India, April 26 -- It was an ordinary day in the late 1990s when I set out into the villages of Howrah district alongside Dominique Lapierre, the celebrated French writer whose soul seemed stitched into the soil of Bengal. To the villagers we visited that day, he was not a foreign author - he was "Dominic Da," their own.

What I did not expect, as a rookie journalist still finding my footing, was to find Raghu Rai walking among us.

There he was - no entourage, no fuss - just a man with a camera, moving through the lanes of rural Howrah with the quiet ease of someone who had always belonged there. We ate together that afternoon and talked about many things. At one point, the village folk, overwhelmed by Lapierre's near-mythic presence, in...