chside employment.

Offices filled with ledgers piled to the roofs were
enough to put me off venturing into the world of Indian
accountancy and, not wanting to follow the aimless road
back home, I desperately cast the net out wide. An
answer to an advert for a 'Person Required for English
Publication' -- one of the more ambiguous ads to grace
the career opportunity pages -- led to an interview and
my first trip to the Herald offices.

Finding the office more energetic and boisterous than
previous working environments I had experienced, a
barrage of writing tests and interviews left me feeling
like I had been through a whirlwind. The whirlwind
moved quickly. That very same day I found out I was the
new sub-editor for the Herald International Review, a
paper intended to serve the Goan diaspora.

Well, what this role meant in reality was that I would
read the articles awaiting publication, picking up the
odd grammatical error, but more importantly I was the
lowest common denominator litmus test -- if the pages
didn't stand up to my paltry knowledge of the Goan
political system then (the argument goes) it would not
be understood by Goans in the furthest-flung corners of
the globe.

Day in day out, I would take the long dusty climb up to
the top floor -- at the time we were sharing office
space with accounts. Not quite the close separation of
duty to which I'd become accustomed. And although their
elaborate entries in ledgers never became any less
cryptic, it did give me the opportunity to mingle with
those outside the editorial department.

During the early weeks of my tenure in May, the heat
soared. Then early in June the rains broke -- with a
fanfare of grumbles from most of the populace for the
three-day delay. Funny for me, as in the North European
climes to which I was accustomed, rain pretty much
randomly came and went. The ferocity of the storms also
came as a shock. Days heavily punctuated with storms.
The power cuts that ensued, hobbling our much needed
computers, led to a greedy lunge for the last drips of
juice out of the backup generator in order to crunch
out a few extra words. Once that dried up, we would
have little more to do than meditatively stare at the elements.

In the English political system, the summer is the
silly system. It's the time for stories of twins joined
at birth and how a routine trip to the hospital to have
a wart removed leads to three-years incarceration.
Falling over th