Our parents were friends, and Maya’s mother came to visit my mother periodically with her two daughters. The older daughter was a lively creature and would promptly lead my elder brother to the garden to walk and talk. I was left with the younger one, Maya, a shy girl of few words. Awkwardly, I would get her to accept a lemonade and sit next to me to look at a magazine. If my fingers touched her hand as I turned the pages, she withdrew it in a flash and her face changed color.
 
I finished school and went to college, and didn’t see her for some years. Then I went to a family wedding and encountered Maya’s mother. Next to her was a beautiful tall woman, in a simple white-and-green dress, her lush hair in a long braid. It took me a few minutes to realize that it was Maya. She looked like a character out of a Jane Austen novel, placid and statuesque. She was no more loquacious than before, but I persuaded her to come to a quieter area where we could talk. She was in college herself, devoted to her studies but interested in art. She was considering specializing in photography.
 
I would have liked to keep talking with her, but the social situation made that impossible. I wasn’t smart enough to gather her contact details before she rejoined her mother and moved away.
 
I saw her only twice after that, fleetingly, on social occasions. Apparently she had married and moved to another town.

​It was more than a decade before I heard that she had returned to the city. Her marriage had ended and she had started a new life, working as a photographer in an advertising agency. I had not forgotten the shy girl who had withdrawn her hand at the slightest touch, nor the beautiful woman at the family wedding.
 
I turned up at her office. She gave me an uncharacteristically broad smile and took me over to the café next door for a cup of coffee. In office clothes and her hair in a bun, she looked different but as remarkable as ever. I said I was sorry that her marriage had ended, but I was glad that she was back in town. Diffidently, I added I would like to see more of her.
 
She was quiet for a few minutes, leaving me anxious about the meaning of her silence. She said then she would be happy to see me. She added she did not have many friends and she thought of me as a very special friend.
 
I was touched. She was starting a new phase of her life. She was also starting on a new profession. She had overcome her natural reticence to tell me that I had, after all, a special place in her life. It made me very happy.
​
I saw a lot of her in the following weeks. There were two very different sides to her. She was very friendly and I felt special in her company. Yet, in some indefinable way, she seemed to draw a line that I felt I could not cross. Was this the result of an embittering experience she has had? Or was it a natural sense of caution she observed? I did not know. But I knew I was happy in her company and I was content to live within the invisible orbit she had gently but deftly drawn around her.

​She was gradually getting busier in her work. The advertising company demanded long hours of her, often beyond the normal work day. In addition, at times she took on private assignments that she felt were artistically important to her. I encouraged her to take them, for, beyond the remuneration, it seemed to add to her professional confidence. It meant though that she had occasionally to go out of town and had less time for me.
 
Meanwhile, my work pressures grew. I called her as I traveled, but I longed to see her and be with her.
 
After a week-long trip I drove direct from the airport to her place.
 
She came to the door of her apartment. “Hello, stranger!” she said jocularly.
 
“I don’t want to be a stranger,” I said.
 
“I don’t want you to be,” she replied. She looked at me. She seemed to have something on her mind.
 
Then she said, “I have a problem. I took this apartment on a short-term lease. Now the landlord wants it back.”
 
I thought fast. I said, “I have a solution.”
 
The following week she moved in with me.

​I had a recent brush with death: a violent car accident in which the car was totally destroyed and I was too, nearly, but I survived. It prompted some interesting thought about dying.
 
We don’t want to think about death. This is astounding because we know that death is waiting for us all. We also know, as life insurance actuaries will quickly tell you, from the age of 16 to 64, the proportion of people who die double every couple of years. Yet most of us avert our glance at the impending shadow, pretend that we are immortal and go on heedless. This is childish and silly. We need to give thought to death and recognize it as the capstone, a very significant event of our life.

​The reason we don’t do so is because we think of death, not as the ultimate event of our life, but as a negation of life. We think of diseases as the invariable causes of death and therefore our enemies. So we declare war on diseases and place the mantle of warriors on doctors, reducing ourselves to the status of helpless little ‘patients,’ who would patiently carry out the biddings of their heroic saviors.
 
