Where the Air Is Sweet

The earliest sensation Raju remembers, about the time he started attending school at age three, was an ache, a longing for something he could not yet imagine. By the time he completed primary school, this ache had been transformed into a belief that something essential was missing here in the Gujarati village of Malia, the land of his birth, the land of his ancestors. In the months before he married, before he prepared to embark on adulthood, he took to stepping outside his family's hardware shop and standing still in the middle of the gully, grains of fine, pale dust catching in the hairs inside his nose. He would look around him at the shops he could describe to their last detail, at the houses he had known since he knew anything. Then he would close his eyes. And he would see nothing.

From Where the Air Is Sweet by Tasneem Jamal 2014. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.