​Wear your best dresses, switch on all the lights, turn on the liveliest music. A breathtaking event is about to happen.
 
In truth, the scene is pretty prosaic, a small room next to the chemical lab in Syracuse University. The only room that was available at short notice for a meeting of the Ukrainian students. It can accommodate only ten people. There are some folding chairs and two small tables. The walls could do with some painting.
 
Still this room is the site for a magnificent event, an unforgettable encounter of two people who will arrive at this point by a highly circuitous road.
 
Artem, 23, is the first to enter. New to the university, he is lonely and eager to pick a friend among other Ukrainians like him. How he comes to be here is quite a miracle.

​His grandmother had shrewdly guessed the winds of war and persuaded his reluctant grandfather to abandon their modest life and family connections in Lviv, at western end of Ukraine, for other shores. With the dissolution of Imperial Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ukraine, never a tranquil land, had seen its western part endure harsh subjugation under the Poles. Now, with new war clouds gathering, she wanted desperately to escape more uncertainties. She wrote to some cousins in the US and took a boat with her husband and little daughter Yulia for New York.
 
Neither she nor her husband spoke a word of English. Entering the country was no problem, because nobody asked for a visa those days. He took a job as a meat carver, did it diligently for ten years, and also set about learning English. With his savings he then set up a small retail shop his wife could run. Two earnings, he thought, would not only ease their life, but also provide better for the child’s education.
 
Yulia did well in school and later in college, but, to the disappointment of her parents, did not meet any one she wanted to marry. They encouraged her to visit her native land, with the secret hope that she will meet an eligible Ukrainian lad. Old family relations invited her to endless social events, and her parents were thrilled to hear that she seemed to have taken to a teacher in the local school. Yulia, a determined woman like her mother, quickly made up her mind. She got engaged to Danylo.
 
When she heard that he might be conscripted, she went a step further. She married him, hoping to make a difference. It did not make a difference. Danylo was forced to join the army and went to the front. When he returned three years later, Yulia thought it was time for her to return to the bosom of her parents, along with her husband. Danylo too was eager to begin a new career in the new land. But they found that Yulia’s parents could not sponsor Danylo’s immigration, because they had never formally become US citizens. They had to wait another two years before they could finally land in New York’s giant immigration gateway in Ellis Island.
 
Five years later, Danylo and Yulia were finally a legitimate American couple, working decent jobs in retail stores and renting a modest apartment in Bronx. They were happy. Their happiness became complete when they had a healthy son, Artem.
 
Artem, a bright but shy boy, finished his school with distinction and chose Syracuse as his university, notable enough in reputation and close enough to his parents in Big Apple. Now he sits expectantly in the dingy room next to the chemical lab, as other Ukrainian students trickle in. 

And then the miracle happens.
 
In walks the world’s most beautiful woman. Or so it seems to Artem.
 
Yana too has arrived at this magical moment by a winding road. A dangerous and highly circuitous road.
 
Her grandparents lived in a tiny suburb of Kyiv, near the edge of Dnieper river, which had been devastated by wartime hardship and had decided to flee Ukraine rather than face the expected Soviet rule. They had gone west, past Lviv, after trudging endless miles and passing the frontier, to enter Hungary. Their daugher, Yulyana, could not walk anymore and they planned to take a train.
 
As they waited, the siren went on and the three of them took shelter in a primitive bomb shelter next to the train station. A train station was a prized target and the two Allied bombers struck home. The shelter was smashed to smithereens, the grandparents were both wounded, and their girl was lost in the wreckage. They started digging in the debris with their hands. When the others in the shelter understood what they were searching for, in spite of the language barrier, they too started digging and finally they found the half-dead girl under the fallen beams.
 
Some of the men who spoke German begged a retreating truck of German soldiers for help. The soldiers agreed to take the Ukrainian family and promised to get them some medical help. The Germans dropped the family in a town the next day and the grandparents at first did not know where they were. They realized eventually that they had been dropped off at a monastery. The monks gave first aid to the couple and treated their daughter. When the monks realized that the couple had nowhere to go and were afraid to return to their homestead in Ukraine, they offered a job to the grandfather of looking after the grounds and the grandmother a scullery maid’s position in the kitchen.
 
There they remained for five years. When, quite accidentally, a senior monk mentioned his friendship with a Dominican priest in New York, the grandfather expressed his interest, for he had heard of the inflow of immigrants in the new country. Six months later, their passage paid by the monks, the family arrived in Boston, on their way to a shelter in Brooklyn.
 
The couple found jobs in the public transport system, and the girl, Yulyana, grew up strong and healthy. She studied and worked at part-time jobs, went to college for two years and then dropped out, to marry a young professor, whom she detested initially, for he was Polish, but eventually came to admire and love. They had a bright and brilliant daughter, Yana, who, to her parents’ great pride, had no difficulty getting admission in Syracuse University.
 
Yana did not expect to meet Ukrainians in Syracuse, but she has come to the meeting, mostly out of curiosity, for she has heard many stories of Ukraine from her mother. And, now, here is a young, good-looking man introducing himself as Artem and gaping at her face.

​She smiles. She smiles a lot more when they date the following week. And the week after.
 
Fifty years later, they are still married, and they live a hundred yards from my home.
 
