I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ''Ours'' is different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.