Tehmina didn’t get it—how could a boy who had grown up on the crowded, tumultuous streets of Bombay, who had jostled with the noisy crowds to catch a train to college, who had eaten pani puri and drunk sugarcane juice from roadside booths, who had witnessed the whole carnival of human experience—the millionaires, the lepers, the jewelry stores, the slum colonies—how could such a boy encase himself in a timid, clean, antiseptic world that was free from germs, bacteria, passion, human misery?