Yana still has a radiant smile. Artem still likes to see it every morning. They are still glad that their paths, however circuitous, miraculously crossed. 

When I was a kid, my parents complained that I occupied the bathroom for a long time. My brother, with his gift for hyperbole, would say, “If he enters the bathroom now, we will not see him until tomorrow.” He must have passed on the idea to his wife when he married, for I remember getting a birthday card from her twenty years later that pointedly quoted from Martin Luther’s diary, “The more you wash, the dirtier you get.”

​I am sorry to report that neither the complaints nor the sarcasm had the intended effect of reforming my behavior. I continue to tarry in the bathroom. I simply love the place. Buddhadev Basu wrote a charming essay years ago explaining why the bathroom was his favored place. He said that was the spot where he felt the most untroubled, immune from others’ demands. Nobody could reach him; family members hesitated to knock on the door. He was totally free of the world. To my family’s annoyance, I read the essay aloud to them after dinner.

​I don’t quite have the same problem. I live alone in a three-story home, where there are two bathrooms, and, in addition, what Americans call, two ‘half bathrooms,’ that is, bathrooms without a shower. I am never in the way of a guest or a visitor who feels an irresistible urge. Yet Basu had a point. Once you close the bathroom door, you have a world of your own, private and peaceful. Whatever mansion or hovel you live in, that remains a reassuring refuge.

A neighbor across the street, a widower, lives with his brother. The brother lost his job and his apartment, and came to live with his sibling – temporarily. That temporary period has now extended to seven years and looks certain to continue. My neighbor, though clearly very fond of his brother, has a recurrent theme in his conversation: he does not have a space to himself. He cannot speak on a phone, sure that he will not be overheard. He cannot be in a room, sure that his brother will not walk in. He dreams of the day he can again have his space to himself, though the prospect seems unlikely.

I have all the space I need to myself, in fact much more than that. Having grown up in India, where people live in smaller houses with smaller rooms, I have a recurrent sense of guilt for wasting so much space. I know I will be content with a smaller, one-level apartment, where all I need is an independent study or office. But, even in that smaller lodging, I would prefer two bathrooms, so that I don’t have to share it with a visitor. I would like the unhurried use of my bathroom behind a firmly closed door.

​My family, including my sister-in-law, was quite right: I shower for a long time. I thrill to the abundant sprinkling of modern shower heads, where you can regulate the volume and power of the water jets. I confess I am not yet used to the more modern types where the water jets come at you at various levels in different angles. I am sure they are very hygienic and serve to massage distinct parts of the body. My world-weary body is not yet accustomed to this cutting-edge innovation.

 I am guiltily aware that I use more water than I need to clean myself. UNICEF tells me that one billion people in the world don’t have access to clean water. At least I am not using the large bathtub in my other bathroom. I have used it sometimes, but the long ritual of filling it with warm water, putting in bath salt and immersing myself, while refreshing, is not for my everyday routine. I like the simplicity of a dial or a couple of faucets, and the next moment you are delightfully drenched from head to toe in warm water. 

In Japan, I was impressed by the practice of scrubbing and cleaning oneself before getting into the bath, which is really for relaxing. I use the shower for both, first for cleaning and then for relaxing in the warmth of flowing water. I follow the Japanese in another way: I turn up the water heat once I have showered for a while. It is supposed burn calories, reduce blood pressure and strengthen the heart. Whether you believe that or not, you cannot question what I immediately feel after a warm bath like that. It dramatically lifts my spirits and blows away my blues. I am glad to pay a little more for my water bills if it gives me this quick track to euphoria.

There are records of people taking a bath since 3000 BCE, and the Greeks and Romans had both public baths and private bathrooms, at least in the wealthier homes. Clearly the private ones were for cleaning and resting, while the public ones were for relaxing and chatting. From the sixteenth century, public baths went out of fashion, but the Japanese were smart and kept their wonderful sento and onsen. I loved the onsen in Chiba, though the locals clearly did not like that, unlike the Japanese, I had not waxed my bodily hair before immersing. Nor did they care for my daughter’s large tattoo.
 
My children may laugh at my long shower and my beloved sister-in-law may continue to send me sardonic notes. I tell myself that Homer’s heroes took baths to gain strength before a major encounter. The great Achilles’s mother Thetis bathed him in river Styx to make him invincible; sadly, she held him by his heel, which remained vulnerable. I too am vulnerable, very vulnerable, and not just in the heel.
 
But if I must have a room to myself, it has to be the bathroom.

For a couple of weeks, I was a house guest of the Shuklas in the California bay area. I am a poor guest, disorganized and forgetful. But Shubha treated me like a prince, making every comfort a certainty and every meal a gift to relish. Shiv took a day off from his hectic business schedule and offered to take me to any out-of-city site I wanted to see. I opted for the Asian Art Museum, famous for its collection of Sikh and Madhubani art and its ancient Buddha statue, excavated from Sultanganj when rail lines were being laid.
 
We had a wonderful leisurely trip, enjoying sights on the way. When we arrived at the museum we found out what we hadn’t checked in the website: it was closed that Tuesday. We were crestfallen; I was deeply disappointed, knowing I may not again have the chance to come there. As we wondered what we could do, we noticed a sign a few hundred yards away. A tea garden. We sauntered in.
 
