“Grey sky, the monsoon clouds hanging low and heavy like the underside of a bruise, the light filtering through them diffuse and directionless so that the world appeared to have been painted in a single tone with variations only in saturation. Grey sand, packed hard where the tide had retreated, scattered with the organic debris of a night's worth of waves — seaweed, plastic, the occasional dead fish with its eye turned upward in the fixed, glassy stare of something that had stopped being surprised by the world. Grey water, the Arabian Sea in its pre-monsoon mood, the surface restless and dark, the waves arriving at the shore with the tired persistence of something that had been doing the same thing for millennia and had long since stopped expecting applause.”