Madras is a city that leaves you with a cicatrice. I learn, for one, that people get used to anything. It's never so much a matter of enduring or living in inhumane circumstances as it is a matter of getting used to things.
What I come close to asking, every time I come across an article in a newspaper or a journal, when I read a story, or when I meet someone strongly committed to, say, developing the living condition of a community is, do they understand?
Do they understand why or how people cope?
The analogy I cosset myself with is quite unkind: similar to releasing an animal that has been cooped up in a zoo, into the wild. Natural, but doesn’t make the prospect less daunting.
If I see someone sleeping in the side street, chilled under a blanket at eight o'clock in the morning, it seems out of place not to feel guilty. Allow oneself a little lenience though, and ask oneself this (not without a little wariness): what would the fellow do with a computer, a lot of money, or a lot of books? He may be as lost as I would be were I in his place.

My question that morning then, as the thought of being late popped in now and then in my head and the dry, clammy air blew an occasional wind, was : what do they wish for?
It must be the kind of comfort my little room brings me after an intricate day in college, the kind of pleasure some books and movies promise me, the kind of assurance people I know well provide me with. I let my rickety auto carried me to college and let the thought fluttered away.