Thinnai

If there was anything our neighbours envied us, it was our thinnais.

The working-class district of Kurusukuppam is not the Pondicherry of tourist brochures. Here, residents are a bewildering mix of Creoles, colonial war veterans, proud communists and French citizens who have never left India''s shores. It is a place of everyday tragedies, melodramatic occurrences and stubborn, absurd hope.

But life ...