Our American Embassy post was in India and we moved into a large three-story house in central New Delhi. The Iraqi Embassy was next door and our security guards were alerted to be vigilant.

As I sat drinking a Sidecar and doing a Sudoku one evening, a security guard came  to say that a thief had intruded and was held. When the other guards brought the thief forward, I was astonished to find him singularly well-dressed. He had a cashmere jacket on his arm. I asked him in an Indian language what he was doing in my house. He replied that he was sorry he did not speak Indian languages, but would be glad to respond in English or French.

An Indian thief, in an expensive suit, who did not speak Indian languages, but was ready to converse in French! It needed some exploration. To the chagrin of the guards, I asked the man to come in to the living room and offered him a drink. I alerted him that I had been told that he was an intruder, probably a thief.

The man said he was a Frenchman whose name was Jacques Fisher, but since he lived in an English speaking country, the United States, he usually gave out his name as Jack Fisher. He had lived in our house earlier as the World Bank representative in India. Presently he was returning from a mission in Tokyo; when he found his connecting flight from Delhi to Washington delayed by several hours, he took a taxi from airport to visit his earlier home. The house had pleasant associations for him, including the birth of his only child. The moment he crossed the gate, he was apprehended, and the guards simply did not understand his nostalgia for the house.

I offered Jack another drink, then took him on a tour of the house. An hour later I called a taxi to take him back to the Delhi airport.

A year later I joined the World Bank in Washington myself, and Jack became my closest colleague and friend.    

Bob Simon and I walked around Lake Anne for years. He had founded Reston, where we both lived.

Bob Simon would speak to anybody who passed by. He noticed a new jacket, a bandage on the hand or a changed hairstyle. With strangers he discussed the warm weather, their cuddly dog or the heron he had observed beside the lake.

He paid attention to everything. He checked out each garden, told me what was new or good in it, what the garden keeper had done that was special. He wanted to know the name of each plant, each flower, and would ask a resident the exact spelling of its name. We had a special spot that we both liked, where a tree bent over the stream, which he would duly check and tell me whatever had recently changed.

He wanted to hear about the places I had been and what was special about them. Generalities did not interest him; he wanted specifically to know what I had experienced, what it had meant for me.

We talked about Reston. I told him what I liked and what I didn’t. Though some thought I should not tell him what I didn’t like – he might be upset – he was quite open. He would pugnaciously contradict me, but never stop me. He liked good polemics and I think he enjoyed debating an adverse point of view.

We talked about politics. It was certainly his favorite subject, and he had no hesitation skewering naïve and uninformed opinions. He detested the growing inegalitarianism in the US, the unquestioning adoration of military prowess and surreptitious partisan effort to restrict minority voting.

We walked together every morning, except when one of us was out of town. When we started we walked all round the Lake Anne; later he shortened his route, and I would walk with him and then some additional distance on my own.

I often walked with a dog. It was amazing how gracious he was, when the dog would unaccountably move from left to right, or vice versa, and get in the way of his walking stick. He simply moved to the other side and let the dog have his way. He would say, “Let her have her way and follow her interest. After all, we are following ours.”

Family Excursion

I loved to hear Bob's stories of the past. A typical weekend recreation of the Simon family, Bob told me, was an excursion in the car out of town. For his father, who spent all his days amid downtown hustle and bustle, it was a relief to be out of New York city and drive freely on the country roads.

But something went wrong on a bright fall morning. Driving carefree, his father suddenly saw what looked like a large crack in the road and trying hastily to steer round it. He ended in a roadside ditch. As it went, the car toppled and turned upside down. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt; Bob and a sister had minor bruises.

What followed was even more miraculous. While the children crawled out of the car,  his father was stuck in the car. His mother promptly took command of the situation, lined up the kids on one side and asked them to push the car to a side and then, singlehandedly, pulled out his father.

Cheating Subordinate

At 21, after finishing college, Bob went to work for a company to gain some work experience. The very next year his father died. He suddenly had to take charge of his father’s company and the Carnegie Hall.

An employee who had worked long for his father became his right-hand man. Bob thought, given his limited familiarity with his father’s affairs, the man would be an asset before he could find his feet. Two months later he found that the person, knowing that Bob was less familiar than his father with the company's affairs, had cooked the books and stolen money.

Though uncertain that he could manage without the man’s help, he could not bear to work with a person who had abused his trust. He sacked the man and plunged himself into a determined study of the company’s accounts.

Some Union Leaders

The union members who had worked with his father knew that he was diligent and knowledgeable, and had never tried to run rings round him. Theirs’ was  a cautious, respectful relationship. When Bob took over, the union thought the young man could be a pushover and started making exorbitant demands.

