For a brief period I worked as consultant to a large bookstore. I love books and I thought it might be fun to work there. It was fun, but it was more. I had interesting insights in how businesses operate, and, more interestingly, how people operate.
 
It was a huge bookstore, divided into four sections. Each section held books on a group of subjects. Salespersons were moved each week from a section to the next, so that they get to know the whole store and learn to deal with different sets of clients. The store manager emphasized that the cardinal rule of the store was that, when a client names a book, the salesperson doesn’t just tell the client where the book is located, but walks with the client to the shelf, retrieves the book and places it in the client’s hand.

​As a newcomer and learning my steps, I tried to be inconspicuous during the first week, but acquired a mysterious halo thanks to a peculiar incident. During the coffee break, I heard a colleague talk of a “stupid woman” who came the previous day and asked for a book of fiction – she was, of course, told that the store had thousands – and, when asked to name the author, said George, without being able to say whether it was the first or last name. Naturally, the book could not located or sold.
 
It was a coincidence that, when we returned to the store, there was the same woman again, approaching the help desk. Perhaps to test my mettle, the others promptly urged me to attend to her.
 
“Could you please help me with a book I want to buy?” she asked politely.
 
“I would love to. Do you have the title of the book,” I asked in return.
 
“Fiction,” she said, “if I remember it right.”
 
“And can you recall the name of the author?”
 
She hesitated slightly and said, “Something like George.”
 
I said to the woman, “I know the book you are looking for and I will get it for you” and walked to the shelf and picked the book and gave it to her.
 
The others were slack-jawed with surprise and asked me how I knew what book she wanted.
 
I explained that I was lucky enough to have known about the book, but the real reason was I didn’t assume that she was stupid and listened carefully to her. She did not say she wanted a book of fiction; she said ‘fiction’ when I asked the title. She did not say George was the name of the author; she said it was something like George. I realized she wanted a Spanish masterpiece called Ficciones, a book so famous that even the English translation carries the orginal name, written by the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, whose first name an English-speaking person may be forgiven for remembering as George.
 
I confused the store manager by requesting that I should be allowed to work, contrary to tradition, in the fourth section continuously for at least four to six weeks.
 
“That is the section of information technology books, and nobody likes to work in that section. They say it is hard and confusing. Why do you want that section for so long?”
 
“That section can be the biggest money-spinner,” I said, knowing it was the dot-com boom period. “It is confusing, because nobody has tried to sort out and rearrange the new technologies correctly. I believe it can be simplified and the clients will love it.”
 
I soon realized that it was difficult to do all the rearrangement while the store was running and buyers were looking at the shelves. I asked for an extraordinary measure: to give me an assistant and let me work a whole night while the store was closed. When the rearranged section opened, it had suddenly become an easy job, at least for a computer enthusiast to find a book. Startups started visiting in large numbers and the revenue of the section shot up overnight.
 
The tradition of walking with a client to the shelf and physically locating the book for the person was a good one, I thought, better than telling the client “Go to aisle 4-G and look for it,” among fifty other similar looking books. But the core of the practice, a demonstrative helpfulness, was frequently missing. Many people don’t just want to pick up a book and buy it; they may be curious about the author’s other books or other volumes in a series. While other salespersons thought they had done their bit by accompanying a buyer to the book, I found I had far better results by just being friendly and attentive and letting the client tell me what really interest him or her.
 
The shocking reality was that the bookstore showed little interest, while hiring its sales people, to ascertain whether they had any interest in books. In fact, supervisors admonished salespersons if they as much as opened a book, saying, “You are here to sell books, not to read them.” I have a suspicion that, when a bookstore puts its trust in people who don’t care for books, it is sadly changing the very meaning of a bookstore for its best clients, the book lovers.

We are used to seeing screen stars avowing eternal love and then divorcing the next week, followed by unsavory stories about the protagonists whose sources are easily guessed. This is not confined to Hollywood. Now in big cities, in our close circles, ruptures of close relations is a frequent occurrence. We care for somebody, perhaps deeply, as deeply as we know how, and yet the relationship collapses at some point, leaving odious detritus.
 
