​As we waited to board a plane, exhausted after running the security gauntlet with a small child in tow, I was captivated to see what Lina, our five-year-old, did. She scanned the passengers in the boarding area, spotted another five- or six-year-old sitting with his parents waiting for the same flight, and quickly walked over.
 
“I am Lina,” I made out her opening salvo from a distance.
 
I could not hear the boy’s response, but guessed that he was saying his name in response. A minute later, Lina had occupied the seat next to the boy and they were wrapped in animated conversation.

​Was my daughter preternaturally social, eager to win friends everywhere? She had swiftly realized that her parents, both diplomats, moved from place to place and the friends she made in one city were soon a thing of the past. She had learned that she had to find and make friends fast.
 
When the time came to board, Lina came to ask me if she could sit with her new friend.
 
“If you can find an empty seat next to your friend,” I said skeptically, as I had earlier ascertained that the plane was pretty full.
 
I had underestimated the ingenuity of my child. Duly supported by her newly acquired friend, and even his sympathetic parents, she begged the flight attendant to accommodate her next to the boy. Some discussion and some adjustment later, Lina came, smiling, to tell me that she would be sitting with the other family.
 
Knowing that she does not like to feel cold, and trans-Atlantic flights can get chilly at night, I asked if she wanted the blanket I had in my hand. She took it without a word, eager to return to her friend.
 
Twice during the flight I checked to see if she was all right. She briefly answered me and returned to her conversation with the boy. His mother looked sympathetically at me, suggesting she hadn’t had better luck trying to talk to her son, who was too busy talking to his friend.

​The next morning Lina was having breakfast with her friend, as I was sipping my coffee on the flight.
 
Four hours later we reached our destination. As we got out of the plane, Lina took leave of her friend and his family and joined us.
 
“I am glad you had a pleasant time chatting with your friend,” I said.
 
“Yes,” she said, “he is very nice.”
 
“What’s his name?”
 
“Antoine.”
 
“Where is he from?”
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“Do they live here? Or they traveling somewhere else?”
 
“I don’t have any idea,” Lina replied impassively.
 
My daughter, I decided, had learned to live with impermanence better than her father had.

​Sir Andrew Henderson Leith Fraser, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, had gone to the Overtoun Hall in Kolkata on a warm July evening in 1908 to hear a lecture. He suddenly found a revolver pressed to his ribs.

The nondescript young man that had his finger on the trigger seemed determined to send him to the hereafter, as a coup against the ruthless colonial rule the Governor represented. But the revolver malfunctioned. Before the man could try again, the large American, Keith Barber, who looked after Overtoun Hall, tackled him, and the police arrived.

That wasn’t the only episode of the nationalist drama in the Overtoun Hall, the centerpiece of the large YMCA building at the corner of College Street and Harrison Road. Keshab Chandra Sen had advocated English education there, and a decade later Gandhi spoke there on nationalism and Rabindranath offered his ‘interpretation of Indian history.’

In 1950 my father came to take charge of the building, moving from our home in the pleasant YMCA building located on, coincidentally, Keshab Chandra Sen street in the Mechuabazar area. We lived on the topmost floor, in a spacious bright apartment, with an airy living room, several bedrooms, a modest kitchen and a long, broad, covered terrace. We loved the apartment, but what made it exceptional was the access it gave to a remarkable building: without even stepping out, I could go to a gymnasium, a library and a restaurant. And to the Overtoun Hall.
​
The Hall had been built fifty-two years ago with a bequest from John Campbell White, later Lord Overtoun, a skinflint Scottish chemical manufacturer who docked a shilling from his workers’ meager wages any time they smoked and five shillings if they drank beer. Overtoun would turn in his grave if he knew how the Hall became a symbol of independent thinking, particularly against the British.