Bob was nervous. He was new, young and inexperienced, while his adversaries were mature, experienced and fully familiar with the business. But he was also a quick learner and resolute negotiator. He readily talked with the union bosses, any time they wanted, but he would not cede ground unless he saw a good reason.

In a few months, the union leaders realized that they would have to make a good case if they wanted to extract a concession from Bob.

A Special Hotel

A tall, soft-spoken woman joined the staff as Booking Manager for Carnegie Hall. Bob liked her from the start and ended up marrying her.

Bob had planned a great honeymoon. After considering several hotels, he chose one that seemed just perfect: it entailed short travel, the price was right, and its cuisine was reportedly excellent.

When he arrived  with his wife, the clerk was cagey and quickly called the manager. The manager took one look at Bob and his papers and said he could not find a place for the couple.

He explained that his was a classy hotel. He could not accommodate Jews, without upsetting his top-class clients. Bob had to take his bride and, late in the evening, go in search of another hotel.

In the Army

At 29 Bob joined the US Army. “Unlike all the wars that followed," he said to me, "this was a very emotional war. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t join. I could have avoided because of my age and my work. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t. I went.”

He first underwent training at Camp John in Long Island and then more training at Camp Lee, later renamed Fort Lee, in Virginia. He was then sent to Kansas and Nebraska for further training, and eventually posted in the quartermaster’s office.

He worked for two years in Brussels, Belgium, mostly on logistics, buying pulp for paper making, when France was finally freed. He was assigned to France for a year and found the major part of his work was to a find a way through the intricate French bureaucracy.

Wine in Paris

While Bob worked in France, his aunt in New York, who had hastily migrated to the US in anticipation of the German invasion, asked him to check on her valuables stored in a Boulogne-Billancourt warehouse, on the outskirt of Paris.

Given the chaos of occupied France, neither expected much of the exploration. Bob made the trip, but his expectation sank further when he saw the extensive signs of allied bombing and a series of razed buildings. The potbellied warehouse manager pointed to one and said, “Our largest store has been reduced to ashes.”

Bob waited quietly for bad news as the manager riffled through old records of deposits. “Let us see what is left,” he said, and walked with Bob to a dusty corner of the warehouse that hadn’t been destroyed.

After a short search the man found what he was looking for. There lay, in neat order, all the sixteen packages of Bob’s aunt’s property. The man could have as easily said the property was in the other warehouse and destroyed, and appropriated the property himself. But he hadn’t even touched the most valuable and tempting part of the collection: the aunt’s huge prized collection of vintage wines, including an open crate with eight high-price bottles.

Bob, 101, died this week. I will miss our walks.

Our relationship had been eroding for a while, but it was still a shock when she left me. She just went to her mother’s house and never came back. When I called, she said she had decided not to return.

Five years I nursed my sense of loss. Then I met somebody special. She was very special. I met her at a party and at the end of the hour I felt I had struck a chord. We walked out and preferred to be with each other.

That was just the beginning. I wanted to talk to her every day. I wanted to tell her everything. Clearly she felt the same way. In three months we were a number.

I told her about the other relationship. She said, uncomfortably, that she felt guilty because she was usurping someone else’s place. I said the relationship had ended, definitively, before I met her. I was not sure that she was persuaded.

Seven months later I had an accident. It was late and I was tired. Doubtless I was also careless. The front edge of the car struck a concrete block and caved in. Seat belts weren’t then in common use. The steering wheel ploughed through my chest cracking all the ribs on the right side and breaking the sternum.

A colleague was passing by lucky happenstance. He rushed me to a hospital and arranged for a surgeon. He knew of my long-term relationship and called her. Later he thought of my special friend and called her too.

When I recovered from the painkillers, I thought of them. That, in fact, was all I thought of. But none came to see me.

I lay in bed, took pills, read and watched the lengthening shadows of the day. Some friends and relations visited me, but the two persons I most longed to see did not come. I could not have told either of them, but both teetered endlessly at the edge of my mind.

The day I was finally released from the hospital, the specialists forbade me to use stairs for two months. Since my apartment was on the second floor, my brother insisted that I stay with him and his wife in their large ground floor apartment. They took punctilious care of me.

When I was leaving their place, my brother told me that my special friend had called him regularly to ask about my condition. She did not want it mentioned to me.

I still walked and drove with great difficulty. But I went to see her. How could she not come to see me even when my life was in the balance?

She listened quietly and then told me something I did not know. The colleague had called and she had rushed to the hospital. She was told she could not see me immediately because the doctors were in my room, examining me and discussing my status. She had to wait.