The naïve faith in the omnipotence and omniscience of medical knowhow is profoundly misplaced. Paralleling the acrimonious debate in the US about when life begins, the definition of death itself anarchic. For the expediency of organ harvesting, which requires that organs  must be from a live body, we have adopted the convenient definition that a person is dead when the brain doesn’t function. So you can be dead while your heart beats on, all your respiratory and digestive functions work, the vital signs are present, and, bar the surface areas of your cerebrum, even the rest of your brain is active.
 
We pretend to know the cause of death and have implicit trust in postmortem analysis as the final arbiter. The truth is that, just to cite an example, even for alcohol, the toxic substance most incriminated in murder and violence, its concentration in a blood specimen to determine a person’s inebriation at the time of death, as lawyers well know, is open in medical science to wildly different interpretations.
 
More widely known and painfully experienced is the friends’ and relatives’ anguish when doctors try to extend a dying patient’s life by the so-called ‘heroic’ measures, which, in many cases, add hours to a person’s life by brutal mechanisms that would never have been accepted by the person if he or she could have objected. The pernicious premise of life at any cost is based on the false idea that disease must be fought and death defied no matter what the benefit is to the person involved.
 
Our reluctance to look at death ends in hurtful consequences. There are preposterous death rituals, from ghastly and disrespectful burnings in the east to astronomically expensive burials in the west. A scant few besides the wealthy execute wills; fewer still do any significant estate planning and leave a morass of complications and tax burdens for their heirs. Most important of all, families do a poor job of preparing for the death of a loved one and needlessly inflict an avoidable trauma on vulnerable members, such as an aging widow or an adolescent child. Francois Mauriac spoke of death as “one grace assured to people,” but often it is disgracefully and unnecessarily cruel on the caring ones they leave behind.
 
Tagore, the great Asian poet, said simply and profoundly that death belongs to life as much as birth does. We must learn to look at it without fear and anguish, and hopefully with equanimity and acceptance.
 
My deliverance, alive, from a crushed car may ease the transition to a saner view of what the alternative might have been.

​India has many wonders, but a wondrous thing that glitters often in my mind is Darjeeling, a small town in its northeast corridor. It glitters and it beckons.
 
Legend has it that two English officers found the place while looking for a decent location for a sanatorium, pastoral and peaceful. The locale was just that; it was also unspeakably picturesque. Set in a craggy mountain ridge at 7000 feet, it had a fresh and brisk air. With emerald plantations all around, it looked like a dream nestled in the grandeur of the Himalayan range. The British, then ruling India, with Calcutta as their capital, quickly chose it as their summer capital. It was christened, after a famed Buddhist shrine in the area, Darjeeling, place of the thunderbolt.
 
The name hints at an interesting history. The land once belonged to the Buddhist Chogyals of Sikkim, but was wrested by the martial Gorkhas of Nepal. When the British gained control, they returned the land to Sikkim but leased the Darjeeling area for a trifling sum and started tea plantations, which became a giant money spinner. Darjeeling tea is still unmatched in its reputation for a unique flavor in the world market.

​You reach Darjeeling by flying to Bagdogra and driving up a winding road for three hours. The first time I went in a more interesting way: I took the slow Toy Train that climbs 5000 feet over 50 miles, does incredible loops and provides an incredible vista of mountains and tea gardens for seven hours.
 
The first thing you want to do in Darjeeling is simply walk up and down the Mall road. Look up and you have a breathtaking view of sparkling snow-capped Kanchenjunga, the highest mountain of India, a pentad of Snow Treasures, which mountaineers climb but respectfully never to the top. Look down and you are in a cavalcade of tourists, residents and jobbers of infinite variety, mingled with the local Nepalis, Lepchas, Bhutias and Tibetans, your heart lifting with the energy of rubbing shoulders with friendly strangers and pushy vendors. All aroung you are cafés, hotels,  booksellers and souvenir shops, waiting to be explored and remembered.

