They say, “Eighteen sores when touched by a tiger, but fifty-eight if by the police.” Don’t forget that.

Childhood friendships were often like that – intense in presence and in the present tense, remote and unreachable in absence.

The enemy inside is far more powerful than the enemy outside.

Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?

You take away economic security and the whole pack of cards collapses. Everyone is at each other’s throats. All these vaunted bourgeois values that prop up society – love, duty, honour, respect – all rest on power-relations lubricated by economics. They are the gloss people put on the naked truth: self-interest.

This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people’s lives because your own is just empty, dead time.

There seem to be fewer stars; it must be getting close to dawn. No sign of your face or your name in the sky tonight. What is going to happen to the two of us? Doesn’t that question haunt you, too, and keep you awake? It’s eating me slowly from the inside. It’s all impossible, everything between us, every possibility, imaginable or unimaginable, is impossible.

So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he.

This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.

Numbers never lie; one can make them, of course, as one can make anything speak another story in another tongue, but they do not have the inherent falsehood that words carry.