What if you died and no one even realised it? What if people forgot you had even existed? What if no one had any idea where you had been buried? I know of a man to whom this happened.

In the late 1980s, working in a Delhi newspaper, I probably said his name five or six times a week. I'd get into a scooter in the morning and say, "Bahadur Shah Zafar" and be taken to New Delhi's Fleet Street, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the avenue where most of its newspapers were.