India, Oct. 12 -- For most of my life, I have read to understand: Policy papers, books on business, biographies of men who built empires and believed they'd figured out how the world works. Those pages spoke in the language of clarity and logic. I liked that, and still do. Fiction, on the other hand, made me uneasy. There was too much left unsaid and too little that could be measured. It often felt like I was wandering through a fog without a compass. I missed the clean, straight lines of non-fiction, with its clear conclusions and comfort of closure. My bookshelves, then, were neat rows of certainty. But that's a problem as well, as someone close to me once said. She pointed out that if I could look at the shades, listen to the unsaid, and...