For most of my life, I have held a healthy amount of disdain for the elders in my family. Most of them seem to have held onto a certain set of ideas—in terms of religion, morality, politics, life—ideas which are eternal, unchanging and always correct.  My uncle was not one of these people.  My earliest memories of him are from our summer vacations in Jammu. These memories are fuzzy—flashes of a house, an iron gate, a wild garden, a bed in the open courtyard, a large cooler with