His bleary red eyes still haunt me. It has been 16 years to the day now, but those eyes won’t let me sleep. I was on a holiday that summer with my family. We had spent a month at Bergen and were visiting Paris for a short break before returning home to Delhi. This trip had been long in the planning. Paris, the city of lights, was also the city of our dreams. It was an expensive city, and we had only managed a small bread-and-breakfast room in the poorer part of the city. It was only for a few nights, I told my young son reassuringly. The rooms were clean and didn’t smell musty, the sheets were fresh out of the laundry. The breakfast menu was limited but the food was healthy and filling. On the second day, we did discover why our floor carpets were damp; the shower…