The Paris Walk

The Paris Walk: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.---Ernest Hemingway The Paris Walk: This is a book about Europe. Through the Indian eyes. How is my first abroad journey I changed and everything in my life metamorphosed to an obsession of seeing a world of art beauty hardship frustration tears and surrender? And of course death. This book is a collection of fourteen stories but of one theme. Europe. And how days and nights my color and habits and outlook and emotions changed as I travel from one city to another through a period of three months. The day I was waiting for the return flight in Madrid, I knew I have found my home. I will return. I did. And from there the stories originated. Because each man has something to say and each journey makes him tough and bearable. He understands how he belongs to the world. And the world in him. It is a book which contains the story of Andre, the fisherman who was ready for his last journey on the tip of Barcelona. His old age, his old scripts broken poems, his dreams all ready to embark for one last journey. Then there is my experience of one night in Pamplona, the bullfight arena, made immortal by Ernest Hemingway and how the place has changed and not changed. It is a story of one night with a bullfighter in a very old Spanish village outside Pamplona and it brings out the truth before death. This book contains also the stories on my visit to Prague and my interaction with Kafka and the gypsy woman. How abstract and surreal life can be still in this age of reason and technology, my story tries to prove that. This is also a story of modern times based on the abstracts of Franz Kafka. All beside the flowing Vltava river. There is a story that starts on the streets of Vienna with a very old sketch of a Nazi woman. That sketch leads to one unknown chapter that was written during the Second World War. There is also a story that starts in Venice and ends in Berlin where I try to capture the inhuman sufferings of the citizens of East and West Germany between a love affair. There is a story on Anne Frank. It is about my visit to her house in Amsterdam and how she came back to me again and again in dreams. How I visited her cemetery at Bergen-Belsen and how I found the girl who once wrote a diary and lived forever. And of course, there are stories in Paris. I am an aficionado of Paris. An obsessed lover. And Paris always reminds me of Hemingway and Van Gogh. How they in their life portrayed Paris and how the city has cultivated in them the seeds of their own genius. There is one story on Van Gogh on Rue De Lepic where Vincent Van Gogh stayed and painted. It is a story of my search for that house. It is a story of walking through Paris with a girl from below the Eiffel Tower at midnight to the house of Vincent Van Gogh. There are other stories in Paris. There is a story of a writer and his journey with a French writer from Jaipur to Paris and a trip both inwards and philosophical. There is the story of one woman, a whore, and how she lived her life and killed herself in search of her son. It is based on a real woman whom I found in a cafe at Montparnasse late at night waiting for a client who never came. That night she was thrown out of her hotel. There is a story in Hemingway's home, where Hemingway lived and wrote his first novel. The story itself is named '74, Rue Du Cardinal Lemoine'. It originates with a beggar walking through that very street and pausing for a while and looking up. That is where my story started in that very famous place of a legend. I have entitled the manuscript as 'The Paris Walk' as Paris comes back again and again in my stories. It is my love for Europe that is painted in the book. A never-ending walk. The Paris Walk.