What do you do for company when you are not an extrovert? Why, retreat into the world of books of course. Here are people who will talk to you when you need company, will go away when you're tired of them and will engage you in intellectual discourse when your brain needs exercizing. For some reason, I am fascinated with the period 1900-1960 and most of my English reading consists of forgotten bestsellers, British and American, from those years. Does anyone still read Nigel Eldridge's The Colonel's Son? It's about the author's childhood in interwar India (1919-39). Or Julian Maclaren-Ross's books? Books like these evoke an era of bad plumbing and uncertain electric supply, when modern amenities were still not taken for granted. I think I relate to them so much because this was what small-town India was like in the 1970s and 1980s (perhaps even today?). Also, books like Eldridge's (although not Maclaren-Ross) were often available in dusty libraries in the small towns where I grew up, as were books by Daphne du Maurier and Laura Lee Hope, all probably left behind by the departing British. In the days before the Internet, these were my only window into the western world. Little did I know till I studied history that these tales, so outdated, such markers of a world of racial inequalities, were stories of a world being transformed. Still, their nostalgic appeal remains for me even though I recognize all the limitations of the authors' latent and blatant prejudices. I choose to read them as narratives of a time before central airconditioning and central heating. Every time I hear our sixty year old boiler make groaning noises in the wintry nights of southwestern Connecticut, I remember...cold nights in unheated houses in Punjab and John Masters.

Snow is coming, snow is coming, right now a distant gray-whiteness on the horizon. But we are not alone. Right now, Washington DC is hunkering down and other areas will follow suit. Far away, in California, six days of rain has made people's lives miserable. Further away, in India, the air force and army is having to drop supplies for snowed-in people in Kashmir. 40 feet of snow in some places! First, the tsunami and now the rain and the snow. Stay warm and dry, everyone.