Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous street of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-story hillock to fill Dr Narlikar’s apartment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah.