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.

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

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

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.

If only a man could spit his past out so easily.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books