Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I started my working life as a trainee in The Statesman in New Delhi, more decades ago than I care to remember. We, the lowly ones in the hierarchy, were forbidden to use the first person singular. To write about oneself was a cardinal sin, guaranteeing expulsion from the ivory tower that was this newspaper – preeminently a male citadel – in the 70s. Even today, it takes a lot of revving up before I can bring personal anecdotes and revelations into my writing. But this time, as you will see, there’s good reason to.

Grandmotherly duties and pleasures bring me to Washington DC in the cold heart of winter. Despite having spent my childhood here, memories of my years here have long since fossilised. Nothing, not even Dunkin' Donuts or passing by the home we lived in or the schools I went to stirs them enough to rise to the surface. But the other day three words caught my attention and suddenly a host of images and emotions came flooding in.

It was late evening and we were on our way home when we passed the entrance of Glen Echo Park, an amusement park in Bethesda: it’s in the state of Maryland, on the outskirts of the American capital. Of the park itself I don’t remember much, other than images of cotton candy and a colourful merry-go-round. What does remain is the conversation with a young African- American girl I met through friends a few weeks later. If memory serves me well her skin was a kind of honey mocha, substantially lighter than mine. When I mentioned the visit to Glen Echo Park she went silent before blurting out : ‘How could you go there, only white people are allowed!’ The ‘you’ was in caps.

Well I suppose diplomats and their families were then considered beyond race, the exceptions. And we who lived inside the cocoon of those blessed with diplomatic immunity were oblivious to the segregation and gentler version of apartheid going on in the world outside this laksman rekha protecting us. The schools we went to were predominantly white and the African Americans didn’t exist, or were invisible to us. In fact, many of us thought we were closer to white than black!

Needless to say that day came as a rude awakening about racial discrimination – and the realisation that Indians were way down on the other side of white on this colour chart. Strange, as coincidence can often be, a couple of days after the amusement park jogged my memory there was a moving story in The Washington Post, a national daily, about the death of Senator Gwendolyn Brit, a senior African American Maryland politician who had been arrested in 1960 for riding on the merry-go-round at Glen Echo Park. The placard the young Gwendolyn was carrying said: ‘Discrimination is NOT for our generation’.

Today, the handsomely elegant Senator Barack Obama – hanging in there somewhere between the generation of those who fought for Civil Rights like Brit and the hip-hop generation – is a frontrunner in the race for the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. An African American in the White House is no longer a mere fantasy. Rev Jesse Jackson who won 13 primaries had declared himself as President of Black America. Actor Chris Rock even made a comedy, Head of State with a black president.