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While working on the penultimate draft of this book, I had the good fortune to have two perceptive readers, Jayashree Nambiar and Priya Vijayaraghavan, to look through the draft and make suggestions. I had this help from Jayashree for my last book also, but Priya is someone whom I had never met or even spoken to on the phone. She had sent me an email a couple of years back commenting on my previous books, and we have been in touch with each other on and off by email since then. When I finished the draft of this book I requested her to read through it, and she readily agreed.

It is important for a writer to have his text checked by a discerning reader, for quite often what is crystal clear to the writer is confusing to the reader. In this I was blessed with having the comments of Jayashree and Priya.

On the publisher’s side, I am grateful to Chiki Sarkar and Paromita Mohanchandra of Penguin for their help and advice. I am also greatly indebted to Meena Bhende, whose meticulous copy editing of my text has been invaluable to me.

A COUPLE OF years ago, when I was working on an early draft of this book, I had a surprise visitor, a close friend of mine of my student days, now a phenomenally successful businesswoman in a faraway country, whom I had not seen for well over forty years. That evening, when we were strolling on the boulevard along the beach in Pondicherry, she asked me to tell her the most moving incident I had come across while researching for this book.

So I told her about Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveller who had spent several years in Delhi in the mid-fourteenth century as a courtier of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq, and was then sent to China by the sultan as his ambassador.

On his way to China, Battuta spent a few months in Maldives, and there, on a tiny island which had just one little mud hut, he came across the only man living there. ‘He had,’ recounts Battuta in his memoirs, ‘a wife and children, a few coco-palms, and a small boat which he used for fishing … The island also had a few banana trees … I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.’

Battuta had over the years moved among some of the richest and most powerful men of the age, but the one person he envied most was this poor, solitary islander.

When I told this story to my friend, her eyes glazed over with tears, and we walked in silence for a while. She was, she then told me, saddened by the many personal sacrifices she had to make in her pursuit of success.

‘Well, every achievement has its price,’ I told her consolingly. ‘No pain, no gain.’

‘And no cliché, no wisdom,’ she rejoined, laughing.

This book is dedicated to that witty and wise long-lost friend of mine.

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2014

Copyright © Abraham Eraly 2014

Cover photograph courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Cover design by Aashim Raj

All rights reserved

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

ISBN: 978-0-670-08718-1

This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18658-8