I bought a house decades ago in a small suburb at the edge of Washington. I am a city man and the only reason I bought a suburban home was that I worked in a management center near it. I worked there briefly and soon returned to live and work in the city. Then, for a long stretch, I worked abroad in different countries, living in well-guarded houses that came with the work.
 
When I returned to Washington, I went back to live in the first house I had acquired. I did so without a clear plan, but I found a certain charm in living in an old home. Like an old comfortable pair of shoes. I was back after twenty years, and many things had changed in the community. Still there were some familiar faces and known landmarks. I grew slowly accustomed to my home.
 
It is really a modest home by local standards. By my standards it was much more. It more than satisfied all my needs. With three floors and one occupant, it gives me enough space to spread all my wordly possessions. In fact, I feel my possessions have grown because there is so much space. I would like to reduce those if only to reduce the clutter in my life.
 
A female architect, Chloethiel Woodard Smith, built the house fifty years ago in a contemporary style, with simple straight lines and large windows. Because of its age, it lately needed a little more than a facelift. I resurfaced the hardwood floors, renovated the kitchen with granite counters and modern appliances, put in recessed lights and added some color to its bland, beige look. Once I had refurbished the four bathrooms, I felt I had done enough.

A few years later, another change was forced on me. It made the biggest difference to my life. The living room had a balcony that had aged and needed to be replaced. I thought of a larger balcony, where two people could sit and talk. Then I realized that a large balcony does not really cost so much less than a full-size deck. So now I have a deck that gives me the strange sensation of being outdoor even when I have not really stepped out.
 
It feels that way because it is quite a large deck. It spans the entire width of my home. It has thin, white, unobtrusive rails around that let you feel unbounded when you are on the deck. Most of all, around the deck are large trees with their verdant foliage that give you the impression that you are in a garden. The solid elms, oaks and maples surround you, and spur you to look around and walk around instead of just peering at your books.
 
I have to confess that I am often on the deck to do just that: peer at books. Reading is a pleasure for me, often enhanced by a cup of robust Colombian coffee or a glass of chilled mellow Campari. My preferences are modest. If I make a special, venturesome cocktail, a martini with absinthe or ginger liqueur, I want to savor it under the sky while reading Ian McEwan or Haruki Murakami.
 
This is where the deck makes an unexpected difference. In between sips of wine or McEwan’s elegant prose, I am tempted to look up or look around. To see the flecks of floating silver cloud or the massing blobs of dark clouds hinting at the torrential drama to come. To notice the swaying branches that tell me the advent of a storm. Or simply to observe one lonely leaf, separated from its long-held anchor, undulating in air before making a delicate landing on the ground – or just at my feet on the deck.
 
My Judeo-Christian ethic of hard work, which applies even to reading, inclines me to read seriously, without distraction and without stopping. The deck has begun to act as a seductive, pagan temptress. It tempts me to watch the pretty red cardinal winging across the deck in sublime confidence that a rapt reader will do no more than admire its prettiness, the squirrels scampering up the tree and then scampering down with no greater purpose than the apparent pleasure of scampering, a rotund overfed cat slowly passing under the deck and savoring its constitutional before returning to a favorite sofa in its owner’s home, the occasional whistling stroller striding through the woods behind my home, and, if I am very lucky, a hungry deer emerging from the thickets to search for a morsel from somebody’s garden. I am a city slicker and not an eager observer of nature at all. Yet the deck has made me aware of the spectacles hourly surfacing around me that I have so far been insensible enough to overlook.

​Even work has started changing its meaning. When it is not a very warm day or raining hard enough to defy the large umbrella stand I keep on the deck, I often bring my trusted Mac and work on the deck. The shade of the umbrella, the gentle breeze wafting the smell of the woods, the happy chirping of the sparrows with the advent of dusk, all give a new meaning to my fitful labor on the deck. I can’t prove it, but I think I write differently when I sit and write on the deck. Probably I think differently when I am on the deck.
 
