Free India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India by Akash Kapur

met only at her apartment; she refused to meet anywhere else. She was friendly and polite, a little formal.She’d ask if the neighbors had seen me. She wanted to know if the security guard had asked what I was doing with her.
    Once, she told me about going to the beach with her friends, hanging out by the water and buying cotton candy, and I told her I would love to go with them sometime. She got nervous. She said she’d have to ask her roommates, and also her “uncle,” a distant family member who was acting as her guardian in the city. She never mentioned it again, and neither did I.
    She seemed to be enjoying city life. She and her roommates hung out in the shopping malls. They watched the crowds, maybe bought some clothes or costume jewelry. On weekends, she often went to the movies. But first, she always telephoned her mother, even if it was in the middle of the afternoon—not to get permission, she said, but to let her mother know where she was going to be.
    On workdays, Selvi got home late. But on her days off, she never stayed out past nine p.m. She said that some of her office-mates liked to go to clubs, dancing, maybe even drinking. They went with boys; they flirted with them. But, she insisted, she wasn’t like that, and she never would be.
    Her aunt was still worried about her. She called Selvi all the time, asked her what she was doing, warned her not to get too close to any men. Selvi told her aunt about her schedule. She said she worked from lunchtime to past midnight every day, with only a half-hour break for dinner. She didn’t have time to meet men.
    She said: “Auntie, you have to trust me. I won’t start any other life. If I meet anyone, if I like any boy, I’ll come and inform you all and you can help me decide. Before anything happens, I’ll inform my dad, because it’s so important that he should like anyone I meet. Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love.”
    “You have to understand, Akash,” she said to me. “I’m not a city girl. My background is different. I was brought up in a different way. I wasn’t brought up to stay out late and do those kinds of things.”
    We were sitting in her living room when she said this to me. It was a cloudy morning. It had rained hard the night before, and Selvi had gotten drenched on her way back from work. She seemed tired, under the weather. She had a bit of a cold.
    “Yes, but lots of people come to the city with different backgrounds and then change,” I said.
    “No, not me,” she said. “I believe the day is for working, and the night is for sleeping. I’ll never change.”
    She seemed a bit irritated. She blew her nose into a tissue. She got up and started packing a bag for work. Then she put the bag down and looked right at me. “I’m still exactly the same person I always was,” she said. “I told you already: I’m not one of those girls whose minds can get swayed. I know who I am.”
    She had a sharp, direct manner that often made me feel like I was saying or doing the wrong thing. She was schoolmarmish. I thought from the first time we met that there was something determined, even ferocious, about Selvi.

    Hari was telling me one day about how he learned to speak English
. He hadn’t spoken it at home; both his parents spoke only Tamil. He said he had learned English from watching television, and from reading books and pamphlets at his mother’s workplace. From a young age, he was determined to be fluent; he knew that English was his ticket out of Tindivanam.
    He told me that when he was a boy, he was teased a lot at school for always speaking English. His classmates would taunt him. They would say
“Rumbo Peter vidurai,”
which, with its reference to an English name, was a way to mock someone for putting on airs by speaking a foreign language. Hari said he didn’t care. He’d always been different. He’d always felt apart from other people his age.
    It was true that Hari’s English was pretty good, especially for