Your main topic, in essence your only topic when you talked on and on so passionately on those nights, was slums—not only Dharavi, but slums in general, the condition of slumdom. Everything else you touched upon seemed to flow from this theme as from an open drain. How could we allow ourselves to be bystanders while human beings lived like that—no toilets, no privacy, cardboard walls and rusted tin roofs, all of it lashed together with old electrical wires, bits of rope, tape. Yet even so, this was home, neighborhood, community, you declared. Why don’t people get that? Why is everyone on the outside so clueless when slum dwellers hold out against fat-cat developers, even when they’re bribed with lakhs of rupees and a brand new flat in a concrete block? They never asked to be relocated, they never petitioned for slum clearance—all they wanted is a working toilet of their own instead of being condemned to stand in the pouring rain in that humiliating loo queue every morning, for God’s sake, you declaimed as I nodded now and then to prove I was listening, marveling to myself, and yes, also deeply moved at the wonder of youth pouring forth newly discovered knowledge with such ardor as if it were fresh wisdom on the face of the earth, never before thought or heard. And really they’re such good people when you get to know them, you went on discharging your grand associative verbal torrent, such kind, generous neighbors, there’s such a real sense of community in the basti, it’s a village really, everyone helps each other, everyone looks after each other’s kids, everyone gets along just fine until suddenly, some evil spirit blows in—politicians, gangsters, cops, big money, all the usual instigators and perpetrators, and the whole place explodes. Rioting, killings, mutilations, rape—the Hindu nationalist majority comes rampaging through the Muslim ghetto, which makes it by definition a pogrom—right? The Muslims are plotting to shoot off rockets from the slum aimed at the airport, they’re screaming, get them out of here, it’s ethnic-cleansing time, ship them all in cattle cars to Pakistan, they’re all terrorists—exactly like what’s happening now in the Middle East, in Gaza for example, which they call a refugee camp, but what’s a refugee camp anyway? It’s really just another word for slum. Gaza is one giant slum when you think about it, a filthy, disease-infested shantytown, the most populated strip of land on the planet. Nobody wants Gaza, not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Arabs, not the Zionist entity, nobody.

The Zionist entity? Where did that come from? If only your father, the Holy Beggar Shmiel Shapiro, either devoured by cannibals on the Andaman Islands or perched there on the lip of Reb Shlomo’s grave in Jerusalem, strumming his guitar and warbling on about how the Nation of Israel lives, could hear you now—what would he say? Oy, this needs such a fixing, he would say. But as for me, I remained silent. I merely sat there admiring your precocity. Already you were ready for the Ivy League.