When Stephen Alter is asked the simple question where are you from, originally? He hesitates. Although he is in almost every way an American" granted with a trace of British accent" he has an unexpected reply: My real home was in India, a hill station called Mussoorie, seven and a half thousand feet up the Himalayas. That was where I was born and raised, in a section known as Landscape, and a time, that haunts him still: I miss the place itself; the mountains, the view of the high Himalayas beyond Mussoorie, stretching all the way to heaven..