Amit Chaudhuri

‘Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact ...’

An hour's a symbolic duration.

The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.

The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free - not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it's gazing upon something it's unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing. Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted.

I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.

Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us.

Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end.

I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife.

History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.

He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to.

I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony.

At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.