Tears brimmed with surprising speed. He was my child. He was tangled into me. His name, his cry, his colic, his anger, his thieving, his running away, his wildness—all tangled into me.
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Whether we are in a simulation or not should have no effect on our sense of selfhood. We are who we are, or who we are simulated to be: in either case we have no option but to be ourselves.
“The rules are quite clear,” wo whispers. “Woman falls asleep under tree, jinn can enter. And the path is clear—through the woman’s long hair. You seem to be woman, yet your hair…”
Her hand involuntarily reaches for the fuzz of her rapidly growing-out undercut. “So then?”
To his right, a nala yawned, splitting the Meena Bazaar road in two. Trash oozed from the concavity as rivulets of sewage trickled past it. Plastic bags of green, blue, red, pink, white, and black covered the cleft. He sensed them crinkle in a corner, right near the cemented bricks that fenced the nala from the road, and a rat emerged from underneath, sitting atop bloated polyethene.