Words, Words, Words

Chapter Four

On Whom the Sun Never Sets

1

The great grandson of an Indian immigrant from Bihar wakes up to greet the sun as it rises in the island of Taveuni in the Fiji Islands. At that very moment, another immigrant from Karnataka drives home in his Mercedes to his suburban home in San Jose as the evening sun still blazes on his windshield. The British Empire has got accustomed to the setting of the sun, but the Indian diaspora enjoys the sunshine continuously in one part of the world or another. No country in the world has remained untouched by it, no civilisation has remained unembellished. Louis Armstrong may not have met an Indian on the surface of the moon, but his giant step for mankind was possible, in part, by the toils of several Indian ...