There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who had developed an unwholesome, because entirely one-sided, passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty, and adored talk-show host Miss Salma R., whom he had never met: an infatuation that he characterized, quite inaccurately, as love. In the name of this so-called love, he christened himself Quichotte, for the opera “Don Quichotte,” and resolved to be his “beloved”’s knighterrant, to pursue her zealously right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and, by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart.
The truth was that Quichotte had almost no friends anymore—no social…