The question is: What remains? Of an event that was of such prime importance, what endures in our life?

I was recently in a club where somebody invited me to play a game of table tennis. He was a very poor player, but, I discovered to my embarrassment, I played even worse. This was a memorable epiphany, because I had played the game for years with a fair degree of skill. I had entered competitions and even received lessons from two world champions, Viktor Barna and Richard Bergmann.

​Equally discomfiting was the experience when a friendly woman showed me the acoustic guitar she had recently acquired. She showed me a couple of chords she had just learned, and I tried to show her a couple more. I couldn’t. My fingers simply didn’t obey my arrogant will. It was no use reminding myself that I was a guitarist in a band and had performed in events and restaurants.
 
My years of loyal practice did not let me retain my proficiency in playing a guitar or table tennis. I had lost the skill, though fragments of the know-how might have lingered. I asked myself: What had remained?
 
In table tennis, the joy of learning from masters and playing against wizards had faded, but I had learned the heady thrill of competing and, more often than not, coping with the pain of losing. Playing in a band taught me, in a way I could not have imagined, the real meaning of coordination. Even more, my ears learned the difference, even for a folk song or movie tune, the difference between good music and really good music.
 
Building a relationship with another person, or even living with him or her, is a much more important affair. When it ends, do we retain anything of value?
 
Recently I attended the graduation ceremony of a young person whose parents I have known for years. The parents, Michael and Abigail. divorced some years back, and Abigail attended with her current husband and Michael came with his new girlfriend. As we sat together after the ceremony, unaccountably I felt a great sadness seeing Abigail and Michael talking to each other, amicably but distantly, like polite neighbors. I remembered the time when they started seeing each other and dreamed of living together and the many years they lived together and had children. Is this all that remains? Courtesy and quiet conversation?
 
I spoke to Michael and Abigail later, independently.
 
Michael isn’t a loquacious person. Eventually he volunteered, “I felt angry and humiliated when she left me. It was no comfort that she wasn’t leaving me for another person. It made it clearer, in fact, that she would have no part of me. But you can’t be angry all the time. It came to me that she had struggled -- and, in fact, had had problems. I was a large part of the problem.
 
“So, four years down the line, when she told me that she was to marry someone, I sincerely wished her well. I had briefly met the person, and he seemed a decent person. I wanted them to find the happiness that had eluded us.”
 
I am more comfortable talking with Abigail, and she was more outspoken.
 
“Michael was a special person for me, for a long number of years. I had a difficult time with him at the end, but he still remains special for me.”
 
She looked at her present husband and added, “I do not regret my decision to leave the marriage. It was the right thing to do. I was not happy, and there was no way I could be happy. No matter. Michael will always be a very special person for me.”
 
I remembered my discussion, some years earlier, with a couple both of whom are well-known practicing psychologists. They had each divorced their spouses after a failed marriage and met and married years later.
 
“We did not know better then. Our marriages had seemed burdensome, and we decided to end them. Our spouses were decent people, but our relationship had seemed irrecoverable and hopeless. That’s the way the cookie crumbled.
“Now, having counselled scores of couples and seen their problems, we feel perhaps those relationships weren’t so ill-fated after all. Probably those marriages could have been saved. One is never sure, but it is possible. We just didn’t know better.”
 
Many leave one another in acrimony, at least distaste. Fortunate – but sadly few -- are those whose relations end on a pleasant note and they can go their way with something to treasure.
 
We cannot all play guitar or good table tennis all our life, but we can treasure what we have loved and learned.

I was just a young college student when I strayed one evening into the Ranji Stadium in Kolkata. My friends were having a party, but I was curious about an exhibition of photographs my father had told me about. His friend, a press photographer, had told him that it was worth looking at.
 
Once there, I was glad that I had gone alone. It was a remarkable experience of my life, an experience that merited some silent meditation. I believed then, and I believe now, you cannot go through the exhibition like that without an internal shift. Something changed within me.
 
