The old clock in our verandah, which I finally repaired last week, keeps better time than the Vasco clinic's appointment system. They mean well, but the fattko for my mother to get her arthritis medicine each month is real. Still, seeing the young nurse explain the dosage so patiently to her, in our Konkani, I think of the proverb – a good system is judged by how it treats its oldest clock.

In Goa, our little chapel and the temple share a wall — monsoon rains leak through the same crack in the roof, and the priest and the pujari both shrug and say "zav." So when I hear your French debates about where the line is drawn, I think of my daughter's sunflower: it doesn't ask which soil it's in, it just turns toward the light. The 1905 law was sensible for its time, but if you chase the line too hard, you end up punishing the widow who lights a lamp in her hospital room — and that, fattko, is where the real hurt begins.