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Communist Manifesto leaned comfortably on Homer’s Odyssey , and the Bhagavad Gita was wedged in by Translations from the Koran . Just as comfortably inside Dadamoshai’s head lived his thoughts and ideas—separate skeins interwoven with the gentlest compassion and wisdom to form his rich philosophy and outlook on life.
    Boris Ivanov was writing a treatise titled Freedom and Responsibility , a rather obtuse and philosophical work full of difficult arguments. He spent long hours debating ideas with Dadamoshai on the veranda. India was on the cusp of her independence after more than two hundred years of British rule. A great renaissance was sweeping through our nation and many social and educational reforms were under way.
    Many people considered Dadamoshai a great scholar and independent thinker, but others saw him as a blatant anglophile and called him an English bootlicker. He was unabashedly Western in his dress and liberal in his thoughts. He lived frugally and thought deeply. He did not take siestas in the afternoon and cursed fluently in seven languages.
    Dadamoshai believed that women were not given a fair chance in our society, largely due to their lack of education. Why were Indian boys sent to study at the finest universities abroad, he argued, while girls were treated like some flotsam washing in with the river tide?
    Traditionalists accused Dadamoshai of rocking the social order and luring women away from their jobs as homemakers. What good would it do for women to bury their heads in math and science? Or, for that matter, to go around spouting Shakespeare? Pots and pans would grow cold in the kitchen and neglected children would run around the streets like pariah dogs.
    In many ways, Dadamoshai saw me as the poster child for the modern Indian woman. He gave me the finest education and taught me to speak my mind. I was free to forge my own destiny. Sometimes I struggled to stay grounded like a lone river rock in a swirl of social pressures. But in truth, this was the only option I had.
    * * *
    Miss Thompson, my private English tutor, lived in a small primrose cottage behind the Sacred Heart Convent. A spry woman with animated eyes, she had about her a brisk energy that made you sit up and pull in your stomach. Her father, Reginald Thompson, the former District Magistrate of Assam, was Dadamoshai’s predecessor and mentor. Dadamoshai had seen Miss Thompson grow up as a young girl.
    I was Miss Thompson’s first Indian student. Ever since I was seven, I took a rickshaw to her house three days a week. After my lessons, I would walk over to Dadamoshai’s office in the old courthouse where I’d sit and do my homework, surrounded by the clatter of typewriters and the smell of carbon paper until it was time for us both to come home.
    Miss Thompson was a stickler for pronunciation. She made sure I enunciated each word with bell-like clarity with the stress on the right syllable. I learned to say what , where and why accompanied by a small whoosh of breath I could feel on the palm of my hand held six inches from my face. It was Miss Thompson who instilled in me my love for literature. She encouraged me to plumb the depths of Greek tragedy, savor the fullness of Shakespeare, the lyrical beauty of Shelley. As I grew older, I saw less and less of her, until our meetings became just the occasional social visit. She had more Indian students now, she said, thanks to Dadamoshai’s flourishing girls’ school.
    I decided to drop by and see her. She was usually home on Tuesday mornings, I knew. I arrived to find a rickshaw parked outside her gate and an elderly servant woman sitting on the porch. Miss Thompson must be with a student, I imagined. Young girls were never sent out unchaperoned in our society. Dadamoshai, on the other hand, always insisted I go everywhere alone. This raised a few eyebrows in our town. I was about to turn around and walk away when Martha, Miss Thompson’s Anglo-Indian housekeeper of sixty years,