She went to the waiting room. The room was empty save for one person. This was the person she felt guilty about. She was the usurper. She could not face her. She stood, unseen, at the waiting room door for a long time. Then she went home.

She said she felt now she was wrong. She should have visited me; she owed me that. But she could not, knowing the other person would be there.

But the other person was never there. She told me years later that, though she was distraught, she had actually noticed my special friend at the door. She felt then she couldn’t be at the hospital or in my room. She couldn’t be with me anywhere if there was another presence. She returned home from the waiting room.

Sôn Tran was seventeen when two soldiers came to pick up his father. It was July 1975 and Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, had fallen two months ago to the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong. His father, Tran Kim, was a police lieutenant in the previous administration and was a prime target for ‘reeducation.’ The soldiers said Tran Kim was to leave forthwith for a designated ‘camp’ and carry food for three days.

He vanished without a trace. His family, his wife and children including Sôn Tran, had no idea where he was. Friends or neighbors who had similarly disappeared were equally untraceable. In absence of the only earning member, the seven children scrambled to find jobs or errands to earn some money. Sôn Tran worked as a day laborer, doing odd jobs, till he found a job in an office. At night he ate a bowl of rice with vegetables; the family could not afford anything else. Week by week, they sold everything in the house to buy food and clothes.

After three months came a scribbled note telling them Tran Kim was in the ominously named Suôi Mau (“Stream of Blood”) camp near Bien Hoa, 20 miles north-east of Saigon. Sôn Tran took a bus, then biked seven miles of dirt road to reach the camp. There was no education or reeducation in the camp; only hard farm labor, to extract vegetables and corn from forest-cleared land. Tran Kim had reduced to a skeleton, but was luckier than others who had died of malnutrition or disease. There was no doctor.

Tran Kim spent seven years in camps, including four years in a further and harsher one in Xuân Lôc. Sôn Tran visited him every month. He carried food packets, biking miles and miles of rough village track to reach the camp. That helped Tran Kim survive, and when he emerged in 1983, just skin and bones, his family was reduced: a sick son had died practically without treatment and a daughter, who had joined other boat people in an attempt to go overseas, had died at sea.

Seven years later Tran Kim learned of the new US program offering refugee status to people who had suffered under the new administration in Vietnam. Helped by his children, he completed the application and was approved. In August 1993 the Tran Kim family arrived in Seattle, completed their paperwork, aided by Church World Service, and flew to Washington via Chicago. Sôn Tran’s brother-in-law, who had years earlier taken a boat out of Vietnam and landed in Malaysia and later moved to the US, lived in Washington and helped the family find a modest apartment.

To Sôn Tran, 36, after the nightmare he had lived through, “everything seemed different, but everything seemed good.” Besides Vietnamese he spoke some French; now he set about learning English. A Vietnamese construction company hired him as a handyman, and he quickly learned caulking, painting and plumbing. Pleased with his work, an American client found him a better job, which in turn led him to start his own company. He felt he had become a true-blue American the day he got his driving license and promptly bought his first car for $700. He didn’t bike any more.

Sôn Tran, now 60, is a successful business contractor in Washington who helped refurbish my house. The days when he biked wearily to the Stream of Blood camp with small packets of food for his skeletal father, however, remain his most vivid memory forever.

In my experience new immigrants help each other whenever we can. We have all learned the hard way that, as Euripedes said, there is no greater loss than the loss of one’s first country.

For my first visit to the U.S., I accidentally packed my visa in my checked suitcase instead of my carry-on briefcase. When I changed planes in Paris, the French authorities told me that I could not board the flight to the U.S. without the visa. Luckily the gendarme was a Senegalese immigrant. He led me to the baggage room, against the rules, and I retrieved the precious document.

One time I flew to attend a close friend’s wedding in a small town near Berlin, but on arrival found there was no room at the only hotel in town. The only option was an expensive hotel miles away. But a Bangladeshi bellboy was willing to listen to my woes and told me to have a drink in the bar. Ten minutes later he returned with the key to a top-floor room.

I was close to dad, but I never felt closer to him than when we were on vacation and went together for a walk every morning. Our vacation was always with his sister who taught school and lived in a pastoral little town in central India. There was nothing to see there and nothing to do for recreation except go for a walk. That is what we did each day at dawn, long before the bicycles, bullock carts and inter-city buses unfurled a canopy of dust over the town.