When I write I sometimes refer to the different places I have been; it comes naturally as I have spent years in different lands. When people refer to my years of exile, I tend to minimize the experience, for I instinctively feel that I have been living an ordinary life like everybody else in a slightly different place. Location seems unimportant to me. Yet I have come to see how my perspective changes when I move just a few feet from my living room on to the deck just outside it. Realtors, in assessing the value of a home, often cite the three things most important: location, location and, yet again, location. Heaven know how critical location may be in the way we look at the world and our life in it. How different life would be if I were to look at it this moment from a wrecked home in Mosul in Iraq, Aleppo in Syria or Diyarbakir in Turkey, all famous historic cities that are now embattled and perilous. Perhaps there is value in changing locations as there indubitably is in changing perspectives.
 
Rabindranath bemoaned how we sometimes visit mountains and beaches, but overlook the drop of dew on a blade of grass right next to the door. Yes, we need to see the drop of dew, then pack our stuff and make a move for the mountains or the beach.

I grew up in a four-parent family. It sounds strange, but I really had three mothers.
 
My father had two sisters who developed a fast friendship in college with a round-faced, soft-spoken woman. The friendship went further than college bonds usually go. She ended up as their sister-in-law, my mother.
 
Amazingly, the friendship went further. They remained close friends until the day they died. This was particularly amazing because all three pursued individual careers, with notable success, in different cities.
 
Father had inordinate affection for his sisters. I suspect he also had an acute sense of responsibility toward them, because they did not marry and start families of their own.
 
The result was I grew up with four parents, each a powerful influence in my life. 

Father was dispossessed by his family and had to work in a printing shop, to put bread on the table and pay for his lessons. He taught for years, then changed to an administrative job that fetched a modest pay but unusual benefits. He oversaw a library where I had access to books and journals, a gymnasium where a Mr Universe taught me body-building, and playgrounds, where the captain of an Olympic team gave me football lessons and a world champion offered me tips on improving my table tennis.
 
More important, he had an extraordinary capacity for camaraderie. He made friends with authors and actors, politicians and professors, doctors and lawyers, musicians and journalists. People of all ages and all professions marched through our living room, provided tea and cookies by my ever-obliging mother.
 
Doubtless he left some impression on me. I remember my first girlfriend, who came from an aristocratic family, once asked me, “Do you have to start a conversation with every waiter and janitor in town?”

My aunts were a study in contrast. Aunt Senior was the maternal, nurturing kind, a true pushover. If I wanted an expensive treat and knew that mother, let alone father, would never approve, I astutely went to her and got her on my side. Once I persuaded her to order a large almond cake I had set my heart on, and later I heard mother tell her it was insane to order something so expensive frivolously, but my aunt never disclosed my role. She was the most generous person, both with her money and her heart. She gave immoderately, unreservedly, and sometimes unwisely, even to the undeserving. There was no question, however, that her life became a simple song of benediction, ever gracious and peaceful.
 
She once said of two virtual strangers, “They are good people. I want to be good to them.” That was her dogma for all people. I thought it naïve then; now I think it wise.

Aunt Junior was quite different. She was sharp-witted and could be hard-hitting. Working hard and full-time, she still learned languages, did courses and built gardens. Ingenious and indefatigable, she would run with me, do jigsaw puzzles, play games and even invent new ones. From a school principal she became a state education administrator, yet always found time to read books to me after breakfast and dinner. In an indiscernible, playful way she passed on to me her extraordinary zest for life, an astonishing appetite for the concrete. When she visited me in the Philippines and we strolled, she told me the names of the trees and plants we passed. The ones she couldn’t, she found out the names the next day and told me on our next walk.
 
Whenever I hesitated, afraid to venture in a new direction, she would say, “You haven’t done it; try it. You may like it. If you don’t like it, try a different thing.”
 
Both the aunts painted, one in water color and the other in oil. I learned to sketch from them. More important, I developed a taste for art and an eye for design: I learned to distinguish fonts, separate a Bodoni from a Garamond, recognize painters, know why Monet looks quite different from Matisse, and even enjoy seeing a Renzo Piano building as much as a Philip Johnson house.

​I have never quite met anyone like my mother, with her quixotic melange of the tender and the tough, and her infinite capacity to sit back, reflect and understand. Living a hectic life overseas, I once told her, “I make it a point to write to my aunts every week. If I have more time, I write to you.” Astoundingly, though I was telling her of a higher priority for the aunts compared to her, she replied, “You do the right thing. They need a letter from you more than I do.”
 
