Ayyan detested this moronic pride more than anything else about the country. Those flared nostrils, those dreamy eyes that people made when they said that they were once a spectacular race. How heaps of gems were sold on the streets, like berries. How ancient Brahmins had calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon long before the whites; how ayurveda had figured everything about the human body long before Hippocrates; how Kerala’s mathematicians had discovered something close to the heliocentric theory long before Copernicus. In this delusional heritage of the country, his own
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