The first time I ever saw my grandfather’s name written out was in a leather-bound register of a thousand pages. Each page was busy with names, and it took me a while to find his: misspelled, in diminutive type, buried deep in the thick, creamy leaves. It was late spring, and I was seated inside a shed at the Delhi War Cemetery, reading with my chin tilted up so the sweat dropped away from the paper: I couldn’t risk blotting out the memory of a war hero.

Outside, the sun blazed off the marble gravestones of about a thousand men who died for the British Empire in World War II.…  Seguir leyendo »