He sent the spawnlings to the French Institute, and the delicate unorganized bantlings were all obstetrically laid out, like so many yellow specks on a sheet of Indian paper!

I plummeted down [the ski hill] past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

A school let out, teens in their miraculously white, pressed shirts and blue pants and skirts, surely having come that morning from crowded, dirt-floored huts without water. They roiled over the sidewalk and flowed around me, a sweaty, old-lady tourist in her long-sleeved, 50 SPF shirt, pants, and pastel hat – a lump in their path.

From the ground, Colombo’s port does not look like much.[…] But viewed from high up in one of the growing number of skyscrapers in Sri Lanka’s capital, it is clear that something extraordinary is happening: China is creating a shipping hub just 200 miles from India’s southern tip.