We don’t really have an autumn in Delhi. Our summer merges into winter with only a brief transition heralded by the passage of Diwali. This means Keats’s Ode to Autumn is just a poem for us. His “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is a haunting description, not a lived reality.

This is where America and Europe are so different. Fall, as it’s called in New England, is perhaps the most colourful season of the year. The trees are clothed in shades of ochre, rust, magenta, auburn and deep green set against their own rich brown. Even though the days are steadily growing shorter, the sun bathes the landscape with a warm golden glow. The world looks like a picture postcard. And the rhythm of life feels like a lilting tune.

Twenty years ago, I arrived in Washington in the middle of fall. As the taxi drove from Dulles Airport to the Hay Adams Hotel, the other side of the square from the White House, I saw for the first........

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