In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and … - V. S. Naipaul

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. … How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. … It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. … But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged.

I had talked of Raymond's pain when I was thinking of my own, and Yvette had talked of Raymond's needs when was thinking of her won. We had begun to talk, if not in opposites, at least indirectly, lying and not lying, making those signals at the truth which people in certain situations find it necessary to make.