I'm at that age where I go to more funerals than weddings. Yesterday we said farewell to Mahen Chanmugam, a great artist and lovely man. His favorite subject was Lord Ganesh, the lord of new beginnings. May he be reborn well.

After the cremation we took a walk among the tombstones. Past the place where Dinesh was murdered, past the bodies burning on pyres, past the nuns singing in Tamil, past the Buddhists chanting in Sinhala. It was All Souls Day and the cemetery was full. And we got lost, so we saw a lot of it.

My friend is a novelist and he says there's a lot of characters in the graveyard. A lot of stories. He likes to wander around meeting the characters and calculating their innings. Me, I mainly look for swastikas, of which they are plenty.

The swastika meant and still means good in the subcontinent. It's still on the school tie of girls at Museaus College, it's still carved into houses, I have one in our house as well. I understand that Hitler used the swastika, but as Michael Bolton said, he's the one who sucks, why should we change?

We also look for funny names, because we don't seem to grow up, even as we literally near the grave. Names like Richard (Dick) Peck. Ho Cheesing. Is it bad teasing the dead? My friend said the dead are glad to have anyone talk about them at all.

I've been walking among the tombstones a lot lately. A week ago I was in Oxford and that was my main place. There, I looked for Stars of David, which were not yet a hate symbol when they were engraved.

Or old philosophers's tombs, which look like the burial of philosophy itself. Everyone serious ends up being merely grave.

There's nothing more to this. I've just started taking photographs again and thought I'd share them.