Now the British were gone, and the Hall had turned into a different kind of symbol: of a new cultural renaissance. In the newly independent, post-colonial India there was a spurt of creativity. Books, hitherto vetted and censored, were now coming out in profusion; people were writing poems and songs, unashamedly patriotic; dances were choreographed and plays staged with bold, new ideas. For a pittance one could rent the Overtoun Hall and offer music, dances and theater to an eager audience. For every show, father would receive a bunch of free tickets.
​
Invariably I was one user of those tickets. Night after night I would fast-track school homework to rush to Overtoun Hall to hear the finest musicians of India, from Ustad Vilayat Khan to Nikhil Banerjee, from the Dagar Brothers to Shamsad Begum, to watch outstanding plays from the historical Chandragupta to provocative Nabanna, and hear lectures from scholars, writers and politicians. The last was the most frequent and luckily so, for these were my favorites. I hung on their lips as I listened to my adored litterateurs like Narayan Gangopadhyay and Pramatha Nath Bisi, and to much-admired political speakers like the communist leaders Soumyendranath Tagore and Hirendranath Mukherjee.

I never cared much for my schools as sources of learning; later I developed the same skepticism of my colleges and universities. But I have no doubt in my mind that my true alma mater, in the literal sense of a ‘nourishing mother,’ was Overtoun Hall. It fed my growing appetite for new and challenging ideas, it opened my eyes to different options for arranging society and my ears to incredible heights of musical and dramatic power. I never lost my longing for the theater and my endless obsession with new concepts, and I owe it all to endless evenings in the last row of an overcrowded auditorium.

I can still remember the thick Teutonic accents of Arthur Koestler as he urged his listeners to ‘think and write’ new ideas. I can never forget Utpal Dutt’s – he was still a student – vibrant soliloquies from Shakespeare that made me a lifelong reader of Shakespeare.

Last year I went and took a look at the building at 86 College Street. It is no longer a YMCA building; it had been sold. Worse, it looks abandoned and unkempt. Overtoun Hall now probably hears the footfall of ghosts.

The young intruder in Overtoun Hall who held a revolver to the Governor failed to put a bullet through his heart and possibly spent his life in a miserable British jail. But Overtoun Hall certainly put a different kind of bullet through my heart that has ricocheted through my whole life.

​My cousin Deepa had the strangest honeymoon I have ever heard of.

​She took a plane with her newly acquired husband, Jog, to a hill resort where we had a made a reservation for them in a good hotel. The plane developed engine trouble and landed in another town. They took a train to reach the resort town. Unfortunately, some careless truck driver had stalled his vehicle near a level crossing and the train crashed into it.
 
The couple took a local bus and arrived at a small town closer to the resort area. Then they rented a chauffeured car, hoping still to take advantage of the hotel reservation. The car wasn’t as good as the driver made it out to be. It broke down twice on the way requiring the attention of roadside mechanics. By the time they reached the hotel they had lost the reservation and they went to another small hotel.

​In their hurry they had made the wrong choice. That hotel was the choice location of drug dealers. The police raided the hotel in the night and arrested some people. Deepa and Jog were interrogated for a long while, then released in the morning. Their vacation in the hill resort spoiled, they decided to fly to a coastal town for what remained of their honeymoon.
 
They checked into a large hotel, were given a charming cottage of their own and had a wonderful day on the beach. The next morning Jog had high fever. The local doctor, who did good business in the hotel, thought it was malarial fever and prescribed large doses of antibiotics. Jog’s condition rapidly deteriorated, for the doctor had misdiagnosed: Jog had flu and the antibiotics made it worse. He had to be medically evacuated with a nurse. Deepa flew back to her home town and attended to her slowly recovering husband for the next two weeks.

When Jog eventually recovered, Deepa would laughingly narrate her mishaps to friends and family members. She even made a story of it in the local newspaper.
 
​Her story took a new turn when the proprietor and manager of the hill resort hotel, where we had first made a reservation for the new couple, read the story and felt sorry for the troubles the couple had to endure. He offered a fully paid week of vacation for Deepa and Jog at his hotel whenever they wanted.
 
They went the following month, a belated but beautiful honeymoon.

He had come to Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer and fallen in love with the country. When his tenure ended, instead of returning to Colorado, he longed to linger in Kathmandu.
​
To pay his way, he followed the example of poor Nepalis and started a roadside teashop. He was friendly, took good care of his customers and served them with a smile. The clientele grew rapidly.