A tea taster friend – the subtlety of whose profession had always mystified me – reserved a room for me and my friend in the Planters Club right next to the Mall, and we were enthralled by the discreet charm of the old-fashioned hospitality it afforded. The next time I stayed with another friend at the Windamere Hotel on Observatory Hill, a short walk from the Chowrastha junction where the Mall road ends. A quaint relic of the British Raj, with its spacious well-tended grounds and comfortable rooms and fireplaces, it cast such a spell on us that the friend ended up as my fiancée.
​
There are a dozen ways you can amuse yourself in Darjeeling. You can learn the secrets of  mountaineering at the Institute Tenzing headed; you can see the variety of Himalayan flora at the botanical garden; you can see pandas and Siberian tigers at the zoological garden; you can visit the world class tea estates; you can hear the touching stories of Tibetan refugees at their center; you can explore the natural history museum; and you can take a break from all this and be at the beautiful Choling Monastery.
 
But for me Darjeeling itself is the greatest amusement. As the large and well-known cities get larger and more modern and start looking like each other, this beautiful town remains defiantly small, old-fashioned, almost old-world. It also remains quiet and tranquil, a balm to the wounds of living. It is the most unbelievably romantic place. I haven’t seen Darjeeling in years, yet it glitters in my heart.

​Recent visitors to Darjeeling have told  me it is becoming more congested and less bucolic. They report political tension as the city administration wants more autonomy and less sway of the state government. I know, I understand. But the truth is that Darjeeling is, as the Indian poet Rabindranath would have said, only half a city. The other half is the imagination of its aficionados. Multi-colored, many-splendored, glorious imagination that, to be candid, outstrips all reservations.

​I live alone. This is in sharp contrast to a much larger part of my life. I grew up living with my two parents and two brothers. Two aunts played such key parts in my life, and influenced me so much, that they were virtually two additional parents. My parents had many friends and they entertained often. The result was that our house was constantly full of visitors and guests.
 
I stayed in my parents’ home until I completed university. Then I immediately found a job in another town, and, for reasons of economy, shared a house with three noisy colleagues. They were a perennial source of both amusement and irritation, and, for the first time, I consciously entertained the dream of living alone.

​I briefly realized it when I switched to another job in another town and found a pleasant apartment of my own. But I soon met an alluring person and thought a single life wasn’t all that it was made out to be. We married. Soon enough I found married life wasn’t all that it was made out to be. The marriage ended.
 
What followed was a period of confusion and connection. I threw myself into a lot of activities; my life became a whirl of friendships and relations. It was the least lonely of times, it was the most active, exciting, buoyant, variable and troublesome of times.
 
It ended with a bang, when I met someone and married and moved to another country, the United States. For her work as well as mine, we moved from country to country for twenty plus years, and saw two children grow to adulthood and leave nest. Our work entailed long periods of separation, and eventually the relationship tapered with an involuntary whimper.

​Now I live alone, eat alone, spend most of my time alone. I have felt the keen edge of being alone and wondered whether one can happily live alone in Walden or Washington. But I have also found the peace and wonder of flying solo, listening to the seductive music of silence, walking exactly as much or as little as my inclination guided me, and delighting in the sense of sheer freedom from the compulsions of adjustment. My mornings are mine, so are my evenings and nights and all the aches, pleasures and surprises they can bring along.

​His father, Victor Avilov, was a celebrated mathematician, whose books were an obligatory text in the entire USSR. He could have been one too. But it didn’t turn out that way.

Leonid loved mathematics, he told me, its precision, simplicity and unbelievable chic. But he didn’t care much for the perennial experience of scarcity in his life. He didn’t have the clothes he needed, even in the bone-chilling winter of Moscow. Nor did his mother, Olya, who often lacked the ingredients she needed to cook for the relatives who visited. His father Victor wore frayed jackets and broken glasses, and worked with shamefully old books and computers.

Leonid joined the university faculty, after graduating with great distinction, and made his father proud. Then, to the chagrin of his father and his mathematician colleagues, he left the university and joined government service. The petroleum ministry offered greater prestige and better pay. His salary doubled and the apartment he was allotted on the elite Smolensky Prospekt in Arbat was quadruple the size of his father’s modest flat in rundown Ulitsa Kosygina.
​
He was embarrassed to invite his parents to his comparatively luxurious home, but his girlfriend, Nadia, who also taught in the university and had moved in with him, persuaded him to overcome his qualms. The parents were duly impressed by his new lodging and Victor was reassured to find that his son was using his expertise to develop complex algorithms in the country’s interest. Surely he hadn’t lost touch with mathematics.

