He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

When I look back, the absolute highlight was meeting Mandela himself. When I shook his hand, I felt like he was a very old soul, gentle and kind. I know absolutely nothing about reincarnation, but the only way to describe it is that it felt like this wasn’t his first life. His energy was unique, unlike any person I’d ever met. He was comfortable, wise, settled and strong. Being in his company, celebrating his birthday, was one of the greatest honours of my life.

The trauma of the tsunami rearranged his models. He was pushed into intimate contact with others’ minds as they suffered great loss and endured great pain. He sat with these people, talked with them, entered into their experiences. He got to know others in powerful new ways and became something of an Illuminator. When he entered into lives other than his own, his perspectives widened and deepened. He saw others differently, himself differently. He was humanized. He felt with more affection and saw the world with more wisdom. This is the effect that seeing others deeply tends to have on people. As the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has observed, what the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.

He had grown up to be a novelist and writer of great compassion, faith, and humanity. He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything

else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are...because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier...for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.

But gradually, over two years of conversations, Deo’s story came out. “I don’t see any way of doing this without spending time with a person,” Kidder said. “If you spend time, what you want to know will creep out.” The key is to listen, to be attentive, to be patient and not interrupt. Kidder told me he likes the version of himself that comes out when he’s trying to learn about another. He’s humbler, not talking so much. Kidder didn’t merely interview Deo; he accompanied him to the places where his story played out. They went back and visited the spot where he slept in Central Park, the supermarket where he worked as a delivery boy. Their walks together were a way of planting themselves in the concrete details of Deo’s experience. Eventually, they went to Burundi, to trace his journey through the genocide.