Eventually he took over a house with a large garden. The house would sometimes be rented for private parties and sometimes exhibit paintings from local artists who couldn’t afford a gallery. The big front yard with its garden and sheds became a full-fledged restaurant. Nobody knew or cared for the owner’s last name; he was just Mike. His restaurant became known as Mike’s Breakfast.

​Occasionally I had lunch there, but Saturdays – the day Nepal has its weekly holiday – I was a fixture there for brunch. Imagine the scene. A nice green patch, nicer for being unmanicured. Large and small trees, pretty bushes, some with flowers. A modest table, a comfortable chair. And me, in the chair, right under a large banyan, with a sheaf of newspapers and the sun on my back, filtering gently through the leaves.

I never ordered, for the waiters knew what I always wanted. Twenty minutes after I arrived, there would arrive on a steamed plate a so-called Nepali omelet, a giant egg confection with a ton of varied vegetables, spiced just right to make it lively and acceptable. Another twenty minutes, and they would bring me a large steaming glass of Nepali Chiya, fragrant high-quality Indian tea with hand-picked spices of Nepal. It was enough to breathe new life into a somnolent, hide-bound expatriate pen-pusher.

​​Brunch was just the beginning. There was the recurrent reunion with other regulars: Shrestha the techie, Sherpa the wheeler-dealer, Williamson the cartographer, Upadhyay the journalist and Xerxes (unlikely to be his real name) of no known occupation. They came with the periodicity of my Chia refills, and like the Chia filled my day with spirit and joy. When the mood struck, I retreated behind my papers, only to emerge when another friendly face came to tell me the latest news or misadventure.
 
I write this as I sit on the terrace of my favorite French café in Reston sipping a latte and taking in the latest overloaded shopper, an unusual Bentley, a kid propelling paper planes. I am happy here. But I also remember the happiness an unusual haven brought me, week and week, month after month, in a sunny corner of Kathmandu, a jewel of a restaurant at the foot of the Himalayas.

​Adhip was a college friend with a quirk. While all my friends in college, just like me, planned to look for a job after graduation, Adhip spoke of starting ‘on his own.’ He said he had the entrepreneurial spirit, like his dad who had started an engineering works that produced railway parts. Did he intend to start a factory, I asked him? He surprised me by saying he would like to go into food services business. Apparently he had been taking cooking lessons from the chef his father employed and he fancied a classy restaurant could do quite well in the city.

​After we graduated, Adhip did start a small coffee shop that offered a few select food items. I invited some college friends and went for a party, and, since I had meanwhile found a job, could afford to refuse Adhip’s gracious offer to be the host. We liked the cozy warmth of Adhip’s place, but I heard that the coffee shop folded a few months later. Adhip did not get enough clients as a competing chain opened a café nearby.
 
That seemed to have little deterred Adhip’s spirit when I met him next at a friend’s birthday party. As he had lost the capital his father had advanced him for the restaurant, he had started a business that did not require a capital outlay: he secured orders for small parts from manufacturing companies, which were then made by his father’s factory according to the given specification, and Adhip supplied the finished parts to his clients and paid his father and retained a decent margin for himself. His company, he stressed, was independent of his father’s and he operated from a tiny office rented near his father’s plant.
 
Adhip’s business prospered. He took pains to understand his clients’ business and supply parts, fashioned scrupulously, that more than met their requirements. His reputation grew along with his list of clientele. We had lunch together and he mentioned that his father wanted him to take over the parental factory, but that he preferred to run his own separate business.

I was out of the country for some years, and when I returned I called old friends including Adhip. He invited me to lunch at a new restaurant downtown. It was a large, modern restaurant with an open look, located on a major corner, and I was received royally when I mentioned the host’s name. Adhip came and joined me, not from the entrance but from the kitchen, and I knew instantly then that he had never given up his idea of a classy restaurant that could do well in the city. The buzzing restaurant, packed with diners, told me what Adhip modestly elaborated later: his was now the prime dining place in town.
​
His father had chosen to retire, and Adhip had appointed a common friend, a qualified engineer, as a manager to run both his father’s old plant and his parts business. His focus was on providing the best value for money – the finest cuisine and ambience – in the restaurant business.
 