She was gentle and soft-spoken. When she made a point, it seemed like a thought casually dropped for others’ benefit. She wrote affectionately; all her letters drip of motherly concern and a carefully honed let-go philosophy. When I was twenty and she had sounded perturbed about an office event, I had quoted her from a Captain Drefus letter from Devil’s Island saying that “of all losses, the loss of reason was the most appalling.” When I was fifty and mentioned a trouble brewing in my office, she sent me back the same quotation, adding she trusted my ability to stay steady and rational.
 
The greatest gift she gave me was the equanimity that Indian seers have talked about. I learned to see both sides of a question, and be ready to accept both sides of a person. I will never match her, but I began the journey of seeing more than what is apparent, finding a place in the heart for others’ foibles and one’s own drawbacks. I knew she was a beloved teacher in her school, but it has taken me years to realize she taught even better at home.
 
I am cynical enough to believe that all families have dysfunctional elements, often covert. Chance had me reared in a four-parent family, where love was lavish, care was unquestioned, and where, for fortunate me, all the four, imperceptibly but extravagantly, stacked up gifts that never tarnish and sparkle forever.

​I have never written to you. I don’t know what possesses me to write to you now. I only know that I want to write to you, perhaps as a matter of closure. Having said that, I realize that I don’t even want such closure.
 
I met you briefly in the university. We took the same course and we were in the same class a few times. We spoke inconsequentially a couple of times. Then you left. I heard you were taking another course elsewhere, in another city. I did not see you for a long time.
 
Until two years later.
 
You called and reminded me that we had met in a classroom. I told you the reminder was not necessary. You had a distinctive way of talking and I remembered it. I also said I was happy to hear from you.
 
You asked if we could meet. I said that I lived right next to the university and you were welcome to visit me. I gave you directions and, because I lived in a gated community, instructed the guards to guide you when you came.
 
When I opened the door to you the next day, I was speechless for a moment. You looked different: compared to the girl I had met earlier, you looked more grown-up and self-possessed. You looked beautiful, and I felt breathless.
 
You smiled and I took your hand.
 
You mentioned a conflict with your family and said that you were now on your own. You had taken a job and intended to stay in town and finish the course. I was happy to hear it and I said so. We had tea and we talked for a long time.
 
When you left, I said I hoped to see you again soon. You promised me I would.
 
You called two days later and said that you had several questions about the course and would appreciate it if we could talk. You came early and again we talked for a long time. The talk was not all about the course. You told me about your life with your family and how sad it was that it had ended the way it had. You spoke of your dreams and the independent life you had always wanted to achieve.
 
In turn I told you of the kind of life I dreamed of as my university days were about to end. I wanted a life of action, but I also wanted a life of ideas. I knew the two were not easy to reconcile. I also said I have had a loving family. Going forward, I could not think of a life without some measure of love and friendship.
 
I remember my mother returned early that day and she invited you to stay back and have an early dinner with us. She sat you next to my father, facing me, and I sat transfixed watching you as you smiled and talked, mostly to my mother who was, I could guess, a little concerned about a young woman living alone for the first time in a big city. When you left, my mother said to me that you were a pleasant person and I should help in whatever way I could. I said I would like to.

You had said that you might get in touch with me the following week. So I was surprised to get a call from you the very next day. You said you were at the university to see a professor and he wasn’t there, and wondered if I had some time to see you.
 
When I saw you at the door, I was about to say how delighted I was to see you unexpectedly, when I suddenly found you in my arms. My pulse raced as I held you, your breath on my neck. I kissed your hand and asked you if you had to go back to see the professor.
 
“I don’t have to see anybody,” she said. “I fibbed. I came to see you.”
 
I scarcely believed my ears. We had a whole day and an empty apartment to ourselves. I looked at you, your glistening forehead, your quivering nose, your full lips, and my heart was in my mouth. I could not speak.
 
Here was the person of my dreams standing with her arms around my neck, my body sensing her uneven breathing, her fragrance enveloping, almost obliterating my whole existence. There was nothing I could have said. For a second I thought you were crying. Then you smiled, and I held you hands and kissed you.
 
