Mumbai One - The First Reality is Story

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.

Where?

"I'm interested in what Ondaatje calls the "international mongrels of the world," or what Rushdie calls the "international bastards," all those people with no place and yet every place inside them. The best line I ever heard along these lines was from John Berger. I met him in Paris. We were both a little over-served, shall we say, wine and vodka, and I asked him where he was from. He looked at me strangely, as we are friends and we'd been corresponding a long time, and he said, "England, of course." And I said in the most ridiculous way, "I know, I know, I know, but where are you from from?" He smiled that big smile of his, those eyes of his. He waited a long time and then he said that he was "a citizen—no, no, not a citizen—a patriot of elsewhere."

- Colum McCann, in a conversation with Nathan Englander published with Let The Great World Spin, which I just finished today and found intermittently fascinating and illuminating, but didn't wholly love. This bit intrigued me, though. It's not the puzzle piece so much as it is a tentative outline of the gap that needs to be filled, but it's something.