Where Some Things are Remembered : Profiles and Conversations

‘Shortly after Mrs Gandhi was defeated | in March 1977 | my wife | Leela | and I went to see her in New Delhi… Mrs Gandhi sat in a large chair | her feet curled up under her. “Thank you for coming |” she said. “I’m sorry the house is so disorganised | but I’m supposed to move soon.” She looked terrible | worse than I had ever seen her even when as prime minister she followed her father’s habit of working eighteen hours a day.’ Dom Moraes was not only one of the finest poets of the twentieth century | he was also an extraordinary journalist and essayist. He could capture effortlessly the essence of the people he met | and in every single profile in this sparkling collection he shows how it is done. The Dalai Lama laughs with him and Mother Teresa teaches him a lesson in empathy. Moraes could make himself at home with Laloo Prasad Yadav | the man who invented the selffulfilling controversy | and he could exchange writerly notes with the novelist and intellectual Sunil Gangopadhyaya. He was Indira Gandhi’s biographer— painting her in defeat | post Emergency | and in triumph | when she returned to power. He tried to fathom the mind of a mysterious ‘super cop’—K.P.S. Gill—and also of Naxalites | dacoits and ganglords. This collection is literary journalism at its finest—from an observer who saw people and places with the eye of a poet and wrote about them with the precision of a surgeon.