When he was seventeen, Narendra Damodardas Modi had an extra middle name—‘Trouble’. He was also fast becoming a problem for his family. Modi at seventeen was unsure about what he wanted to do, which runs in contrast to the decisiveness he shows today: all he possibly knew for sure was that he did not want to accept and play the cards life had dealt him in his home town Vadnagar, in the Mehsana district of northern Gujarat. At that time, Modi also made life agonising for a girl who was three years younger to him. She waited with hope for a drifter to whom she had been betrothed by her parents as a toddler.

This is the period in his life about which Modi does not reveal much. If one probes deep, he smiles and says the time will come when he will reveal all. But at 17, he decided to take a furlough from his family, from what his lower-middle-class moorings ordained for him. He did not want to lock himself in what that offered. It was literally a walk in the woods over the next few years. Modi spent his time roaming about in the hills of Kumaon, the...