When we meet Raghu on a rainy afternoon early July, all dapper and radiant with the brush of success, he tells us, “It was just an amazing idea that the history of a World War could be an alternative history anywhere in the world...let alone right here.” Given that his protagonists were either no longer alive or, in some cases, close to vanishing completely, the writer found himself extremely lucky in recovering their stories. “I discovered that Verghese Kurien, the founder of Amul, had been Bobby’s classmate in college...while sifting through records at the Imperial War Museum in London, I found a recorded interview of a sapper officer, John Walker Wright, who turned out to be in Bobby’s own unit.” It was not easy to steer through the reefs of history, cross-referencing sources, walking through the silences and elisions in the records. “I’m an author who is two generations distant from the one that fought the war, a generation that is now disappearing. Without making too much of it, I wanted that distance, that mystique to be present in the writing,” he says.