Then another door opened for Leonid.  A major UN agency that had been carrying out a study in the petroleum industry was so impressed by him, they invited Leonid to join their team for two major projects in Yerevan, Armenia, and Dushanbe, Tajikistan. When he started work on a third project in Skopje, Macedonia, he was offered, in consultation with his government, a senior position in the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, to apply his modeling skills to key labor issues in the world.

That is how we met in Tokyo, where we both came to work on the same project eight years later. Slim, rugged, almost athletic, he was a fast walker but slow talker, given to stating his view concisely and directly, then softening the impact with a short, lucid explanation. When I knew him better, I facetiously told him that the first part came from his immersion in the Russian bureaucracy, and the latter from his admiration for his gifted father. He was no doubt a star analyst, but he supplemented that with a conceptual flair that placed him in a class by himself. His reports were characteristic: they were short on elegance, but long, brilliantly so, on analysis and depth. English forever remained an alien idiom to him, but his prose was defiantly luminous in precision.
​
We became friends when I realized that he was as earnest in his relationships as in his work. He meant what little he said. His warmth was genuine, his sincerity consistent. Gradually I learned his painful secrets. Though he lived in Geneva comfortably with his wife Nadia, he was not permitted by his government to have both his daughters with him. If Gelya was with him, attending school, Galya had to be in Moscow with his parents, as a guarantee of his return. He was well paid by the UN agency, but he was privately required remit a quarter of his dollar salary to his government, then lacking in foreign exchange. He still remained amazingly dedicated both to his work and to his country.

It took me time to realize that Leonid was truly a son of his father. Night after night he would spend hours in a casino playing Pachinko, a Japanese arcade game of chance, struggling mightily to devise the algorithm that would let him win consistently. He was less interested to win than to lasso his dream of a perfect system.
​
But he was also truly a son of Russia. After a long day in Tokyo, he would sit in a terraced izakaya, sip warmed saké and tell me of his family, his parents, of Moscow and of vodka. He was content to drink wine with me, but his heart always craved for good Russian vodka. He taught me the right way to drink vodka, possibly a family legacy: freeze the silver liquid for at least two hours and then drink it – straight, of course. Vermouth, verboten; ice, an abomination. That lesson, though not of mathematics, I will remember.

​I worked for a large European company with offices all over India. My boss, who hated to fly, would often send me in his place to far-off meetings and conferences. I enjoyed the travel, visiting new cities and meeting new people. With so much travel, some of the pilots and flight attendants became my friends.
​
A youngish pilot I liked on our very first encounter. He was modest and self-effacing. I found him a man of few words, yet he was soft-spoken and friendly. I told him that, despite my executive duties, my first love was writing and reading. In response he said that flying was his first love and he liked the simple life of a pilot. He wanted nothing better than working his allotted hours and then returning to his wife and two small children.
 
I was taken aback when his co-pilot later confided in me that he was actually the son of Indira Gandhi, the first female Prime Minister of India. There were rumors that his mother wanted him to assist her and begin a career in politics. When I next encountered him at the airport, I alluded to the rumor, saying I would miss seeing him on my flights. He said he would never leave flying. He loved it and he loved the life it allowed him.
 
“I don’t want to do anything else,” he said. “I just want to fly and watch my children grow up.”

​I ran into him another time or two before I moved to Washington, D.C., in the late seventies. In 1984 I saw his photo on the front page of the newspaper after his mother was assassinated. He was persuaded to succeed her as the new prime minister. I thought of that young man who had so loved flying and did not seem to care for politics.
 
Would he be able to retain the simple life with his family he loved so much, I wondered. 

​Just seven years later I saw him again on the front page. A woman had sought audience with the young Prime Minister and, coming close to greet him, detonated a hidden and powerful explosive belt.

​I have never fancied travel. To those who know me this will sound like an ersatz dramatization. At best an over-statement.
 
