Delhi for me was all about mixing with a crowd that made me intensely uncomfortable and valued me very little for myself. They wanted someone else, not the ME that I was, with all my insanity, my giggles, my sense of the ridiculous, my strange accent and my frankness. So when Asra came into my life, her timing was perfect. She was like me in many ways, could understand what I said and why I said it and had the same craving for affection rather than usefulness. We did not have to talk much to communicate and could spend time laughing about all that was ridiculous, from wavy French fries to Delhi roundabouts to the drunks we dodged at various totally silly parties. She was a serious journalist from the Wall Street Journal; I was trying to make something of my own career on the Internet and beyond. We became friends.
And Asra brought someone into my life that I will never forget, all the sappy sentimentality and resale value attached notwithstanding. She sent me an email one day after she had gone back to the United States, asking me to talk to a friend of hers who couldn’t decide whether to live in Delhi or Mumbai on his posting in India. He, too, was a journalist from WSJ, and a really nice man, with a really nice wife who was a little careful with her English, Asra explained tactfully. And one morning, the man phoned. “Hi, I’m Daniel Pearl,” he introduced himself. Soon after, he was sitting in my living room, asking me questions about India, its culture and the two cities he needed to choose from, his glasses glinting with his enthusiasm, his clean-cut, amazingly young face alight with excitement at a new adventure. Formality and stiff tea drinking fast shifted gear into casual, feet-on-the-sofa friendliness. We had started becoming friends.
Daniel listened to what I had to say very patiently and with a smile on his face as I tried not to play favourites – after all, Mumbai was home for me, and Delhi was hardly a pleasant experience. Eventually, he took a list of telephone contacts from my little red book (with me, it would rarely be black) and left, his first stiff handshake now a warm shoulder hug. Soon after, he emailed me, saying that he and his wife, Mariane, had decided to live in Mumbai and that he would get in touch when they got there. I heard about Daniel from my friends – he had called everyone on the list and endeared himself to most. He liked Mumbai, and the city accepted him and his wife easily into its enormous and friendly fold. He was working hard, enjoying the heat of the city and the warmth of the people and felt comfortable, which perhaps he would not have been able to do in Delhi, he wrote. And I was glad. To me, he was someone I liked, not just for Asra’s sake, but for his own. A few months later, I met Mariane, too, when Daniel brought her to Delhi and out to dinner with me. She was shy, obviously unsure of her linguistic skills, extraordinarily pretty and totally adoring of her husband. They made a good-looking couple, and radiated a quiet contentment that was all about staying home and being a unit.
Daniel kept in touch with me at fairly regular intervals, telling me what he was up to and how Mariane was. It was a casual, friendly, vaguely affectionate correspondence, punctuated by an occasional phone call. Asra formed the third side of the bond between us, and it was a happy relationship all around. And then she moved for a while to Pakistan, the land of her extended family. Daniel and Mariane travelled there. Asra emailed to say they were staying with her and that Daniel was following up on a story lead, interviewing some local people who could tell him more about what was happening in that part of the subcontinent.
The rest, the world knows.
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