The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. - V. S. Naipaul

Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need.

A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.