It was a most astounding discovery. It was an oasis in the middle of a bustling city.

During the World Fair of 1894, as a part of the International Expo, a Japanese tea garden was built in the Golden Gate Park in California. It is the oldest public Japanese garden in the US, masterfully landscaped, three acres of plant, water and rocks clearly inspired by Buddhist and Shinto themes. When the Fair ended, in agreement with the city masters, Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese emigré and professional gardener, designed and modified the temporary exhibit into a permanent tea garden and became its official caretaker.
 
He looked after the garden for thirty years. He poured his money and passion into creating a garden of utmost perfection. He tripled the size of the garden and imported from Japan plants, birds and koi fish. He even secured the ornamental wooden gate of the Japanese pavilion when the 1915 Panama Pacific International Expo closed. After he died, his daughter Takano Hagiwara and her children scrupulously maintained the garden.

Shamefully, anti-Japanese feelings gripped the country during World War II, and Takano and her family were evicted from their home. They were shipped, along with 10,000 innocent Americans of Japanese origin, to a internment camp. Even when the war ended, the Hagiwaras were not allowed to return to their home or paid any compensation. Reportedly, their home was destroyed, along with a precious Shinto shrine. Rabid authorities even renamed the garden as an ‘Oriental’ tea garden. Much later, a plaque made by Ruth Asawa, known for her elegant metal sculptures, was placed in acknowledgement of the Hagiwara family’s remarkable contribution.

I did not know any of this when I walked into the garden. I confess that I am not fond of most gardens. They seem nurtured in blatant defiance of architect Mies van der Rohe’s classic principle of Less is More. People seem to stuff all the plants and flowers they like in a terrain, where everything looks crowded and the onlooker is overwhelmed rather than pleased. What a different impression this garden made on me! 

Everything was in its rightful place and everything seemed just perfect. There was unspeakable elegance in its delicacy and economy. The garden had a network of several pathways, each thoughtfully dispersed. There were arched drum bridges, charming pagodas, cherry blossom trees and serene koi ponds. There were native Japanese plants all over, with a tranquil zen garden. The artistic configuration of rocks and water provided a calm ambience. The grass and stonework and waterfalls completed the picture. The bonsai trees offered a gentle finishing touch.

I stood there. Ambled a short while. And stood again. It was electrifying in the speed with which the garden took away your cares and concerns. I just stood there and breathed peace. I felt at peace with the world. There was balance and flow everywhere in that quiet scene.
 
We walked some more, and then walked over, fittingly, to the tea house. I ordered the matcha set, which includes matcha tea that is served in the tea ceremony and the red bean paste daifuku. The matcha, brewed in the traditional concentrated way had a mildly bitter taste and exactly matched the sweet daifuku. Others had jasmine, hojicha, sencha and iced green tea along with rice cakes kuzumochi and bean paste pancakes dorayaki.

​Then we walked out of the quiet Japanese dream in the heart of San Francisco.
 
I suddenly remembered that was quite the feeling I had when I sat, silently, in the sanctuary of the Kopan monastery in Nepal, waiting to see the Rimpoche. I was at peace even before I met him. On the way out, I read a Tibetan proverb.
 
It said: To live well and long, eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.

I waited at the Mayakovskaya metro station for a long time.
 
Galina never turned up.
 
​I had landed in Saint Petersburg on a whim. I had work in Moscow, but it ended earlier than I imagined. Nothing important waited for me in Washington. I bought a ticket online and boarded the train for Saint Petersburg.
 
I had successfully located a copy of New York Times, the only daily I considered worth reading, in a Moscow newsstand, and now was a good time to read it. I had hardly reached the fifth page when there was an interruption. In a curious accent.
 
“Excuse me,” said the person sitting next to me, pointing to the other sections of the voluminous newspaper on my lap.
 
“You read English!” I said in surprise, redundantly, before adding, “By all means.” I passed her the bulk of the paper.
 
Now I noticed, for the first time, the person seated beside me. A young woman, in a yellow summer dress, her chestnut hair in a casual bun, a large black bag perched on her lap.
 
“You will ask these sections when you finish your section, right?” she asked. I nodded.

I hadn’t read much of the troubles in South Sudan and Nicaragua before there was another gentle interruption, “Excuse me?”
 
She wanted me to explain something in the science section about gene therapy. My science is worse than basic, and on medical innovations my ignorance is abysmal. I read the part that eluded her and tried to throw some light.
 
I must have said something stupid, for she laughed. It was a gentle, quickly-smothered laugh, but the meaning wasn’t lost on me. I confessed to being lost amid such therapeutic wizardry, when she divulged that she was a doctor. A pediatrician, with a special interest in medical oncology.
 
That is how our conversation started. By the time we arrived in Saint Petersburg, four hours later, we were friends. Galina was her name.
​
We had a wonderful stretch of two days in a city that I loved. Saint Petersburg is a charming city, redolent of history and studded with beautiful edifices. The companionship was even more charming. In spite of the fact that her English was limited and my Russian non-existent.
 
She had taken leave from her hospital, but told me that if an emergency came up, she could be called and she would leave. She had added firmly that her patients had to come first – always. Fortunately, no emergency occurred.

