“Little bits of truth, popping out like lizards, saying, “Here am I. You know me. You know me quite well. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
Agatha Christie’s 1944 novel, Absent in the Spring, written under the alias Mary Westmacott, has no crime in it – let alone a murder. No one does anything wrong, no cruel words or harsh blows are exchanged; in fact, everyone’s exceedingly polite and proper, and most content with their place in the world.
Joan Scudamore, wife of an upper-class English barrister, is travelling back to London from Baghdad on train. Her younger daughter, who has recently had a baby, lives there with her husband, who’s a PWD engineer in Iraq. After a long time in the “Occident”, Joan is eager to return home to her beloved husband, Rodney. However, bad weather leads to a breakdown in the railway services and she’s shored up in a rest house in Tell Abu Hamid, a small town somewhere between Aleppo and Mosul. The company she has is an Indian manager (who naturally only speaks broken English) and no one else. She wouldn’t have minded this long-ish layover had it not been for what her old friend Blanche had said to her on a chance meeting...
Read more
-
AI talent war heats up: Why India Inc must build 10x organisations, not chase elite hires
-
Your honour, dissent is constitutional
-
'America plus one' still a challenge
-
Infosys caps WFO exemption at five days a quarter after Wipro & TCS tighten WFH norms
-
India-EU mobility pact to boost migration, jobs and student opportunities
