“My father died of a heart attack at fifty-three. He was an accountant—a quiet, methodical man who counted other people's money with more attention than he gave his own life, who ate the same lunch every day (curd rice with pickle, the meal of a man who valued consistency over variety), who walked three kilometres every morning before the rest of the family woke, who loved grammar and corrected ours relentlessly, who read books and marked them with red ink when the author's syntax offended him, who was, by every measure that mattered to a daughter, the safest person in the world.”