‘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.