A new film about Cleopatra? Here it only reminds me of my daughter’s history book last year—so costly, we had to choose between that and repairing the roof before monsoon. Such stories of queens feel distant when our own children’s learning is a burden.

Just yesterday I was fixing an old Philips radio, and the neighbour’s boy came running to tell me Fiji beat Australia in the Hong Kong sevens. I told him, bhai, that is not luck — those boys run barefoot on coral from childhood, and their grandmothers don’t need a referee to tell them what is fair. Here in Namchi, we watch a man with a bigger shop charge double for daal in the rain, and nobody calls a foul. The rulebook is not the problem; it is who gets hurt when the whistle stays silent.