I had been on that bus for 8 hours already, and a couple of hours after Albuquerque the gentleman sitting beside me asked me where I was from and what brought me to America. Once the conversation continued past the pleasantries, I quickly learnt that he was on his way back home to southern Texas after burying his father who had just died of cancer. I expressed my condolences. "Obama killed him you know" he suddenly said. I was genuinely surprised, "What ?" "Obamacare. Death panels of doctors that decide who gets treated and who does not." Bitterness crept into his voice. "They treated him like trash." Obamacare had just been passed, it was the summer of 2010, and most likely, nothing had actually changed in the hospital systems of middle america. Still, I was not going to argue with a man who had just buried his father. There was silence between us for a while. "What do you do down in Texas ?" "I teach math at high school....
in the mid 90s in a dusty town on the Deccan plateau. I was five or six or seven (I can't really remember) and playing in the cool shade of my uncle's living room, vaguely aware of the blazing sun and hot earth just outside the large french windows that opened onto a still green lawn. My aunt was drowsy, cup of tea in hand, while my cousin and I ran around with the insufferable, misplaced enthusiasm of boyhood. While pausing for lemon sherbet, I looked onto the road past the lawn outside those french windows and saw our maid, Kusum bai walking by. I noticed she had her little son with her, three years old perhaps. And on his back, an old schoolbag of mine. The idyllic afternoon seemed to dissolve around me. I felt my mind and chest and limbs fill with rage, with righteous fury at this kid who had been given (I knew he could not have taken ) my schoolbag ! I rushed outside, eyes misty with anger and fell upon the little boy, wrestling the bag from him. I remember being ...