And feeling mad like a prophet, I could only wait for us to fall through them or crash into something, to crawl, dizzy, out of our seats and look down at no world below, to realize—my GOD, we are skywrecked! A great planeful of people just disappearing into the clouds and never heard from again, lost in the vast empty endlessness of the skies . . .

The boy seated next to me was so beautiful— I was huddled against the window because he was so beautiful, so I wouldn’t accidentally touch him! I couldn’t quite pinpoint his ethnicity . . . he had my dark hair and my not-white-not-dark skin, but his eyes were pale shots of green. Drinks were brought around and it was a cranberry juice with the R’s rolled the American way for him, apple in the same intonation for me.

Do beautiful people know the tremendous possibilities of their lives? Do they know that, at any given point of time, there is the full, distinct possibility that someone is regarding them a revelation? Someone is watching the curves of their bones, feeling the relentless pull of the very way they are arranged.

I felt a terrible longing (because that is all jealousy is, really) to be this—this thing we call beauty that lies under everything great that has ever been done. Every great monument, every timeless song, every pimply kid building resolve against the shining head of hair blocking his view of the blackboard— bubbling over with want.

And I did what any body that shares an exhausting relationship with itself (conciliatory, scolding, rationalizing, pleading) must: delved under blankets. Hid. Behind an iPod, behind a BlackBerry. Held up a phone screen and scrolled through a playlist until I found my old friends, the Poets from Finland, who were all that remained of the first boy I ever knew.

A whooshing dip. Sudden, sharp thud.

The world had changed. The world was a roar of hot air.

A year away, and already I had outgrown my home. Calcutta rambled past me like a spatter of embarrassing relatives. I had to avert my eyes from the florid posters peeling the paint off buildings, past the teeming masses of unattractive humanity in bright, cheap polyester.

A few weeks ago, while I was riding a campus bus to an early-morning Eisenstein screening, a patently Bengali man climbed on board, toting a large plastic bag stamped with familiar, curling letters. His eyes had paused at me, hesitant but curious. I had looked away, feeling tainted with a stain that seemed to go deeper than skin, seeping into my emotions, and then, still deeper—right into my core. Wedged between worlds, I was a bridge, blurred at the edges—a person with a personality in perpetual flux.