Haan, so I was watching that final from the terrace, chai getting cold in my hand. These club nationals with no referees — it’s like our school’s annual day when the chief guest cancels and we just have to run the show ourselves, only here nobody’s patting anyone on the back for being a good sport. The teams that call their own fouls and actually mean it? Those are the ones whose kids probably come back to show their first paychecks. The rest are just noisy chai-walloper politics.

Haan, so yesterday I was at the post office sending the school fee, and the girl ahead of me was trying to renew her permesso—fourth time this year, she said, and they still want the same original document she already gave them twice. Bas, I told her, keep every single photocopy, even the one they stamped and threw back at you, because what is logic in that building, yaar? I have seen people get citizenship because they had a kind clerk on a Tuesday afternoon, and others get stuck for years over a signature that was there all along.