New Delhi, June 10 -- I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, for the first time in my early 30s. I had moved to Delhi around that time, rented the tiniest bedsit I could find in the upmarket southern part of the city, my very own version of the seamier West Egg side of Long Island Sound in the novel, and, like Nick Carraway, the Yale-educated but "no-money" narrator of Gatsby (to borrow a phrase from critic Tony Tanner), began getting acquainted with the new- and old-money denizens of the posher East Egg side of the society I had thrown myself into.

I had a sense of turning a corner in my life, like Nick, who turns 30 in the course of the novel, and his epiphanic line about that momentous event struck a cord with ...