The train has blue seats and contains wafts of evening bath perfume even after the wind has hurtled through it for a few kilometers. I am reading a gift I have received across many kinds of distance. John Berger is leading me calmly in an initiation into resistance, resilience and reality (which, as he says, is first story). I look like another city and I feel weightless in this one. Two pre-ten boys are selling plastic clips through sheer guile and underage flirtation. They hop on in the middle of a page with their big smiling voices. I am full of rage and will brook no slumdog references. (When does compassion become ferocity, and vice versa?) If Mumbai is Manhattan, where I am headed must be Brooklyn. Low buildings, sea breeze and youth scattered on nighttime streets. If I am infected with this fearlessness I may never leave.
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