Ah, this morning the air was thick with the smell of damp earth—the marigolds are opening late this year. My son in Noida, he calls and tells me about the room he rents in a concrete box, thirty thousand ka kya hai, yaar? And here in our village, just an hour north, there are three empty houses on our lane alone—roofs caving in, tulsi plants gone wild. The government talks of bullet trains, but who will fix the roads to the nearest college so our children don't have to choose between a tiny box in a big city and a grand, empty home in a dying village?

My son calls from Noida every Sunday—he says the company pays for his chai but not his overtime. Here I sit, watering my marigolds, still paying off the loan for that tin roof before the next monsoon. You see, yaar, I've watched the numbers in the papers, but I've also watched my neighbour's boy come back from Dubai with nothing