“The Ram Jhula Bridge”

“And the tempered rays rendered the houses and other buildings on the far side of the river powdery white, and barely blue and palest yellow. As Theo contemplated the scene before him, his focus attenuated, a familiar stillness permeated his body and mind. A sort of frozen-awareness trance came over him, as it had on many occasions in his life. The silvery cables and towers of the bridge, the lithographic, postcard quality of the pruinose buildings on the far side of the river, the modern-architectural-glass look of the aqua Ganges, all combined to form what seemed like only a snapshot of a pseudo-reality, nothing more. There were no real buildings, river, and bridge; there was simply an illusion of one: a sort of mirage, such as thirsty desert travelers imagine to be an actual oasis. Everything that his eyes beheld struck Theo as imaginary. It was as if he had stepped outside the world to which human beings give their unquestioned allegiance and seen it from a remove, seen it as a fiction, a construct, a flimsy postcard that no more contained a “real” world than the card did a real scene.”