Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets.
New York. A person can spend weeks in this port city without ever seeing the ocean. Skyscrapers. Central Park, with its sprawling lawns, trees, paths, vendors, a boathouse and restaurant: an urban refuge.
To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it.