Time must have stopped. I seemed to be holding you for a long time.
 
Then we stepped out on the large terrace next to the apartment. We walked aimlessly, we talked endlessly. Nothing else mattered as long as I had you next to me. I had never been happier.

I had paid no attention to the darkening clouds. When the rain started, we could have stepped back into the apartment. The drizzle seemed some kind of a benediction. So we just stood there. We stood as the rain poured, drenching us literally to the skin. It seemed the most natural thing to cling to one another, and I kissed you again and again.
 
When we returned to the apartment, I got you my tracksuit to wear and put up your clothes for drying.
 
I ordered some food from the restaurant downstairs, and we sat down to eat. You looked splendidly incongruous but radiant in my tracksuit. Just facing you made me lose my appetite. I can still see you sitting in our sun-drenched dining room, smiling and asking why I wasn’t eating, touching my hand in a reassuring gesture, and, finally, leaving the table to turn off the music and say to me, “Just sit with me, please.”
 
I had three full days with you. Three days of rapture and peace. I was desperately, irrecoverably in love with you.
 
At the end of the third day, you told me that you were betrothed to a person I knew. You were committed to marry him in six weeks.
 
I never saw you again.
 
Except twelve years later, while I was changing planes at Heathrow, I saw you, with your husband, moving toward another boarding area. Years had passed, but you looked no different to me. No different either was my reaction: I felt breathless and had to clutch my briefcase as I sat down in the first seat I could find.
 
The news reached me last week that cancer had claimed you as its latest victim. Those three days somehow endure in my mind as an indelible, inscrutable memory. I remain the willing victim of its tenacious grasp.

It was the stuff of dreams. Literally.
 
Olga had always dreamed of a mother. Her school mates and friends had mothers; most lived with them. She didn’t have one. She didn’t even know how her mother looked. She had no picture of her mother. Her mother had left when she was an infant, and she had no memory of the person who had brought her into the world.
 
Olga lived with her uncle, her mother’s brother, whose two children were like her brother and sister, though they were really cousins. Her true anchor had been her grandmother, whose unflinching love had sustained her through childhood years. But even she had balked questions about her mother. She knew, without even asking, that her uncle would be just as reticent on the subject.
 
Her aunt, mother’s only sister, lived nearby, and often came along to see her. Sometimes, when she didn’t have school, Olga went with her and stayed in her home for a few days. She knew instinctively that her aunt wouldn’t like to talk about her mother either. Nobody wanted to talk about the person who, as she grew up, had increasingly occupied her thoughts.
 
The only thing she had been able to know was what she had overheard. Her mother’s name, Edilma. The name reverberated endlessly in her ears: Edilma. Edilma. Day by day, perhaps even night by night, an image had formed in Olga’s mind of her missing mother. Not just her face. The way she talked, walked, smiled, even touched her daughter. Surely she must have loved Olga. Then why had she gone away, she asked herself repeatedly. She wanted so much to love her mother – yes, she loved her as any daughter would – but, the next instant, she would be overwhelmed by a giant wave of resentment. How could she leave the daughter she doubtless loved? How could she stay away so long without coming to see her? There was nobody to answer her questions. Even to hear them.

Olga was seventeen the day her aunt came rushing to their home. She wanted to talk immediately with her uncle. What she had to say electrified her uncle as much as Olga who stood listening near the door. After seventeen years Edilma had suddenly reappeared in her sister’s home to ask about her daughter. She wanted, said the aunt with trepidation, to see her daughter.
​
Olga could see her uncle’s face freeze into an expression of staunch resolve. Yes, he said firmly after a pause, Edilma could see her daughter. That was all. She could not take her daughter. She had long forfeited that privilege. He did not want to see Edilma, but would allow Olga to visit her aunt’s home for a brief period to meet her mother.
 
It was the longest night for Olga. She had a tough time falling asleep. She felt excited to think of the morning when her aunt would come to fetch her. When she finally slept, it was a fitful sleep. Yet she woke up early, feeling restless. She had been to few big events in her small town, some weddings, three christenings and two funerals, but this was too prodigious an event for her mind to grasp easily. All her life she wanted to see her mother, and now she was going to see her. To talk to her. To ask her the question that had forever nagged her mind.
 
