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For Valentine's Day, Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy shares a family love story from 70 years ago.

I always knew that my mother's aunt Debika was the most beautiful of all the great-aunts. I didn't know that when she was young, she jumped off a moving train for love.

She is now 90. Bent with age, she shuffles with a walker. But she's still radiant, her hair perfectly dyed.

It sounds like a typical Bollywood story. Boy meets girl in pre-independence India. They fall in love. Her family says no way. The boy came from the same clan. That was regarded almost as marriage between siblings. And there were far more suitable boys for such a beauty, like the son of a top-ranking civil servant. Debika says her uncle and brother kept two guns handy to shoot over-eager Romeos on sight.

So one night in 1941, she decided to escape. She packed a bundle with everything she needed: a couple of blouses, a petticoat and two albums — one with family photos, the other with postcards of Hollywood movie stars like Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert.

She put a roll of false hair on the pillow so it looked like she was sleeping. There were dozens of servants to be evaded, big dogs patrolling the yard and many locked doors. She retraces her steps for me more than 70 years later.

She left barefoot, in the kind of sari housemaids wore, to look like a young woman going to work in the breaking dawn. Her fiance was waiting to take her to the train station, but she panicked when she realized the taxi driver recognized her. She was afraid her powerful uncle would show up at the next station with guns. So the runaways decided to jump off before the station. Guards came running, but they nonchalantly strolled away as if they jumped off trains every day.

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At least 15 people are dead and dozens injured Sunday in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, after multiple car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in mainly Shiite areas.

NPR's Kelly McEvers is reporting on the blasts for our Newscast unit.

"The explosions targeted shops and outdoor markets in Shiite districts around the city. After the blast helicopters were circling over many parts of the city.

"Overall violence has gone down in recent years but lately there've been a string of suicide attacks targeting Shiite interests and security forces.

"A suicide bomber killed a top Iraqi army intelligence officer on Saturday.

Tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are on the rise again in Iraq, as widespread protests in Sunni areas have called for the downfall of the Shiite-led government."

Interiors intrigue me. Like many New Yorkers, I am often tempted to see what is inside those great doorman-barricaded buildings that line Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. Step into the marble lobby, ride the elevator to the penthouse and let your imagination be carried aloft. What would it be like to live in a vast suite overlooking Central Park, with its parquet floors, coffered ceilings, and handsome antiques? Surely, dwelling here means being beautiful, rich and glamorous.

In reality, most people who live in big cities live in small rooms with tiny closets and a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. But one can dream.

The three novels I have chosen allow fanciful musings of the Gilded Age — which roughly spans the period in American history between Reconstruction and the turn of the 20th century — with its grand apartments and lavish furnishings. But of course, then, as now, most people lived in cramped quarters with little to look at. And if life amongst the gilded rich seemed enchanting, for the masses existence could be dreary at best.

"We got it framed and it's now in our living room. And a few weeks after we did this, we got a call one day from the school that one of our daughters had gotten into a spat in the classroom. We had never gotten one of these calls and we didn't know what to do. Here we were, clueless parents, we should be responsible, what do we do? So we called our daughter in and we were kind of grasping and my wife said, 'Look up, there's the family mission statement, anything there seem to apply?' And my daughter kind of read down the list and she got to near the end and she said, 'We bring people together?' And suddenly, boom ... we had a way into the conversation. This is a value, this has been violated, now we had a way to talk about it."

On rethinking — or even eliminating — family dinner

"It is like the big bogeyman in families today ... Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives. Well, guess what? Dig deeper into the research and it's very interesting. It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive conversation in any family dinner. The rest is taken up with take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. And what researchers have found is you can take that 10 minutes and put it in any time of the day and get the benefit. So, if you can't have family dinner, have family breakfast! Even one meal a week, on a weekend, has the same benefit.

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