Before sunrise dad would bend down next to my bed and gently touch my hand to make sure I was awake and eager to go. He wouldn’t say a word to disturb others sleeping nearby and wait for me to get ready. Once outside the house, he would still wordlessly look at me while I silently pointed to one of the two roads that could take us out of town. He would let me choose, and sometimes even confirm the choice by saying, “Well done! This side of town seems quieter today.” I wondered about the comment then, and I realize now he said it more as an encouragement to me than as a factual observation.

We would soon go past the  early vegetable vendors and the hawking newspaper man on his decrepit bicycle and, just after the tiny farmers’ cooperative, be out of city limits. Here the air was fresher, and dad and I would pick up speed. We walked briskly in the cool morning air, alongside the few evergreens that dotted the roadside, and watched the emerging orange line on the horizon. A few huts on the sloping hills, the occasional little stream, an emaciated cow or two next to the huts. “Look,” dad would softly whisper, and draw my attention with a forefinger to a Blue Flycatcher on a twig or a modest garden with flaming bastard teak, then touch my shoulder to indicate that we should move on.

We walked three miles to the river, sauntered a little on the scraggly shoreline and then turned round. Another long stretch of silent walk, punctuated by the briefest of remarks, till we again came within city limits. A bustling town was slowly coming awake. I knew what was on dad’s mind, but waited for him to broach the subject.

Sure enough, he would suddenly turn to me, as if a new idea had just struck him, and say, “Do you think we should stop for some tea?” He loved tea, every kind of tea, and I knew he was by now longing for a sip of strong morning tea. I would nod my agreement and we would take a quick turn to visit the small street-side tea stall where a wizened old man made and served tea to passing day laborers. We would sit on a rough bench next to a rickety table, and soon two steaming cups of fragrant, over-sweetened Darjeeling tea would be placed before us. I loved to see Dad’s face as he took his first sip with an expression of benign satisfaction. After the third sip, he would turn convivial and ask, “So what do you think of this town?” It was the opening gambit in a facile stream of conversation that curiously seemed, unlike any of our conversations at home, like an exchange of equals.

Dad is gone some thirty years. I live thousands of miles away at the opposite end of the world. I have no keepsakes, nothing to remind me of him, except a handful of old photographs. He died suddenly, from a surgery gone bad, and I never even got to see him before he was buried. But, in the picturesque Washington suburb where I live, I walk every morning with an aging husky and watch the morning unfold around a tranquil lake. I walk in silence and remember the quiet loving man who made me feel his equal. That is my truest keepsake.

Drove 400 miles from Paris to the northwestern tip of France. Into Brittany, though I prefer the euphonious French name of Bretagne. Brittany, a giant province, vaunts its distinct culture. It wasn’t even a part of France – it was an independent duchy with two Celtic languages – until the late 15th century when the Duchess Anne of Brittany married the French king Charles VIII (no matter that she had earlier wed by proxy Maximilian I of Austria, since Pope Innocent VIII blessed it anyway).

Audierne is a tiny community, barely a square mile in area, located picturesquely at the mouth of the Goyen river. For centuries it was a fishing village that exported fish and cereal in exchange of wood and iron. Now it is a charmer of a town, with bustling quays and narrow streets, and a long, sandy Trescadec beach.

The heart of the place is the alluring town center, with its shops and hotels, bars and restaurants. I walked the streets, right up to the edge of the turquoise water, and sipped Campari at An Teuzar and Picon at L’Iroise on Quai Camille. The baffling variety of crepes, sweet and salty, bear the hallmark of the Breton tradition.

You can drive a few miles to Plogoff and traipse to the Pointe du Raz for a stunning view of the sea, or you can drive a few more miles to Quimper and see the 12th century cathedral with its incredible stained-glass windows. Or you can simply sit back and enjoy Audierne.

We have become so used to a frenetic work life that, on a vacation, we schedule a frenetic tour schedule, trying to cover all that there is to see. The transition from Paris to Audierne let me see another meaning of vacation: to vacate your itinerary and your schedule, empty your mind and fill your eyes.

A is for Audierne, the city that is also a port, where the sky is blue, the water is bluer, the air is crisp and cool, the people are warm, the crepes are warmer and better, a town that is -- in more senses than one -- a true harbor. 400 miles to a town of tranquility.

I have been in France before and I have been in the Louvre before. But this time was different.

This time I wanted to spend a whole day in the Louvre, leisurely enjoying what I loved and exploring what I hadn’t noticed before. I had chosen one of the two days the museum stays open till late in the evening.

I am very familiar with the museums in Washington and I have visited extraordinary museums in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, Rome and Tel Aviv. The one in Cairo has a special place in my heart. But in sheer magnitude and quality of display, no museum can hold a candle to Louvre.