Adhip was on his own. I was impressed. He had been anything but disloyal to his dream.

​I was disconsolate when father took a new job and we moved to a new house, albeit in the same town. I loved the old house, my sunlit room, the spacious grounds, the friends I played soccer with.
 
Wrenching as the move was, I slowly began to find some advantages. 86 College Street – even the name had some elegance to it – was a huge building, at the junction of two major thoroughfares, a bustling, lively corner, next to a big market and an impressive array of shops selling from saris to shoes, books to bed-sheets, harmoniums to hashish. It was a colorful, lively and exciting place to be.

​The most exciting thing lay right by the side of our building, between a restaurant and a famous pastry shop. While I craved the delicacies the restaurant and the pastry shop offered – which I got to taste only when mother bought them for special visitors – my eternal longing was reserved for the edifice between them, a movie house. It had a graceful name: Grace. It looked most enticing, with posters pasted on its walls outside, showing handsome heroes with flashing swords, buxom heroines coyly striking suggestive poses, and mustachioed villains looking ominous on horseback.
 
On the upper-story balcony there were huge placards and banners that had even more vivid pictures of the protagonists, along with names of the stars, the director and (in India as important as the director) music director. All I had to do was to open the window of my room to be regaled by a larger-than-life Raj Kapoor ogling at Nargis, or Pran pointing a huge Colt directly at me. Mother frowned when she found me mesmerized by a giant cutout of Madhubala that emphasized her impressive endowments.

​Then came an extraordinary development. Among the stream of friends and visitors who passed through our living room, there appeared a trim, well-groomed man, in a beige seersucker suit, a cigarette dangling stylishly from his lips, whom I heard father introduce as the new manager of the movie house. Manager! Of a movie house! In my eyes, as well as those of my brother, he was no less a star than Pran or Raj Kapoor, and I imagined him sitting in a plush seat watching every show and thrilling to every derring-do of the heroes and villains. 

​Joao DeSilva was from the coastal city of Panjim, and spoke Portuguese and English and a smattering of Hindi. He twirled his tiny goatee and graciously invited our whole family to come and watch the blockbuster to hit the screen the following week. He said he had refurbished the cinema and, to cater to the hoi polloi, decided to rename it Deepak, meaning light in Asian languages. To my great disappointment, our father, apparently impervious to the charms of Madhubala and her ilk, said that he could not spare the time for the movie, though he greatly appreciated the offer. Then, no doubt to please DeSilva, he added that the children, however, would be delighted to see the film if that suited him. I couldn’t believe my ears. DeSilva instantly said that he would be delighted to have the children come as his guests, and that he hoped our parents also could join us for another show.
 
There it was, the windfall of a fantastic movie for my brother and me. That Saturday, dressed in our modest finery, we crossed the street and entered the refurbished Deepak. It seemed quite dazzling to our naïve eyes, and DeSilva came out of his office to personally guide us to two front row seats on the balcony.

​We were spellbound when the movie started. It was essentially a love story, somewhat akin to Romeo and Juliet, where the hero, the leader of a tribe, falls madly in love with the chief’s daughter of a hostile tribe. The hero was daring and determined; he went to all kinds of trouble to go round the furious father and make passes at the charming daughter. He finally succeeded in maneuvering the girl into a secluded boat and was just about to do something exciting and romantic, when up popped the disgusting father with a loud snarl, “What! My worst enemy with my best child!” Poor Dilip Kumar, who was all set to hug or kiss the winsome Kamini Kaushal, had to engage in a furious mano-a-mano with the odious chief who would rather be a wrestling champion rather than a decent father-in-law. Sad to say I have forgotten the outcome of the epic battle. Probably the villain won, to give Dilip Kumar the chance to gain the tragic aura for which he was so famous.
 
What I remember better is this: During the interval of the long film, DeSilva appeared with a tray of the choicest delicacies from the two adjacent establishments, the restaurant and the pastry shop. If the strength of my relative recollection is any guide, the stomach certainly is closer to the heart than the eyes or the brain.