For two days she was the ideal guide for a charming city. She was knowledgeable, she knew the town inside out. And she loved it, its little streets and gorgeous palaces, its winding canals and soaring towers, its busy boats and charming, ubiquitous cafés. She was tireless, trying to show me all that I should see and admire, and fall in love with whatever she already loved. My legs would give way, but not her enthusiasm. With a stop for a quick aperitif, she would guide me to the next museum, the next fountain, the next historic site.

​I am a museum buff and have seen plenty of them, but thanks to her I saw the Hermitage in a new light, as almost a cavalcade of world art, and the Peter and Paul fortress as a living, vibrant site of survival. We talked as we walked, and she herself came alive in a way I had least expected. Her father, a police officer, had died during a temporary stint in Chechnya. Her mother, now purblind, lived in the countryside, with an older sister. Her two brothers both served in the army. She shared an apartment with an elderly couple, but spent most of her time in the hospital, where too she had a place in a dormitory. Though she loved St Petersburg, her dream was to relocate to the other end of Russian and work in a reputed children’s clinical hospital in Khabarovsk.
 
Then, unexpectedly, she narrated the story of a fire that had broken out in a children’s school in her village to the north of St Petersburg and how, as an untrained student volunteer, she had assisted the young local doctor trying to save the burnt children. Some died of smoke inhalation, but the others died painfully of their burns. She never forgot the young doctor’s futile effort to save the children and his agonized remark that he had neither the resources nor the training to save the ones that could have been saved. That was when she resolved to be a pediatrician. She struggled relentlessly to gather the money for her tuition, until the lucky day she won a government scholarship.
 
On my last night we took a boat ride along the Neva river and the many canals of the city. It was spectacular, for the many remarkable homes, palaces and historic buildings are on the embankments, often lit up gloriously in the summer nights. The day had been warm, but the evening was cool, made cooler by the river breeze. I saw her copper hair flying in the breeze, and, at one time, put out a hand to catch her scarf that was about to fly away. It was a wonderful leisurely voyage.
 
Our time together had run out. I thanked her, and she hugged me. I was about to say goodbye, but she said she would come the next morning to meet me in front of the Mayakovskaya metro station, near my hotel, whence I intended to leave for the airport.
 
I waited at the station expectantly. I wanted to see Galina again.
 
I waited and waited. Galina did not come.
 
Maybe she had an emergency or a patient that had to come first.

​In the tiny Buryati town of Okinski in eastern Siberia, 2500 miles from Moscow, nobody had heard of ballet or Bolshoi. For sure Misha hadn’t. Nor had his mother, Alina. But, working three jobs, mostly cleaning, to make ends meet, she knew this: she simply hadn’t the means to educate her bright son. Misha seemed bright to her. And nimble too. He did well in the games he played with other kids. He kept playing and appeared tireless. That gave her an idea.
 
She had heard that a team from Moscow came periodically to Ulan Ude, the area capital, to choose small children, eight to ten, who were then trained at government expense. She borrowed money and bought train tickets for both. Misha wasn’t keen on education, so she told him about a selection for gymnastics. In Ulan Ude, in the two large halls of a public school, there were about sixty kids with their expectant parents and three somber-looking male judges.
 
When Misha met the judges in a separate room, his mother waiting outside, they wasted little time. Strip and show your body. Sing a song and show you can hold a tune. Bend forward as far as you, then bend backward. Sit on the ground and spread your legs as far as you can. When a judge spread his legs further and it ached, Misha didn’t complain, for he wanted to be a good gymnast. When the judge tried his arms next, roughly pushing them backward, he still kept his cool. The judges gave his mother the good news. He was one of the seven selected for training in Moscow.

​Misha arrived in Moscow a chilly September morning with a small suitcase, that contained his entire wardrobe of three shirts and pants and a small package of pancakes Alina had prepared for the trip that Misha was too excited to eat. A grave, elderly man took him to a large building and placed him in a room with seven other newcomers. That was the first time he heard that it was a school for ballet.

Early the next day the lessons began. They were harsh and unremitting. About eighty students from all parts of the country, assembled in a large hall, were trained rigorously by five instructors. They gave no respite and made the kids work steadily for five hours. The first priority was to develop the dancer’s technique. That entailed having the correct posture, increase flexibility and gain strength, all the while learning the arcane vocabulary of ballet. Misha, like every other student, struggled and sweated; he was ordered to change clothes every couple of hours. After a midday half-hour break, to rest and eat a light meal, he had to return for another grueling afternoon session.

​This continued day after day, week after week. Within two months, half the students dropped off, and in six months, the number halved again. Misha thought of leaving sometimes, but he knew of no better alternative. Truth to speak, he found a new instinct sprouting in him. He felt he could take the pain, perhaps a lot better than many others. He almost felt a little proud of the amount of physical pain and mental humiliation he could take and survive. I can do it, he said to himself, whatever you say to me and however hard you make my life. I will do it, became his mantra, I will do it to the end.

Misha did it indeed. He stuck through it all for ten years. From simple pirouettes, linking steps, large poses and endless barre exercises, he graduated to higher and higher levels of skill and mastery. He stunned his instructors with his doggedness, his stamina and eventually the subtlety of his performance. On the chief instructor’s recommendation, on graduation he went for further training and experience to Kirov, one of the greatest institutions.
 
