When I visited Notre Dame in 2016, it felt like a return rather than a first meeting. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was my favorite book growing up. My abridged copy was bought from London Book Depot, in a small market in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. I was fascinated by Esmeralda and despised Frollo with a vengeance, but Quasimodo was nothing short of a trusted friend. When we moved cities for my fathers job, Quasimodo would travel too and he taught me by heart the layout of a building I had never visited. While people and climate patterns change, you don’t easily think of buildings changing, far from disappearing. You depend on them increasingly to remind you of what once was and to mark the passage of time when you return. My clearest memory of the visit is the utter joy I felt in finding the gargoyle he (Quasimodo) gazed at most often - very familiar from Luc-Olivier Merson's illustrations. As the tour group took pictures and moved on, I and one other lady lingered behind in the bell tower - leading to a lovely conversation on how the book had affected our childhoods in two different countries, 14 years apart. She returned to Paris every five years and came to the bell tower. I left promising to do the same.

Yesterday night was horrifying. My sister in Paris watched the fire grow from close quarters, while I sat in Delhi grieving over the gargoyles. Perhaps in times like these, the only way forward is to remind myself that the bell tower remains, that the cathedral has seen worse and survived; and whether for faith, literature or history – it’s okay to grieve the loss of a monument - it was anything but inanimate. In this, we all grieve together.

Or in Victor Hugo’s words from the book - “Spira, spera. (breathe, hope)