'Born into a once indentured or girmit ('agreement') Indian family in Fiji, and having studied in India and the UK and taught in India and Fiji, Satendra Nandan lays claim to 'a fortunate life'. It has also been an exemplary life to those of us who aspire to understanding and sympathy across the borders of culture and ethnicity, race and nation. This is a personal book of love and loss, life and death, as its author retraces the lives and revisits the deaths of those he has loved most. It is also a tribute to friendship: indeed, friendship is at once the glory and the burden of Satendra's narrative. What reconciles us to what he deplores as 'the fragility of existence and the vulnerability of human life' is precisely the human relationships established over the course of a full and felt life. The author of many recollections and reflections, Satendra is still able to surprise and move us to revisit our own pasts, and the pastness of the past, in order to rediscover what we thought we already knew. Satendra's reflections on his own life resemble nothing so much as a Wordsworthian elegy in which the consolation he is seeking on his own and on the reader's behalf inheres in the very power and self-evident value of what has been lost.' - William Christie, Head, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University; Director, Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres
