That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper...
Older and wiser, none of us want to be Modesty Blaise any more. Instead, we'll settle for making war, money and love the way she did. That should be enough.
I gave up on trying to do the Bombay scene - what was the point when it was so Delhi?
A flock of bookish birds: Restless Chattering Starlings, Feather-BrainedCuckoos, Bibulous Bulbuls, Culture Vultures, Page Three Mynah Birds digging for gossip, Greater Common Shrills, the caustic ButcherBirds...
My guests have been hooted at, had obscene gestures made at them, and showered with muck. "Really," they say nervously, retreating from verandah to main house, "it's a zoo in here."
"In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path: not moderate, but iconoclastic." The joint-runner up entry i
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