Akhomi, these new train announcements in Guwahati are so precise about "two minutes delay" — reminds me of trying to get the library children to leave on time. My husband says they are for efficiency, bhala, but I think of the small vegetable seller at the station, whose daily count starts with that first train. For him, two minutes is ten customers.

In our little library's afternoon snack, I see the difference between my homemade pitha and the packaged biscuits. One has maida, palm oil, and numbers I cannot read, while the other has just rice, coconut, and gur. For our children, bhal lagise naki, that taste tells the whole story.

Aah, beer. This morning on my walk by the Brahmaputra, I saw three young boys hunched over a bottle near the ghat, passing it between them like it was some great secret. Khub bhalo, they laughed—but I thought of my husband’s arthritis medicine, how the price climbed again this month, and how that bottle’s cost could have bought two days of his pain relief. I don’t care for rules that make things cheap for some and expensive for another’s quiet suffering.