The Anthropologists

It’s not the drinking, Ravi said. It’s the drinking spirit. Someone with a drinking spirit, he explained, was a person who, when offered another round, would not refuse by making a point of their individual needs. Regardless of whether or not they were drinking, they’d welcome the continuation of the evening. This was one of the most important char

I’m having the best day, Manu said. Over dinner, he posed to me his most hypothetical questions: What sort of farmers would we be? Which historical period? Astronaut or deep-sea diver? The questions made me feel that I couldn’t survive a day in the world. I wouldn’t be able to grow anything to eat, couldn’t live through a war or plague, would get t

I left the apartment soon after sunrise and arrived when the mist was still hanging low to the ground. It was the earliest I had seen the park. The late-October colors glowed in the clean light of the day. Birdsong rang out from treetops, ducks glided along the surface of the lake. The runners with cold, firm limbs looked full of focus. So this was

Life and Death All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over. We lived with the abstract shape of the news, informing us that it had arrived. We lived with the imaginary shock. Maybe, I thought, it would also be a relief: Here it was

All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park. I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, positioning them into a fluid conversation, I’d begun to understand th

I retained only bits of information from his retellings, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I felt assured that he was learning these things for both of us and that I could consult him whenever I wanted, like certain books I wished to have in our library, even if I didn’t intend to read them, because they provided comfort in their silent

This was one reason for Manu’s calm optimism, because he was constantly immersed in narratives of creation and collapse, centuries condensed to the span of forty-five minutes, from which he emerged, taking off his headphones, a little transformed, back in the present world, which was no more or less strange than the one he’d just traveled to.

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn’t quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn’t want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.