“Twelve years had passed since I left Buriyatia and my mother’s home, for perhaps the cruelest internship one can imagine for a kid. Finally I was now sensing the first inkling of approval and success,” said Misha, as he poured me a glass of beer.
 
I had met him through common friends and Misha had graciously invited me for dinner. I loved his warm hospitality, but I loved his story even more.

“All this had happened without a clear plan on my part,” Misha continued, “I just went along with what my mother wanted at first. I hated her for my initial days of agony. It took me a long time to realize she wanted something good for me, though she did not know what it could be. Now it was time that I should form my own plan. I started thinking.”
 
Luckily, he found that Buriyatia’s ballet troupe had the opening for the principal dancer. He called and expressed his interest. There was some hesitation, for among the local dancers some had waited five to seven years for such an opening. But Misha was a star, and the troupe could not let him go. 

​So, fourteen years after he had left the area, Misha returned to Buriyatia, spurning the opportunities he might had in Moscow. His goal was to make the local troupe as good as it could be, whatever it took in terms of time and effort.
 
“I came back to my mother’s modest home. I returned to the same tiny room I had lived in years earlier. I had left the klieg lights of the big city, in order to build something worthwhile in my home town. I was still a star, but a star of a very different kind.
 
“I was once again a son, the son of an aging mother. She could not work as hard as she had worked earlier. Now it was my turn to work harder and be the dutiful son.
 
“I felt happy. I also felt at peace with myself.”
 
The beer in his glass sparkled. His face seemed lit up.

For a fairly law-abiding citizen, I have been behind bars more than most people. The experience has been scintillating.

I met Gabriel who came for hiking in the Himalayas, loved the superb hashish he could buy for a trifling sum and bought the large stash that made him fit the definition of a trader in local law; he became an indefinite guest of the prison authorities. Or Jeannie, who also tried some marijuana that was unfortunately laced by the vendor with some PCP, had a violently negative reaction, and acted dangerously unstable on the street; she was sent to prison instead of to a hospital. I spent time with them both, and many more like them. Usually I counseled them, got them a good lawyer and tried to help in other ways.

As a United States consul, I was responsible for American citizens who were in jail in a foreign land. I knew, by talking with colleagues, that many consuls could not care less for jailed Americans. Like most people, they assumed that people who were put behind bars belonged there. They deserved their sentence.
 
My inclination was different. I felt I had a clearer idea of the justice system in most lands. I had read Camus and Koestler and had the interest to find out the way capital punishment operates in many countries. Rich, resourceful criminals are almost never executed. It is the poor, who belong to a backward or minority group, who are hanged, injected with poison or killed more slowly in soul-killing confinement. 

For lesser crimes, as in civil cases, the balance tilts even more egregiously in favor of the well-heeled. Get good lawyers, get well-paid specialists and investigators, and you can go scot-free even if you drive over sleeping people in a drunken spree. In advanced countries as much as in the less advanced, as Harold Lasky said long ago, there is a law for the rich and a law for the poor. Justice is blind, not because it is impartial but because it does not want to see.

One has to be unusually naïve or foolish to imagine that the people in jail are all bad and the people outside are all good. In the country where I was assigned, I knew also that the quality of marijuana was very good and the cost very low. It was tempting for American tourists to not only buy and smoke, but also buy and take home. That was when they got caught. Few seemed to care that they were behind bars for months when they should have been living a productive life outside.

As long as bad laws remained on statute books and punishment was used to exact a pound of flesh and not to rehabilitate wrong-doers, sham justice will be the rule rather than the exception in most countries.
 
I took the part of my work that related to prisoners very seriously. I set up a routine of monthly or bi-weekly visit to the prison, read up in advance about the prisoners’ background and case history, and even took vitamin tablets or preferred cereals for the American prisoners. 

​My intentions were twofold. I wanted to demonstrably underline the human dignity of those prisoners. They were not human refuse, but valuable beings who had made mistakes and were paying a price, sometimes an unreasonably high price for their mistakes. They deserved to be regarded as human beings, their human pains and needs should be addressed.
 
My other object was to underline the uncompromising nature of human rights that every person, in all circumstances, was entitled to. It was far beyond my power to guarantee it to every person, but by insisting on overtly displaying it to American prisoners I hoped to generate a broader awareness of among the entire prison population. I knew I had created some talk, when the prison wardens spoke of their surprise and sometimes even changed the way they treated their wards. The corporal punishment that prison authorities inflict on their hapless wards is an abomination, and I was glad that I could persuade some of them to acknowledge their error and try to work in a more humane way.
 
I reflect on the hours I spent behind prison walls as a great learning experience. Learning of others’ pain is one of the better ways, I believe, to remain determinedly human.

On a pleasant summer day, in a charming little hotel on Ulitsa Stremyannaya in Saint Petersburg, I met Philippe and Elvira Bonnenfant. I was sipping a second espresso after breakfast in the hotel café when Elvira asked if she could join my table. Elvira is from Kyrgyzstan, at one time a part of USSR. Philippe is a Frenchman, who represented an international seeds company in Eastern Europe. Now they both live in Russia. They are a charming couple and I believe we will stay in touch.
 