When her aunt came to fetch her, she was long dressed and ready. There were some people sitting in the living room of her aunt’s home. She ignored them and started going in.
 
She heard an unknown voice call out her name, “Olga!”
 
She turned and saw a middle-aged woman coming toward her, her arms outstretched, her face streaked with tears. “Olga!” The woman cried out again.
 
This then was her mother. She looked older than what Olga knew to be her age. A hard life must have done that to her. Olga stood petrified.
 
The woman came and put her arms around her. She was now crying almost hysterically and saying, “Olga. Olga.”
 
This is the moment Olga had waited for all her life, the mother she had longed for. But it was not happiness she felt, not satisfaction, but a kind of relief. A dam burst. She found herself sobbing uncontrollably.
 
She cried for a long time. The woman who held her cried too and kept looking at her. It seemed to Olga a look of expectation. Perhaps for Olga to say the one word her mother  wanted to hear, a word she had waited to hear for seventeen years. Mother.
 
But the word never to came to Olga’s lips. What she felt surging was a sense of deep resentment. Why did she leave me behind?

​“Why did you leave me?” she said finally.
 
“I didn’t want to leave you,” said Edilma. “Please, please understand. I had no other way. I was an unwed mother. I couldn’t live in this town any more, except a life of shame. I had to run away, as far as I could.”
 
She cried. “I had no alternative. I thought and thought, and could think of nothing, except to leave. Without even my daughter.”
 
“I had no place. I had no way to feed you, look after you. I thought you would be safe here. I had to go and find a way to live.”
 
“For seventeen years? You didn’t come once to see me?”
 
“I couldn’t. Believe me, I couldn’t,” Edilma said, “I lived a life I couldn’t tell you about. I just survived. I couldn’t make you a part of it. I wanted you to have a decent life, with my brother and sister, who I knew would look after you well. I longed to see you, but I couldn’t.”
 
“I missed you,” she added, “perhaps more than even you missed me.”
 
They just held each other.
 
Olga is my friend. She was telling me the story some thirty years later. Yet her eyes sparkled and moistened as she recounted the seventeen-year-old’s story. She never went with her wandering mother. She already had a mother-like figure in her young life, her aunt, whom she loved like a mother. She had a father-like uncle too, who, she knew, loved her and protected her as one of his own. Her grandmother, now dead, a paragon of affection, had shown what unstinting love could be.
 
Olga stayed with her uncle and aunt, but her mother kept in touch with her. When years later, she married and had children, her mother came and stayed with her periodically and showered on the grandchildren the affection she had missed extending to her daughter. The grandchildren loved her in return and filled some void.
 
Olga lives her life, with its sharp turns, joys and miseries. Her mother, who had stayed away seventeen years, can no longer let seventeen days pass without touching base with her daughter or her children.

​Wei, a Chinese farmer hated seeing a squalid temple on the daily walk to his field in the Fujian province. He had no money for paint or masonry. He just took a broom and cleaned it thoroughly. He did it every week and, before leaving, lit an incense. One night he was told in a dream that he would be rewarded for his good work: he would find a treasure in a cave behind the temple. He was to share it with his neighbors.
 
He found nothing but a single tea shoot in the cave. He took it home, planted and nurtured it, and, when the bush grew, he gave cuttings to all he knew. He even made money by selling the cuttings in the market. Everybody agreed it was best tea they had ever tasted, a real treasure. The plant came to be known as Tieguanyin, the goddess of mercy. Now the goddess presides over her merciful potion in millions of home, a drink the world most consumes second only to water.

Are you bored or tired? Drink some tea.
Are you distressed and unhappy? Try a cup of tea.
Are you happy? For Heaven’s sake, celebrate with a large pot of tea.
 
These, at least, were the counsel of my dear father. He loved tea. He would never dream of letting his wife, let alone his undiscriminating son (me), buy tea; he went to a special store and had the storekeeper mix different black teas to his specification. The day he retired from work, he even took over the ritual of making the morning tea; mother happily relinquished, for she continued to work. I gladly stayed away from their dawn debut. I did not care to leave my bed that early. In any case – now it may be revealed – I did not care for father’s strong brew.
 
