These small freshwater fish - Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. ... by 'modernity' I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. ... if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I'm not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta's alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It's this quality I'm trying to get at when I speak of modernity. ... modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.

Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily.

This second time round, she'd discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.