Some letters are written to inform. This one was written to feel \u2014 to hold, for a moment longer, something that was already slipping away. In the spring of 2005, with two weeks left before my flight back to India, I sat down and wrote to everyone I knew: family, colleagues, friends, people who had watched me leave and were waiting for me to return. I did not know, at the time, that I was writing a piece of memoir. I thought I was simply saying goodbye to a city. But letters have a way of becoming more than their occasion. Reading it now, nearly two decades later, I find in it a man I recognise but can no longer fully inhabit \u2014 uncertain, grateful, quietly astonished that he had survived a year of solitude and emerged, somehow, more himself. I offer it here unchanged, exactly as it was written: unpolished, unhurried, and still, I think, true<\/p>\n\n\n\n