Edward Steichen was a leading photographer and he was by then, at 80, the photography director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As the ‘culmination’ of his career, he set about creating an exhibition that would show the oneness of people everywhere. He chose the title, The Family of Man, from a poem by his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, and he also used Sandburg’s words to spell its theme:
 
There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.
 
Steichen traveled to eleven countries, assiduously collecting 500 photographs from 300 photographers of seventy countries, essentially telling the story of ordinary people living ordinary lives through ordinary experiences: being born, growing up as children, playing in streets, eating with the family, working in the field and in factories, suffering pain and affliction, losing relatives, enduring war and hardship, facing old age and death. The interlocking story was of a human being, whatever the age and gender, striving and struggling, braving and living and succumbing and braving in every land.
 
The exhibition ran in the US for fifteen weeks to a record number, then, with government support, toured the world for eight years, in 37 countries in six continents, even the USSR where it evoked wide response from young people (it did not go to Franco’s Spain and Mao’s China). In India, the exhibition travelled to seven cities including Kolkata.

I was spellbound. It was my first exposure to what great photography can be. It was, I realized, not just a pressman’s tool or a wedding photographer’s instrument, to record a gesticulating politico or an overdressed bride, but a powerful artist’s paintbrush, to offer a perspective, clarify a vision, tell a story, and, in the best of cases, change our eyes and our life. Like a soldier’s gun, it can kill an illusion or an inset prejudice, like a surgeon’s scalpel, it can remove an obstruction and help us to see an extraordinary, unwonted truth.
 
I had so far thought very poorly of photography as an art form, compared to music or painting and certainly to literature. I was tired of kitschy depictions of sunsets, boats on rivers and blooming flowers in overstocked gardens. The exhibition showed me a completely different use of the medium. To tell us, succinctly and without pretension, the magnificent story of life, in all its beauty and ugliness. To help us uncover, without a word and in utter silence, the meaning of the unending flurry of human events that pass in front of us, often unregarded. It made a child’s laughter or a mother’s despairing look an unforgettable anthem of every family’s story.

​I was seeing the masters. There was Diane Arbus, with her shocking representation of mentally ill and transgender people, Robert Capa and Mathew Brady showing us the incalculable human ravages of war, the fashion photographer Richard Avedon uncovering the faces behind the masks, Alfred Eisenstaed, capturing a sailor kissing a nurse on Victory Day, W. Eugene Smith who masterminded the idea of a photo essay, Andreas Feininger trapping the soul of a city in his film, Margaret Bourke White whose shot of Gandhi still adorns India’s stamps (and who, incidentally, took the best photo of my girlfriend) and the Frenchman who was to become my idol, Henri Cartier Bresson, telling heart-wrenching stories with every photo shoot. There was too a touching still from Ray’s Apu trilogy.
 
I later found that Susan Sontag had criticized the show as overly sentimental and Roland Barthes had commented that showing people being born and dying told us little. No matter. The exhibition went on to inspire thousands, who felt in some way that it was telling their story. In that sense, Steichen was right in saying that, when people looked at the photos, the faces in the photos looked back at them, and there was a sense of instant recognition.
 
Even artists and photographers felt inspired. Ten years later, the German magazine Stern sponsored a giant exhibition similar in theme. Twenty years later, the UN sponsored an exhibition on The Family of Children. There have been retrospectives and exhibitions on women, on marginal groups and even an exhibition called The Family of Invisibles. They have highlighted the agonies of neglected and marginalized groups.
 
I know better what happened to me. I devoted five years to photography, learning its myriad techniques and loving the strange new world it unfolded for me. I became no more than a proficient photographer. But it did something more. I learned to see.

I was late to arrive, but the moment my hostess opened the door I knew it was the typical Washington party. A dozen people, of whom I appeared the least sprucely dressed, all talking and affecting an earnest bonhomie they were unlikely to be feeling. I was quickly handed a glass of Pinot Noir and seated at the only remaining seat.
 
On my right sat a well-regarded professor of the university where I had once lectured, with whom a conversation was less feasible, I soon discovered, because of the advanced hardness of his hearing. On the left sat a woman in a simple royal-blue dress, who, the hostess said, had just returned from India. That doubtless was why I had been placed next to her.
 