I said to Philippe that he must have had an interesting life, moving from western Europe to the USSR and then living through the turbulent transition from the communist behemoth to the quick-changing Russian Federation. He modestly replied that his life indeed hadn’t been dull, but it was nothing compared to that of his father, Roger Bonnenfant. Intrigued, I wanted to hear the story of his father. It was a truly a strange story and a heart-warming one.

Roger was only 22 when patriotic fervor made him join the French army. With a resurgent Germany next door, there was fearful anticipation hardly two years later. Hitler launched his invasion of western Europe in May 1940. Just six weeks later France fell. On June 22 the French surrendered and signed an armistice. Roger was taken a prisoner of war.

With hundreds of other POW’s he was shipped to Germany, to serve the German industrial war machine. Roger was sent to Heidenheim an der Brenz, a town in Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, a prison camp high up in the Swabian mountains near Stuttgart. Six days in the week he would be taken in a van with other prisoners twenty miles south, to work in a machine tools factory in Ulm.
 
It was in Ulm that he met Gerhard Schneider, a supervisor in the factory. Gerhard was an unusual man himself. He was a world-class athlete, who had survived despite his open contempt for the Nazis only because of his legendary reputation as a ski champion. His youthful idealism had prompted him once to visit the emerging socialist paradise of USSR, where he had been interrogated and detained on suspicion, but he had escaped. Incredibly, he would hide himself during the day and ski at night to elude the Russian authorities and reach freedom.
 
Gerhard treated Roger kindly and got to know him better. On the excuse that he needed a worker to do some chores in his home, he even succeeded in getting Roger to come to his house periodically and meet his wife, Emilia. The couple took pity on Roger and hatched an incredible plan. A plan for Roger to escape.

They took Roger’s measurements and had some rustic German-style clothes made for him. Roger would not survive on the roads for a day in the prisoner’s uniform that he was required to don day and night. Roger did not know a word of German earlier. They tutored him in common German words, so that he could answer strangers’ questions without arousing suspicion. In contravention of wartime rules, they fed Roger wholesome food, so he could regain his health for the tough adventure. He had already lost considerable weight on a prisoner’s meager diet. It also meant he had to make his escape attempt soon, before he became ill or more feeble for lack of nutrition.
 
Roger did not have many choices. The Reich had gobbled up large parts of Europe, including his country. He could not go home. His only chance was to reach neutral Switzerland. His plan, hatched with advice from Gerhard and Emilia, was to reach the southernmost town of Konstanz, on the border of Lake Constance, and then try to reach Basel across the border.

​He started off from Heidenheim on a moonless night. He shed his prison garbs, wore the outfit the Schneiders had suggested and carried the other set of clothes and some rations they had given in a modest bag. It was a long, arduous trek on unfamiliar roads, with the danger of being reported or caught at every turn. He had to look nondescript, avoid attention and buy food with the money Gerhard had given him only when he was insufferably hungry. Once, almost within sight of Konstanz, somebody reported him as suspicious and the local police detained him for a night, but he was able to escape before morning and further interrogation.
 
Once in Basel, he had no way to inform the Schneiders of the success of their common plan. Three years later, when the war ended, Roger was finally able to do the two things he had long yearned to do: tell Gerhard and Emilia that he had survived and return home to Paris. In five months, he was able to do more. He arrived in Ulm and hugged Gerhard and Emilia.
 
For years after that the Bonnenfants – for Roger had married and had his first child, Philippe – always visited Germany for their vacation and the Schneiders in turn visited France for holidays. Philippe was very young when he first saw Ulm, but he remembers being told that his first word as a baby was a German word rather than French. The two families remained closer than blood relations, and the children grew up as virtual cousins.
 
I had to agree with Philippe that his father had had a more exciting life, fulfilling as well as exciting.

There I was, in blue-gray hospital garbs, standing next to a bed and watching my daughter being born. Lina landed with a piercing scream. I kissed Jane, now exhausted after hours of labor, and waited and watched as they cleaned the baby. Then she, a messy little bundle, was ours. Ours to hold and cherish.

Being a boy, I have not had a doll in my younger days. Now was my turn to play with a doll. For Lina was a doll. A plump, smiling doll, forever fidgeting, then forever crawling, then forever running around the house. Those little legs, I couldn’t believe how much running they could do. We had to set up wooden barriers, otherwise she would crawl up the stairs or crawl down to the basement in a second.
 
The living room, dining room, kitchen, sun room, bathroom, were all her preserve. She explored, probed, touched, pushed, even tasted everything. Given half a chance, she would have dust on her feet, flour on her hands and the hand towels from the privy on her neck. None could stop her. If I said, “Lina, you shouldn’t do this,” she just smiled and did it all the same.
 
One time I was changing her clothes, and went to look in a drawer for something, and Lina ran pell-mell through the living room, through a front door left carelessly ajar, out on the front yard. A lawyer friend, passing by on the street, frowned disapprovingly, seeing a naked child on the yard, and then laughed, seeing me pursuing the child frantically, realizing what might have happened.
 
