Over the years, I’ve also learned that I need to let go of the notion that I “understand” how India works. In Kolkata, for instance, I stepped into a bookstore – not much more than a shack really – and saw only anarchy, with everything from Tagore to Grisham stacked floor to ceiling, in no discernible order. Yet when I requested a particular title (a historical novel called Those Days), the clerk quickly and effortlessly retrieved it. He saw order in the chaos.
I realise now that all of India is like this: both chaotic and orderly at the same time. Think of the way the chai-wallah prepares each cup of tea in precisely the same manner, or the way the rickshaw driver expertly weaves through traffic. As the British economist Joan Robinson famously observed: “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”