AFTER ONE WEEK I felt at home in Delhi with its stench, poverty, pitiless look in the eyes of the privileged, and hunger in the belly of the outlawed, but very much alive, Untouchable class, and most everyone’s necessary blindness to unimaginable chaos and energy. A city on the verge of complete and total collapse of the social order suited my unstable inner self. A city where mansions are surrounded by fifteen-foot-high stone and cement walls with tents, dirt patches with glass shards hidden like mortars, barbed wire, and gun-toting guards, and the tents housing uncountable numbers of ruptured bodies hug the walls on the lawns of those mansions. Where Disneyesque elephants, pick-pocketing monkeys, skeletal cows, casually drop their feces, greet you and parade freely down the street. Where one-armed children pound the windows of taxies, limousines, and even the ricketiest of three-wheeled motorized rickshaws begging for a single cent. Where there’s as much dust and pollution per square inch as anywhere else on earth. Where the air is filled with an unstoppable hum of life to a symphony of honking horns, rousing music, and indecipherable voices. Where sumptuous dinners can be infested with parasites for which no scientist has ever found a name. Where a raucous dream of salvation presages no fear of the unknown future. Where gorgeous coal-eyed, sari-garbed woman blithely strut barefoot through cyber cafes. Where disease floats in the air like kites without strings over the Ganges, and where the mosquito bite kills as easily as the thrust knife. And where the winter sunrise feels like inner peace must come and the summer midday heat assures release in death and eventual nothingness. Where thousands have come to conquer and all have left, in the end, defeated by a culture as old and tired and young and vibrant as any on this planet. Here, I felt at home. In India, my sorrows were met with a nod and not an ounce of false pity from anyone, because I had let my son die.