It was in the winter of 1965 that Dr Frank Conlon, professor emeritus, University of Washington, came to Bombay to study the impact of the adjudication of caste and community disputes by British courts. This meant doing the rounds of Elphinstone College, Kala Ghoda, to dig into Maharashtra archives to unearth relevant material for his doctoral dissertation. But, little did he know that a dreary afternoon at the Bombay GPO would change his course of action.

While standing in queue, Conlon's attention was momentarily distracted by two men on the verge of a scuffle. In the ensuing melee, a stranger picked up his briefcase and walked away imagining the foreigner's bag to be full of valuable goods or money. "All they got was a collection of notes that I had laboriously made over the past five months in London and Bombay," says the Seattle-based Conlon in an email interview.