In the former, Alok climbs the light tower being built at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, just before the Asian Games in Delhi. He races the steps, but soon the metal is hot, his palms sweat. “The lights closer now are overwhelmingly hot and what he thinks he is climbing is a stairway that will pull him into the sun.” And later his little sister who watches his failed attempt takes him to a star jasmine bush: “It’s like the sun you were looking for.” “‘You have to squeeze your eyes,’ she says. He does, and sees: burnished by April morning, a pulsing globe seething with white bloom and green leaf. Each white flower blooming not its habitual, single-petalled, star-shaped bloom, but something hinged and also white that lays flat to the petals then flick-folds upright…. ‘A sun for you. A sun for you,’ Maya continues her chanting. Happiness is a hammer blow that he bows under. He wants to tell her that he sees it is like a sun.” Sweet.