Four years later, a shorter replay in Manila, when we rushed to the hospital just in time, for Monica to emerge, quickly, impatiently, into our arms. A different city and a different house, but I felt again I was playing with a doll. A smaller but naughtier girl, just as spirited, just as fun, running around, laughing, singing, dancing. Jane and I had started as a quiet couple, working long hours, coming home to a plain but placid dinner table. Now, suddenly, there were two pretty girls, creating drama and excitement out of nothing, making sure that the pedestrian concerns of their dad were blown away, replaced by the thrill of planning the next weekend with them.

I remember taking Lina to see a charming play, Peter Pan, and for the next three days hearing her hum the signature tune, “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up.” I thought it was a marvelous idea. She could continue to add joy and uproar to my home. Alas, daughters do grow up and their fathers have to give up the dream of playing ever with dolls.
 
They grow up, go to college, take a job and even get married.
 
I am happy for them, but the void in my home is never going to be filled. I love the quiet of my home, the still night and gentle daybreak, the chance to read in peace, think in silence and write without interruption. But I still miss the tinkling of unprovoked girlish laughter and the unexpected momentary touch of a casual kiss. I just miss my daughters.
 
I make a cup of coffee in the morning just the way I like it, robust and fragrant. But as I sip it and watch the glistening east, I say to myself, “Why the devil don’t they phone me?” Then I reassure myself, “They can’t, because they are rushing to their office now.” If the call doesn’t come in the evening either, I tell myself, “They must be braving the evening traffic now, trying to get back home.” I know I expect too much. If they call me once a week, I will want them to call twice; if they call twice, I will want them to call every day. If they did that too, perhaps I will long to hear from them both morning and evening. No, there is no limit to my longing, my unceasing, unreasonable yearning for a lost connection.
 
I look at their pictures and wonder when did they grow so big, so important, so responsible for so many things. How did they ever learn to do all those things they do in their office and in their home? What, in Heaven’s name, do they cook for their husbands and their friends, and how did they learn to cook all that? Just the other day they were the little girls who ran from one room to another, talked about things in whispers and, when I asked, said, “Dad, these are girl things. You won’t understand.”

​Indeed, there are lots of things I don’t understand. There are huge, hunkering things in life that demand my attention, politics, trade, literature, music, technology and climate change. I love to read my favorite columnists, skim foreign newspapers in French and Spanish, call business colleagues and professional friends. Why, then, should my unyielding heart long to hear those girls’ voices every day and why do I pester them with pointless calls at odd hours?
 
I miss them. Unreasonably and unremittingly, I miss them. They did not let me play with dolls because I was a boy. When I grew up I loved playing with living dolls. I still long to play with dolls.

She was a striking person. The oversize, old-fashioned glasses gave her an academic look, but her brisk, almost brusque, manner might suggest a commercial representative, out for a deal. That impression was belied in turn by the unusual clothes she affected: the long loose outfit she claimed to have been inspired by a Lebanese designer.
 
Of middle height, she walked with an amazingly long stride. She spoke with her hands; those were perpetually whirling in mid-air. Yet, for all her ebullience, her voice was soft and soothing. Yes, that voice is my strongest recollection of her. That and her occasional whimsical, staccato messages from all corners of the globe.
 
An enterprising journalist, she had reported extensively from Mexico, and later from Honduras and Costa Rica. Lately she had been on the trail of drug routes and had filed disturbing reports that had drawn interest and admiration. She wanted to follow up and found a way to be assigned to Colombia. After the first few weeks in and around Bogotá, she ended up, like others before her, in Medellin. She used her excellent Castilian to gain
the credence of villagers in the countryside and the residents of the poorest barrios.
 
Then she disappeared.

​The disappearance of a young western reporter, even in what Time had once called the crime capital of the world, drew some attention. I was sure she would reappear in a week or two and send me a cryptic message as usual. No such message came. In fact, nothing happened for weeks beyond idle speculation. Then two youngsters who had strayed in the woods reported a stench from an abandoned hut. The police took some time to check, doubtless because the report was from slum kids. The body was far too decomposed for detailed analysis, but the investigators decided that she had been stabbed and left to die. It was declared a case of robbery and murder, despite the fact that her small apartment in the city had also been rifled and cleaned of all papers and notebooks. There the matter rested, though some of her colleagues tried for a more thorough probe. In vain. The file was closed after a year or two.
 
When I returned to the US six months later, I had an acute sense of unfinished business. I knew her parents were divorced, but I hoped one of them might have some information. I made a special trip to New York to see her father, who worked in the school system as a bus driver. I met him on a Saturday morning, reeking of beer, and he kept asking why I was so interested in his daughter’s fate. The explanation that I was a friend seemed insufficient to him. I had to leave after an hour without gathering much. Her mother lived in a Maryland suburb and it was a long but easy drive to her place. Though a Canadian citizen, her Latvian accent shone through, and she appreciated my admiration for her only child. She said that the local consulate, at her urging, had pressed the government for a thorough inquiry, but it hadn’t yielded more than some peripheral information. A few local miscreants had been rounded up and interrogated, but none had been indicted. The inquiry had simply stalled.
 
When I returned to Washington, I checked with friends and erstwhile colleagues, but soon realized that I was walking up a blind alley. Her life had ended, brutally and tragically, and nothing more was to be expected on the how or why of that end. One could only speculate that she had, perhaps boldly and rashly, as was her wont, entered on a search that some unknown others thought perilous. They had then decided that the search should end.
 
