“The Boy will not be a failure. Mythili knows.She has seen the generations before.The boy will make it.As his father has said,he does not have the option of failure.He will crack atleast one entrance exam,and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco,or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco.He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children.He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work.And there,in the conference room of his office,he will tell his small team,with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way,'We must think out of the box”

“I suppose in about fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

“...he holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost of a flea or two."523”

“One boy has it particularly hard. I won't tell you his name. But I will tell you all about him. He has very nice brown hair, and he wears it long with a ponytail. I think he will regret this when he looks back on his life.”

“When he picked out the [gravesite] plot, my father had joked that he was moving, at last, to the suburbs.”

“[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”