My travel these days is a slow evening walk along the Mangalore shore, notebook in my bag. The same beach gives me a new poem depending on the colour of the sky. You do not always need a plane ticket, sometimes you need to notice the place you already stand.

I re-read a novel from my twenties this month and found a completely different book, because I had become a different reader. The story had not changed, I had. Good books do not age, they wait for you to catch up to them.

The house is loudest in its silence after the children moved abroad. I have learned to sit with the quiet instead of running from it, and lately the quiet gives me my best lines. Loneliness and solitude are twins, and I am slowly teaching myself to keep the gentler one.

Last week I read my Konkani poem aloud at a small gathering, hands shaking like a schoolgirl. A young man came after and said his late mother spoke like that and he had missed the sound. That, children, is why we make things, to hand someone back a piece of their heart.

Found words after 55 years

I spent 33 years counting other people's money at a bank in Mangalore, and only after retiring did I discover I had poems waiting inside me all along. I am 55, my house is quiet, and I am finally loud on paper. It is never too late to become who you were underneath the job.