I came back home, disappointed, with a sense of defeat.

​I felt I was the only one who cared that a lively and fascinating young woman had disappeared from the world, without a word and or a trace. Not even a shred of a report, that could tell us anything about the byways of the drug trade or strategies of a cartel. She was simply gone. This was the end.
 
It wasn’t.
 
The following weekend I was looking through her messages and letters, when I suddenly remembered a small package she had sent me when she first arrived in Bogotá. She knew of my interest in Chilean poetry. The package contained a well-known book of poems. Leisurely I turned the pages. Maybe I hoped, desperately, that I would find a little note inside that I had overlooked. No, there was no note.
 
But, as I was about to close the book, I suddenly noticed, practically at the end, a few lines she had underlined that I hadn’t noticed earlier (I am using Donald Walsh’s translation):
 
All that we were bringing like dead medals
We threw to the bottom of the sea
All that we learned was of no use to us
We begin again, we end again
Death and life.
 
Neruda had two lines she hadn’t underlined that came as an uncanny message of solace:
 
We have met
We have lost nothing.

I have an accent.
 
So do Brad Pitt and Queen Elizabeth. And so did Laurence Olivier and Walter Cronkite.
 
There is no person alive who does not have an accent. The way you speak a language, say English, is heavily influenced by your first language, if it is different from English. It is also influenced by where you come from, the level of education you have had, the social or economic class from which you spring, and even possibly the ethnic group to which you belong. We all have accents.
 
When people speak of a person having an accent, they mean, pejoratively, that the person has a non-standard way of speaking a language, whatever the standard is in their mind or that of their audience. Clearly the standard varies sharply. Sir Laurence, who made a great deal of money by bringing his histrionic talent to the other side of the Pacific, did not at all sound like his Queen, and the avuncular newscaster Cronkite, so beloved of Americans, read his daily bulletin in tones very different from Brad Pitt’s.
 
Yet ridicule is poured on the Tamil Indian who has come to work on a network system in Alabama on a H1B visa or the Salvadoreño who has crossed the border from Mexico questing for cleaning jobs in a New Jersey suburb. Even more ridiculous is the superior air with which a person, who has spent some time in Bristol or Boston, looks down on the average denizen of Manila or Mumbai.

​During a short break in a meeting in downtown Washington, I sidestepped into a delicatessen to order a quick sandwich. Before even the Korean server asked, I told her the type of bread, the kind of meat and the assortment of additions I wanted. She didn’t follow. When I repeated my choices, a trifle more clearly, she still did not grasp. I said, “Just make a good sandwich and give it to me, please.”
 
When I sat down to eat, I had a momentary flash of annoyance that a person, whose work is to fashion a sandwich from the ingredients in front of her, should have so much trouble following a simple order. Then I realized that, in a country where live 5o million people for whom English is a second language and in a city where the foreign-born outnumber the native-born 7 to 1, it was I, the customer, who should learn to cope with the limited linguistic skill of a low-wage server.
 
It is well-know that in the US people are discriminated against, in recruitment or in assessment of their work, if they seem to speak with an unfamiliar accent. Routinely, new immigrants are treated unfairly the moment they open their mouth, even if their looks are misleading. Even in jobs where the spoken language is not important, a prejudice against the non-native person masquerades as a bias against the non-native accent.

When I grew up in colonial India, I could understand – though not accept – the parochial preference of British rulers and their lackeys for a certain accent, but, agonizingly, it continued long after the British were ejected from the Indian shores. The tradition has continued. The extraordinary pains some seem to take to cultivate an expatriate accent belies the slipshod standard of their vocabulary and grammar. Accent is a poor predictor of language proficiency, as much as the size of one’s head, which once riveted the bogus science of phrenology, is a pathetic indicator of a person’s intelligence.
 
Of course, we want to be understood when we speak. Our intonation of words must bear a reasonable semblance to the expected sound of the words. This has become easier thanks to the internet. You can click on any word in a dictionary and hear the right sound, and you can do so in any major language. But to strive for the correct pronunciation is a far cry from the inane attempt to ape the ‘correct’ accent.

​I learned Asian languages before I left India: Bengali, Sanskrit, Pali and Hindi. Those gave me a broad range of phonetics when I went on to learn French and Spanish, while I saw my American colleagues struggle mightily with the softer sounds of d and t. I feel a curious thrill when I am mistaken for a Hispanic when I converse in Spanish.
 
I learned English in India, including some mispronunciations, but never made the slightest attempt to speak like my English colleagues. Later, I was equally loath to pick up the midwestern accent most current in the US. My effort was, as ever in every language, to learn it well, use it with elegance and precision. That effort has not ended. It never will. I admire EM Forster and EB White, but I try to write in my own way, battling to find my own idiom.
 
Getting some preferred accent I believe to be a fool’s errand, unless one works in a call center or aspires to an elevated social status. I have no desire to seem superior to anybody else. A large part of my work involved making presentations to groups, big and small, and I never experienced blank looks. Nobody complained that I was unintelligible; rather, some complimented me on my clarity. That to me was more important than being noted for an Oxbridge accent or taken for a Boston brahmin.