Friday, September 23

The light at this time of the year can seem extraordinary to someone who grew up in England. I simply never saw light like this as a child.

As I walk in the woods I find myself thinking about this, and about the ways in which our environments form us. I have continued reading The Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree’s long and winding novel about an Indian family – or rather, not about an Indian family.

It attempts to describe a world in which everything, including crows and doors, has agency, and it does this in a flurry of word play and self-referential jokes, using a plot that abandons realism in favour of a deliberate sense that any or none of the story might “be true”.

I think about this as I look at the light through the trees. No matter how long I live here I will never have seen this light as a child. I will never know “what it is like to be” someone who has.