My pedestrian palate took many years more to wake up to the charm of tea. I love even its short, simple name. The Chinese who have discovered all sorts of unpleasant things like diabetes to decimal fractions seem to have found tea as the ultimate solace. They called the stuff ‘te’ in Min Chinese and ‘cha’ in Mandarin Chinese. The Dutch took a leading role in tea trade and popularized the term ‘tea’, which entered French and Spanish with minor variation, while the Portuguese traders settled in Macau adopted the Cantonese variation ‘cha’ and brought it into Persian, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.

How did it all begin? The idea of pouring boiling water on the cured leaves of Camellia Sinensis and getting a beverage probably started as a medicinal exercise, until the Han dynasty in China made it into an elite drink at the start of the Common Era. The Tang dynasty, which started larger cultivation in mountains, helped the practice grow. In India’s Himalayan region too tea was extensively used as a drink with a medical value. Slowly tea became fashionable in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Catherine of Braganza brought her taste to the English court in the 17th century when she married Charles II and the British started the practice of mixing milk and sugar with tea. Black tea soon outpaced green tea in consumption and the tea trade multiplied swiftly.
 
To break the Chinese monopoly, the British tried several times in the 19th century to bring plants from China secretly and plant those in their Indian colony, until they found native plants in Darjeeling and Assam and in Sri Lanka. They even offered free land to Europeans who agreed to cultivate tea.

Good tea isn’t easy to cultivate. Tea plants require acidic soil, warm climate and at least fifty inches of rain. They take a long time to mature: three years to harvest and five to nine years to produce seeds. There are of course many strains, classified mainly by leaf size: the Chinese are small, the Assamese large and the Cambodian intermediate. The plants can grow large, but they are pruned to be accessible for harvesting every two weeks. Only two inches of leaves and buds, called flushes, are picked at a time. In tea cultivation quality is paramount.
 
Tea processing is no easier. White tea is wilted (water-extracted) but unoxidized (pan-roasted); popular black tea, called red tea by the Chinese, is fully wilted and oxidized; oolong tea is wilted and partly oxidized; green and yellow tea are both unwilted and unoxidized. Tastes vary, and the industry seems eager to respond with a larger variety. All loose and bagged tea is blended, with varied tastes in mind. There is also tea to which a special flavor is added. For a change I have had tea with bergamot, as in Earl Gray, or tea with orange flavor, as in Constant Comment. Tea with mint is very common.

Tea for me is also memory.
 
Tea is my parents sitting on the deck and sipping a morning cup before the world or children interrupted their peaceful hour. Tea is my college mates thrusting a stained cup at me in a smoke-filled cafeteria to celebrate an electoral victory. Tea is my favorite professor, Amlan Datta, telling me that tea is not just for taste but also for flavor and I should try jasmine tea. Tea is the Roys passing me a steaming cup after another on a breezy terrace in Jodhpur Park. Tea is the only pathetic item I could afford when I persuaded a pretty coed in the university to join me in a restaurant. Tea, glorious tea, is what we drank in abundance when I and fellow oarsmen won a minor event in a rowing regatta. Tea, bitter tea, is what I agonizingly sipped in a hospital café when my baby daughter underwent surgery. I have had tea in tiny clay pots in Indian railways stations, in plastic cups in Colombian buses, in delicate china in Hong Kong’s legendary Peninsular Hotel, from Jane’s large Chinese teapot, from my Russian neighbor’s showy samovar, from shiny, nondescript machines in Virginia’s motels, from the tiny Vietnamese contraption a friend gave me. I remember drinking tea with shift workers in a factory where I was an intern, with actors during break in a play I was stage-managing, with guerillas in Kathmandu, refugees in Cuba, tourists in Venice and students on a boat from Germany to Switzerland.

Through all these memories is the strongest one: mother, then a sprightly young woman, offering me my first cup of Darjeeling tea in India.

India has changed a lot since I lived there. One way it hasn’t is that people still offer a cup of tea the moment I step into a home.

I never say No.

He was the brightest star of the local bar. In twelve years he had come to be counted as a brilliant litigator, who was destined to go much farther. He counted on his charming family: his devoted wife, who took care of his son who had just joined college and his very young daughter.
 
