Unless they were economists, visitors filled him with panic

Selected excerpts from Strictly Personal: Manmohan & Gursharan by Daman Singh, Dr Manmohan Singh's daughter

- Daman Singh

When we arrived in Model Town, Kiki was ten, I was six and Amu was about six months old. We were children of the '70s. Diligent and dutiful, we needed no prodding to study. The streets were our playground, a space we shared with passing cows and cars. Being incurable bookworms, we were hardly ever bored. We were addicted to popular music and saw every major Hindi film that was released.

Once my father joined the central government, we moved from old Delhi to new, and from a small flat on the first floor to a large bungalow with an even larger garden. After a few years in Teen Murti Lane, we shifted to our own house in Ashok Vihar, following a new rule that officials owning a residence in the city had to pay an impossibly high rent for government accommodation.

Two years later we were back in Lutyens's Delhi, this time in Safdarjung Lane. Over the years my parents would hop from house to house, sampling Tughlak Road, Bapa Nagar, Lodhi Estate, Krishna Menon Marg, Safdarjung Lane again, and Safdarjung Road before they found themselves on Race Course Road. Incidentally, this was where they would stay the longest. Each house that they lived in became a separate chapter in our collective memory.