The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives. - Arundhati Roy

A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.

Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can’t do — like writing letters to a part of yourself.

The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.