Shortly after Mrs Gandhi was defeated, in March 1977, my wife, \nLeela, and I went to see her in New Delhi… Mrs Gandhi sat in a \nlarge chair, her feet curled up under her. “Thank you for coming,” \nshe said. “I’m sorry the house is so disorganised, but I’m supposed \nto move soon.” She looked terrible, worse than I had ever seen \nher even when as prime minister she followed her father’s habit of \nworking eighteen hours a day.’ \nDom Moraes was not only one of the finest poets of the twentieth century, he \nwas also an extraordinary journalist and essayist. He could capture effortlessly \nthe essence of the people he met, and in every single profile in this sparkling \ncollection he shows how it is done. The Dalai Lama laughs with him and \nMother Teresa teaches him a lesson in empathy. Moraes could make himself \nat home with Laloo Prasad Yadav, the man who invented the self-fulfilling \ncontroversy, and he could exchange writerly notes with the novelist and \nintellectual Sunil Gangopadhyaya. He was Indira Gandhi’s biographer— \npainting her in defeat, post Emergency, and in triumph, when she returned \nto power. He tried to fathom the mind of a mysterious ‘super cop’—K.P.S. \nGill—and also of Naxalites, dacoits and ganglords. \nThis collection is literary journalism at its finest—from an observer who \nsaw people and places with the eye of a poet and wrote about them with the \nprecision of a surgeon.