Celia smiled pleasantly as she gave me her hand. She had a soft, rolling voice and a deferential style, but her words had a contrasting directness. She sounded clearly American, but I seemed to detect a trace of something exotic. She enunciated more distinctly and gave longer pause between sentences.
 
Since she had recently visited India, I asked her if she had enjoyed her trip to India. She could have gone to India for pleasure or for work, but I made the foolish male presumption that she went as a tourist. She stunned me with her reply.
 
“I lived in India for thirty years,” she said, “I am a nun.”
 
She added, “Yes, to answer your question, I enjoyed my stay in India.”
 
When I confessed to my silly assumption, she said generously, “That is all right. Most of us don’t wear a habit any longer. People who are used to seeing nuns in habits are sometimes confused.”
 
She then smilingly pointed to the brooch she was wearing on her dress. She explained that she wears it with her street clothes to indicate her calling.
 
She had entered the church as a young girl, enthusiastically received her training and had gone to India to serve. For more than thirty years she had lived and worked in a small town in the south. Her life was simple. She lived with an Indian nun in a modest cottage, shared domestic chores, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. She taught young children during the day and helped in a church-run clinic in the evening. Her days were long and nights were occasionally short, when she was awakened for some medical emergency. It was hugely different from the comfortable middleclass life she had led with her dentist father and firefighter mother in an Ohio town.
 
I could not help asking if she was happy in her sharply altered circumstances.
 
“The first several weeks, perhaps months, were a period of excitement. Everything seemed like an adventure. An Indian town and daily life in it were like an unfathomable mystery to me. I knew nothing and I understood less, despite the briefing I had received from my elders and superiors.
 
“Once the period of transition was over, I settled down in my new life. I was peaceful, very peaceful. Of course, there were pains and irritants. Sometimes with the town people, more often with colleagues, but these were, at least in retrospect, minor and fleeting. I knew the patients at the clinic liked me; the children perhaps liked me a little more. That kept me going.”
 
And how did it feel to be back in the US after three decades?
 
She smiled, “At first cataclysmic, to be honest. I had returned to a country very different from the one I had left. Everything was different: food, clothes, transport, newspapers, phones, computers. The church was a solace, the mass offered friendly familiarity. Though, even there, the priorities and concerns seem to have changed.”
 
Has it been difficult to settle down?
 
She thought. “Honestly, yes. It has helped that I now live in a hostel with other nuns, many of a comparable age and experience. I feel I am settling down quite well.”
 
She laughed and added, “The only thing that bothers me yet is the food. I have gotten so used to Indian food that anything I eat here seems a trifle bland. I miss the spices. I tried cooking in the kitchen we have, but the smell lasted a long time and bothered other sisters. I had to give up on the idea.
 
“But, don’t worry,” she concluded with a laugh, “I am not starving.”
 
Three weeks later I made a reservation at the best Indian restaurant I knew and invited Celia. She looked bright in a yellow dress and the brooch shone with the candles the waiter lit.

​I ordered some cumin-and-ginger drink for both of us and, a pen ready, got hold of a menu.
 
“You have to tell me, Celia, of the food that you ate in India and liked. I want to mark the items in this menu to get an idea.”
 
She took a little time to recall the names from a language she knew scantily, but eventually was able to name eleven delicacies: two meat, three chicken, four seafood and five vegetarian entrées. Then, over her strenuous objections, I ordered all the eleven menu items. The waiter was slightly taken aback, but he wrote down the order assiduously.
 
It was my turn to explain to Celia.
 
“I want you to remember tonight as the India Night, when you could once again taste all the eleven Indian dishes you had tried earlier and liked. I have talked with the restaurant manager and he has promised that whatever we don’t eat now will be packed very carefully and you can store it in the hostel refrigerator for several days. You just have to heat it and eat it on successive days. There will be no odor, and the other nuns will not complain.”
 
I will long remember Celia’s startled but happy face.

“I love my daughters,” said Arijit Datta, “and I believe they love me too. They are good and responsible persons, the way their mother and I wanted them to be. They are kind and thoughtful. I am sure their friends and colleagues think well of them. Their neighbors, from what I hear, like them. I have a high opinion of them.”
 