I have worked in twenty countries, visited more than forty. In some I have lived weeks or months, in others years. This does not happen without travel, in fact an enormous amount of travel. In car and bus, in plane and train, I have gone round the globe, consulting and lecturing, shaking hands and cocktails, bowing to customs and tripping on traditions, dispensing unsolicited advice and much-solicited visas, making friends and trying to influence all kinds: congressmen and crooks, statesmen and sharks, businessmen and bigmouths, windbags and wallflowers.
 
True I have traveled a lot. I have traveled for work or to visit friends and family. Or traveled with friends who loved travel. Given half a chance I would rather meet them in my living room or on the back-yard deck. I am glad to drive ten minutes to the French café or the Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. That is the limit of my preferred zone. I can blissfully think of a fragrant bakery in Cairo or jaunty teashop in Kolkata, but the idea of actually making the physical move to those sites fills me with foreboding.
 
Imagine the reality of travel today. Gone are the friendly travel agents who booked you to Port au Prince or any other port by the best route at the best price and insulated you from the misery of searching six travel sites to find a decent trip at a moderate cost. Then you drive, in murderous traffic, to the airport and locate the less-gouging parking lot. Walk up, usually some distance, to join a dispiritingly long line, to check in and deliver your suitcase. Now you graduate to a longer line for security check. You take off your shoes, unfasten your belt and hold on to your trousers, and, in that precarious state, offload the content of your pockets in a bin. To avoid the wrath of the edgy, irate woman behind you, you better load your handbag – remembering to separate your computer – promptly on the rail, and walk into a humiliating ballet in a kiosk and an invidious body search. 

​Now collect, sort and re-pocket your belongings in a hurry and walk another mile to the boarding gate. It is a miracle if you still have your wits about you and your boarding ticket in your hand. When you at last enter the plane, you can’t place your carry-on stuff in the overstocked overhead bin; it has been hurriedly filled by others, desperate to find space for material they wouldn’t place in an extra-charge second suitcase. So you sit askew, thanks to a corpulent seatmate, your legs snaked around your cursed handbag. Pant you may after your Herculean labor, but do not expect to catch the flight attendant’s attention for a glass of water – she has more pressing things to do – and, if you are famished, what she will serve cannot be detailed in polite language. 

​I have a hard time imagining a dream vacation in Venice, Valencia, Valparaíso or even Valhalla that starts like this. It is more like a nightmare when you recall that the same endurance test awaits you on your return.
 
Of course, there are hardier souls who take these travails in their stride and ply a trade in which travel is a regular occurrence. I admire their rocky constitution and granite heart, but have no vaulting ambition to emulate their hardihood.

​Evil comes in many forms. It may take benign, even respectable, forms, but it is still evil. There is one I cannot forget.
 
I cannot forget, but for years I could not say it or write it. I need to break that barrier.
 
Ghosh was a distinguished pediatrician, who lived next door to us and attended to me when I had a problem. Father thought well of him, and he was a fixture at our parties, more as a friend than as a professional. He was always attentive to me and extremely friendly and affectionate.

​He had lent a book to my parents to read and they asked me to return it to his office. I went in the afternoon to his place next door and looked for his secretary, but she had apparently left for the day. Doctor Ghosh came out when I rang the bell and invited me in. He thanked me for the book and offered me a cold drink.
 
As I came into his office, he said that I might as well have my periodic examination since I was in the examination room anyway. He took down my height, weight and temperature, measured my blood pressure and asked me to take off my shirt. He examined my neck, then my chest and back, and asked me to cough a number of times. This was a familiar procedure.
 
Then he went a step further. He asked me to take off my trousers. When I did so, he wanted me to remove my underwear too. I began to get uncomfortable.
 
He knew of my active participation in sports and said, “People who play hockey and soccer and tennis sometimes develop problems in their private parts. That’s why it is safe to have those parts examined carefully from time to time.”
 
If that reassured me for the moment, the feeling changed as his long manipulation of the parts made me increasingly uneasy. The unease rose several notches when he added, “Let me show you how the normal parts look,” and started taking off his trousers.
 
He wanted me to hold and feel the “normal,” but I had quickly snatched my trousers, donned them and was off on a run.
 
