India, Nov. 22 -- I return from an intense, heart-warming tour of Kolkata, a city I have long admired and whose warmth embraced me again. This is the reflection I offer.

I spent a fortnight walking its lanes, speaking in its historic halls, signing books in its beloved bookstores, sitting under the trees of Rabindra Sarobar, discussing Tagore and Camus with morning walkers at Central Park as if they were old acquaintances, and listening to adda that still carries the old fire. Kolkata is alive with literature, music, argument, and a rare human gentleness. One also notices the quiet scars that history leaves behind. Some of those scars still whisper of a long ideological season that ended in 2011, whose fragrance, and at times its constra...