If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.

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

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.

As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the NASDAQ crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. What's hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it.