On Friday, 26 January 2001, at 08.46 local time, an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 shook North-Western India. We had left for our country home and did not feel the tremors that scared Bombay residents. Near the epicenter at least twenty-thousand people have died. The economic damage runs into billions. The after-shocks continue.

My bathroom shelf is a mini-library. There I keep old books I might want to re-read, and this is how I found Romain Gary’s Promise at Dawn. This book was published in Great Britain in 1962 and I must have read it soon after.