Then Roy’s life seemed to cave in all on a sudden. His wife developed a respiratory problem, it turned serious in the hour it took him to rush from the court and take her to a hospital, and in three hours she was dead. He felt very disengaged from his private life, and buried himself in his work. He put his son in a boarding school and requested the principal of his daughter’s school for a counselor to attend to her needs, and started spending endless hours in his office and the bar library.
 
In the next two decades his scholarship and eloquence became legendary. The government invited him to be the state’s Attorney General: he served for three years with distinction, but did not like it and returned to private practice. He had initially established his reputation in criminal law; now he successfully extended his range to property law, especially landed property. He seemed indefatigable.

Roy's ​private life remained solitary and sheltered. He never socialized. He went to a club, had a couple of drinks with acquaintances and returned home. His son, having studied law, went to practice in another jurisdiction. His daughter, now grown, ran his home for him.
 
The school principal, in whose hands he had at one time placed the care of his daughter, was my aunt. She and the daughter had become very attached and the two visited each other almost daily. That is how the two families became close.
 
On my visits to my aunt I had met Roy at times. It was impossible to overlook him. A tall man with silver hair, two relucent eyes astride a Roman nose, his suave but resonant voice would be a notable presence in any living room. He never said a joke, but he was witty. He never raised his voice, but you listened to him.
 
On one occasion, when I was on vacation, he invited me to spend a week in his house, as his son was visiting also. But it was the father I found fascinating; fortunately he seemed also to have taken to me. Every day, when he returned from the court, we had long chats over tea. A voracious reader, he turned over his books to me after reading, and we had endless discussions over the books’ intent or significance. We both enjoyed it. He did not expect undue deference, and I was not used to easy capitulation.
I had strong views on crime and punishment; I found most penal systems repugnant. “The first thing to do,” I would say, “is to wreck them.”
 
“The question is what would you replace them with,” he responded gently and spoke of alternate systems and their drawbacks. He knew far more about both law and its real-life application, but never acted patronizing. He listened intently and engaged me in a frank and fair exchange.
 
“Even when its consequences are evil, you may want to take a hard look at the change you want before you break what you have,” he would suggest.

I still marvel at his patience with my insolence and his good-natured acceptance of my radical views, even if he were to proceed to deconstruct them piece by piece. I knew he was no less spirited than me about his root convictions, but he restrained himself to help me follow him, step after slow step, into his universe.

What a remarkable universe it was! He had dealt with a vast range of criminals, from the cunning and conniving to the brutal and violent, and yet he had come away with a realistic but hopeful view of what a compassionate society can achieve. He was conservative enough to want a lawful society, but liberal enough to disdain current law-and-order shibboleths.
When I spoke of my abhorrence of executions, he told me how his presence at a hanging had given him a sense of revulsion and induced a belated change of mind.
 
He told me that he maintained a special library in a part of his home that he used as an office that his children never entered and he wanted me use it. During the day he was always in the court and I could use his sanctum in complete peace.
 
It was the first time in my young life that an elderly person had treated me as an equal and encouraged me to dispute his ideas. It made me think in a new and perhaps better way. Also it made me feel grown-up and confident, eager to enter the fray of intellectual life.

​He was so kind and affectionate with me that I wanted to know more about his personal life. My aunt had alerted me to his difficult years and the painful rupture in his family life. I wanted to know how he had struggled and survived and reached a plateau of relative tranquility. It was then I found that there was a murky zone in his past that he was almost childlike in his hesitation to stray into. He shrank from any recall of that shadowy phase, and I retreated hastily from my curiosity. I recalled then that in his entire house there was not a single photo of his younger days, nor of his wife or his family.
 
I loved his private library and I spent hours there every day while Roy was away. I read Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf, Plato and Marcus Aurelius. I loved the peace of his inner sanctum and felt the presence of a thoughtful, cultivated man.
 
The library was not large, but had several shelves of hand-picked volumes. I found below the shelves a small, closed cupboard. I wondered if Roy stocked some cherished volumes there and opened it. I was stunned.
 
Inside stood a neatly framed black-and-white photo of his wife, very young, with a notably shy smile. In front were placed in a row a slender necklace and two diamond earrings.