I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

Sadness was so claustrophobic.

You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway then they vanished again. Addresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.

She'd have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she'd be trapped forever in a place whose times had already passed.

We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.