The worse was yet to come. When I reached home, both my parents were there and one look at me told them that I was distraught. Hard as it was to do so, I told them of the “careful” examination, and they promptly called a friend, a senior police officer.

​More than fifty years later, I still recall clearly what the officer told us.
 
“I wish I could say I would arrest that man immediately and put him in jail, where he belongs. I can only detain him for a few hours, in the name of interrogation, but then he will certainly have to be let go. He will hire a good lawyer or two – he can afford several – and in a court it will be his word against your son’s. No judge will be comfortable convicting a well-known doctor on the word of a small kid, since there is no witness and no evidence of an incriminatory kind.”
 
He then told my mother, “I know you are outraged, as I am too, for I have a boy of the same age. But if you love your son, you will not send him to a court only to be grilled mercilessly and humiliated without any redress. I hate to say this, but you all have to forget this incident as best as you can.”
 
My mother asked, “If you can’t prosecute him, can’t you at least record this incident, so that in future if he molests other children this charge could count against him?”
 
The police officer replied, “No, I can’t. If I record this incident, it will be held against me if I don’t investigate it. If I investigate it, the doctor can sue for damages, and my superiors will hold that against me. Without evidence to prove the charge, I can do little.”
 
I heard him, just as my parents did, but it was not easy to accept that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be done about the misdeed of an evil man.
 
I wonder how many children’s lives the pediatrician proceeded to wreck.

​Barely a month after I joined the plant as an intern, the workers went on a strike. It was an experience that has stayed with me.
 
In the mill section two workers had bad accidents, with irreversible damage to their arms, and mill hands said several accidents had happened earlier without any corrective action. When workers complained to the foreman, they received a snide reply, and when the shop representative of the union remonstrated, he was told to shut up or go home. In short order, other workers joined the aggrieved mill hands. When they did not hear a reassuring word from the personnel manager, and the plant superintendent would not meet them, the die was cast. A strike was on.

​Things turned rapidly worse from that point. The managers tried to get in some outside workers to help with maintenance work while the plant lay idle; the striking workers demonstrating outside roughed them up. When a couple of foremen warned the workers that they were overstepping the limit, they too were pushed around, and someone spat on them. The plant supervisors called the police and hired more security guards. The workers, taking the show of force as a challenge, turned even more menacing.
 
As a junior intern, just out of college, I had no role to play and was told to stay away. But I lived near the plant and the temptation was strong to come around and see what was happening. Day after day I saw office cars, with police guard, ferrying engineers to factory gates, and running the gauntlet of workers with placards, gesturing, menacing, shouting insults. Some of the staff and security guards, in turn, made obscene gestures at the workers. A company spokesman came out, ringed by guards, and read out a blustering statement to a group of waiting reporters. Union activists too gave the press a list of their demands and spoke of their many grievances. The reporters wanted to speak to the union president, but he was in another town where his wife was to undergo major surgery.

​By the end of the second week there seemed little hope of a quick breakthrough. With both sides dug in, people expected more violence to follow. I went down Monday morning to see if anything had changed. The demonstrating workers were shouting slogans as usual, but they stopped suddenly. I looked back to see a small, frail-looking elderly man walking slowly toward the factory gate. Instantly, there was sustained, respectful silence all around. The workers and guards all silently acknowledged the presence of the man, who in turn acknowledged them with a brief gesture of his hand and marched straight toward the gate. The gatekeepers, without a moment’s hesitation, let him in and stood aside for him to walk on toward the management office. “The union president,” somebody whispered in my ear.
 
I stood amazed at the electric change in the atmosphere. People seemed to stand petrified in their place, as if expecting something uncommon to happen. It did. In twenty minutes, the old man emerged again, walking with the plant superintendent, straight past the gate and then facing the crowd outside. 

​“We have reached an agreement,” he spoke clearly but softly. “The workers who have been hurt will receive the best treatment and compensation. The staff who have been unresponsive will be disciplined. I will personally deal with the workers who have acted improperly. The engineers will look into the accidents and make sure they don’t happen again. The police will leave tonight. Tomorrow we will start work with the morning shift. We all need to work and behave well with our colleagues.”
 
Everybody went home like chastised schoolboys, in peace and quiet. The strike was over.