He paused. I knew there was something more.
 
“It is just that I can’t connect with them,” he said with a sigh.
 
Arijit is an old friend, older than me, who has kept in touch with me despite my itinerant life. We briefly worked in the same organization, a European multinational group, and I came to know him for a curious reason. He had a crush on my secretary, a charming young woman who relished the attention of dashing older men. I tried to help, mostly by leaving the scene whenever he appeared, but the relationship came to nought, for Arijit left for a better job in another city.
 
There he rose rapidly, married, had two daughters and headed the local management association. We met periodically, for I visited his city for work and we met a couple of times for dinner. He was a bright person, with a flair for conversation and friendship; I enjoyed myself every time we met. Apparently he too liked being in touch, for he called from time to time and occasionally sent brief notes.
 
When I went abroad, he took pains to remain in touch. I followed his successful professional life, but sometimes had the glimpse of a certain loneliness. His wife had developed Parkinson’s, and the symptoms, mildest tremors at the start, grew steadily worse. Their lives diverged. Arijit moved constantly, his wife, home-bound initially, turned bed-ridden.

​When I saw him on a brief visit to India, I was surprised to see him so gray. His wife had passed away, but his two daughters lived with him. Priya was in the university, and Shreya, the elder one, was a junior executive in a pharmaceutical company. They were both bright and pleasant, and I assumed, no doubt naively, that he would be well looked after.
 
We all presume that our children, who have lived years with us and have known that we have loved them, will remain close to us. They will share our joys and understand our pains. When we get older and begin to see the erosion of our strength, when perhaps we start losing friends and the advantages of our positions, they will be, by their very presence, our reassurance. At one time we took care of them and gave them our support; perhaps they can stand beside us now. Once we could advise and guide them; maybe now we can count on their counsel when we need it.
 
Arijit said that, when his wife lived, he had to depend a lot on his wife to look after the two daughters. He had to struggle to cope with his work, prove his mettle and win in a competitive struggle. Win he did, but his work days expanded steadily with his responsibilities and he frequently spent twelve to fourteen hours in the office. He made an effort, when his wife died, to take a bigger role in the children’s life. He spent more time with them, talked daily about their studies and their interests.
 
I asked about his daughters and learned that Shreya has done very well in the pharmaceutical company and Priya has had a good start in a technology startup.
 
“Of course, I know they belong to a different generation,” Arijit said, “their values and styles are different. Mine were different from my parents too. Still I believed I owed my father and mother an effort to connect with them – talk to them, understand them, care for them.
 
“My children seem to live in a different universe. I can’t touch them – not even digitally. When I call them or send them a message, I seem to sense that I am intruding on their time and I need to have a smaller footprint.”
 
Arijit had had a successful career and a busy social life with friends. It pained me to hear of the loneliness behind the façade of such success. That he had lifted his visor and shared his agony with a friend overseas also told me the depth of his pain. He never once begrudged his daughters their professional advance; it is likely that he helped the process in some way. But he longed for a closer How (not) to get a break. link with them, or at least the chance to develop it.
 
That longing clearly grew as some health issues arose; his thyroid gave him trouble, he could walk less and had to control his diet. He had maintained his large apartment, in the hope that his daughters would visit him sometimes. But they never did, and he started considering alternatives.
 
I knew this from our periodic exchanges. It was still a surprise to get his letter. It spoke of a radical move.
​
“It may surprise you,” it said, “but I took a quick decision to move to this tiny house in the foothills of the Himalayas. I rent two rooms from the elderly couple who own it, and they take care of my rooms as well as my food. My thyroid and other problems are unlikely to let me live beyond a year or two. I want to live that limited period peacefully, with no cares and few expectations.
 
“As long as I lived in the city in a large apartment, I could not help hoping that my daughters would visit me and perhaps pass a night. That has not happened in some years. I decided to face the reality that I will leave the way I came, by myself. Your messages have helped – and fortified me in my decision to make a clear break with the past. Thank you and best wishes.”