I had expected everything in India to stay as I had left it. But Young India was racing ahead, trying to get somewhere as fast as it could. Dropping in to Button and Cookie’s colleges, I was amazed to see layered tanks paired with leggings and gladiator flats crowding the streets and hallways. These were the same fashions that I had just seen parading around LaGuardia and Heathrow—but they had already arrived here, riding up on the back of the Internet, glowing alongside the early bloom of social media. I resented it a little. Why did that St Xavier’s student look as good in her boyfriend T-shirt—bought at some sweltering stall in Janpath for fifty rupees—as I did in my eighty-dollar thrift-store shirt? What good was my elite status and expensive education if I couldn’t distance myself from everybody else?

In the morning hours, I woke to the call of a muezzin. There was a mosque near my house, singing out early prayers for the faithful. That song was magic. It got under my skin, trapped itself in my head. And in that moment, I understood why. What? The spilled and spilling blood, the utterness of a conviction, not of the body or mind, but the entrancement borne of a song slicing through vein and tissue to whatever holds our souls. Of bombs and bursting buildings and not enough boiling wax to seal it shut. There was no condoning, nor applause or agreement or desire or dreaming. Just an understanding of why, of the persuasiveness in spine-tingling, uncontrollable faith.

But these thoughts were dangerous. I had to keep them to myself. My thoughts were fine but my skin was brown. And that is all they would see. They would tell their brothers and fathers and sisters and mothers and employers and grocers and, worst of all, their children (because isn’t an empty accusation worst coming from a child? No precedent, no experience to blame it on, just little deposits of ruin). They would shout out whispers of alarm and discontentment, entitled and petulant in the way that only the overfed and undereducated can be. And I, I would be persecuted (prosecuted?) for feeling the forbidden Allah bubble through me.