Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.

I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, "Whatever you do, don't get married". For me, when I see a bride, it gives me a rash. I find them ghoulish, almost.

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

I know that a world in which countries are stockpiling nuclear weapons and using them in the ways that India and Pakistan and America do to oppress others and to deceive their own people is a dangerous world.