And here, at home, the accusations would be even louder. No veil of politeness; the lying children of Marx (who have never heard of Marx) revelled in spectacle and the chance to feed their hungry masses with publicly executed flesh. Burn him, beat her, look what we did for you, villager, They were exploiting you, They are oppressing you, yes They were, yes They are. Now come, feel the fury and dance with rage. Only to our tunes, of course. But you don’t know that. You never will. Even as you dance to our melodious lies, even as we use you to rob Them of their marbled palaces and place them in our welcoming laps, you will never know that They are all we want to become.

Does hunger make them blind, these scraggy men with angry eyes, these broken women with hungry lies? Is it only the cold marble beneath my feet that calms my blood, that allows me restful contemplation and hungerless condemnation?

The neighbour died in the middle of the night. Silently passed away to a morning of discussions over biscuits dipped in breakfast tea. She was a fairly old woman, left a good address by a good husband, who nonetheless did her the disservice of dying too young.

I wanted to go to her cremation. I wanted to say some sort of goodbye.

It would be silly, though, to ask. They didn’t even let me go to my own grandmother’s cremation. I think maybe kids aren’t allowed in there. Of course, I wasn’t a kid any more. But I had been—a kid, sneaking into her bedroom while everyone else waited for the hearse in the hall. Not knowing to not be inured to her cold body wrapped in red silk, poking at the space between her nose and lip, which had turned curiously hard. Some of the brown lipstick they’d slicked on her smudged off her mouth while I played with her stopped flesh—and I panicked. I held her hand for a minute, to calm down, then pulled a maid into the room and begged her to fix it.

It’s funny to me that kids aren’t allowed inside cremation grounds. Funny, and stupid, because hell, it seems like they’re the ones most equipped to deal with death and loss. Easily distracted, only temporarily invested; I could have handled so much more as a kid than I can now. When Dida died, I went out to the verandah and pretended to cry because I wanted to be part of the sadness, and someone came and scooped me up and hushed me with a smiley-faced cookie. Now, I somehow saw the dead neighbour’s life play out in a sentimental sepia tint. And when I cried for her, because I did, I locked my bedroom door and washed my face before I came out.