Tennis partners

What tennis offers is an escape, a retreat from the world, a forgetting. And what about this world, at this time, is worth remembering?

Happy marriages and families don’t make for interesting reading. Tolstoy, of course, pointed this out in the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina. (Though, after a high court judge took exception to the presence of War and Peace on the bookshelf of accused “urban naxal” Vernon Gonsalves, perhaps quoting Tolstoy is verboten in New India. Of course, as is also common in New India, the facts have proven elusive. The judge, it seems, was not objecting to Tolstoy, but another legally published, legally sold book. As if it makes his suspicion of the content of personal libraries any less ridiculous.)

Anyway,