable lessons in life!

7. From Small-Town Boy to Small-Town Boy
What I was, what I am and perhaps, what I'll always remain!

Alright then, enough of narcissistic reverie for the birthday blog... To anyone who has taken the time to read this space in the last four years and the numerous blog-acquanitances who have become good friends now, many thanks!

Love and Peace,
Atticus Finch