Kind words from Bangalore, and a truck to pick up an iPod

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:LAST WEEK MY iPod just stopped working. I got through on the phone to a woman in Bangalore who had a warm and gentle voice, and spoke to me with great kindness.

Kindness sometimes makes me feel like a turkey cock that has been hit on the back of the head with a hurley.

I tried to spell Mullingar for her so that she could organise a courier to collect the iPod. Sending a truck to collect an iPod seemed a little extravagant, but I said nothing.

Her gentle voice touched some chord in me. I told her that I once travelled on the Bangalore Express and was in the same compartment as Gangubai Hangal, a singer who sang for Nehru and Ghandi; an old woman dressed in a green sari and wearing big glasses like tractor lamps. When she lay down to sleep in the bunk across from mine, she unwound her hair and removed her glasses, and I could see that at 80, she was still beautiful.

I wanted to ask the woman on the other end of the phone did she sing, but I thought it might be too much of a chat up line, even at a distance of 5,000 miles.

But as she went on speaking about the iPod, and the truck and the small print of our contractual agreement, I was overwhelmed with all the things I wanted to ask her.

And I wanted to tell her that the budget in Ireland had exhausted me. And that sorrow comes with age; a kind of sadness I feel every morning. I wake with a grim sense that there are no good outcomes to the desires that still trouble my sleep, and so I end up worrying myself to death over the electronic blips of an iPod.

I wanted to tell her that I dread old age, and that I see the fear of death in other people all the time; I wanted to tell her that I feel sad when men run away from their loved ones in late middle age, because they are afraid of death, but can't admit it, and then they end up alone in self-centred apartments and die anyway. I wanted to ask her did she ever have a curry in the Sherlock Holmes Restaurant in Mumbai.

I wanted to tell her that the first time I ever made love was in Co Mayo, with an American, and I can remember the day and date distinctly because it was the very same day that the helicopter landed in Mountjoy jail and flew away with three IRA prisoners. My American girlfriend had a sticker on her rucksack - Make Love Not War; we read that as a sign, and so drove ourselves into a frenzy of joy between the sheets of a small hotel in Louisburg, later in the day.

Bob Dylan still sings all his songs in my iTunes library, although it's a long time since I stood with my torch at the Picnic outside London, singing with him . . ."forever young". I wanted to tell her that I am all washed up in Mullingar, an outcast from my own youth, and I wanted to tell her that each time I see snow on the slopes of Mount Allen it makes me sorrowful, because I know immediately all that will remain when I am dust.

And I wanted to tell her that I love India, and am a great admirer of Buddhist ideas, though my heart still melts when I encounter Christian icons of the Mother of God.

On Sunday evenings in my early 20s I used to watch clerical students in Maynooth return from wandering the streets of Dublin, with bric-a-brac and posters they had bought in the Dandelion market, to warm up their rooms, as a substitute for an intimate life. I would watch them gather on winter evenings, to chant Salve Regina in the stone-vaulted oratory of the seminary.

I watched them and was one of them; sorrowful boys that lingered on the edge of a world in which they could never belong. Clutching to the hope of some foggy kindness in heaven, that no digital phone could access, because back then, we did not dream of wireless phones, or iPods, or casual intimacies with people on the far side of the world; we dreamed of other things.

mharding@irish-times.ie