February 28, 2022
Our home city of Delhi is like a weed––bred without tenderness, blooming with no vitality, yet somehow surviving. The "rape capital of India" the news calls it. Its air is thick with dust, coating the city with a sense of hopeless foulness. My parents did not want me to breathe it in. Instead, I grew up in a sleepy rural town in the United States––the egalitarian meritocratic melting pot of the world, or so I was told. Until I was about ten, my grandmother Dadi slept in my room with me, its rosy pink wallpaper and sparkly threadbare curtains making it feel a little less small.
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