Not only my parents but the whole family was involved in the resistance - my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousings of both sexes. So ever so often the police came and took them away, indiscriminately. Well, the fact that they arrested both my father and mother, both my grandfather and grandmother, both an uncle and an aunt, made me accustomed to looking on men and women with the same eyes, on an absolute plane of equality.

Naturally, if the Americans had fired a shot, if the Seventh Fleet had done something more than sit there in the Bay of Bengal...yes, the Third World War would have exploded. But, in all honesty, not even that fear occurred to me.

My fiancé, you see, belonged to another religion. He was a Parsi. And this was something nobody could stand - all of India was against us. They wrote to Gandhi, to my fther, to me. Insults, death threats. Every day the postman arrived with an enormous sack and dumped the letters on the floor. We even stopped reading them; we let a couple of friends read them and tell us what was in them.

I suspected [Richard Nixon] was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan - not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India.

Now I don't get upset by unpleasant things, I don't play the victim, and I'm always ready to come to terms with life.

All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.

My father was a saint. He was the closest thing to a saint that you can find in a normal man.