As I became a socialist, I started to invent a much more idyllic version of my childhood to hide away what I wasn’t proud of. My parents were products of the 1960s hippie wave. They played records of Rolling Stones and Credence Clearwater Revival. Reading was insisted on. As was questioning all assumptions, everything. When I took that literally, I was told my proper place by my chauvinistic father who wanted me to be liberal as long as I didn’t talk back to him. So many contradictions, so many conundrums. I struck out against my dad and didn’t speak to him for two years.

I fashioned him as my home-grown Stalin that I had defeated as I read Russian history in college. I had a crush on a Muslim colleague later, when I started my career as a journalist. But it felt self-conscious. I was righting a wrong, I was proving something to myself. The default therefore, was still one of discomfort at owning up to my middle-class-ness. My shiny-ness. My not belonging to Lutyens’ Delhi, to the ‘Khan market gang’.

It rankled even recently when someone senior and well-known, a Congress-walla, a journalist and someone who was part of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s inner circle told me that I didn’t have the ‘stature’ to apply for the Nehru Fellowship. And where on Earth did I live? Not a smart part of the city. I should’ve let it slide off of me with cool indifference. But it hurt like a stab wound. And then I began to look closer at my own dissonance. And how it could so easily be harvested as hate. Hatred for the liberals and socialists, for feeling like it was not possible to belong to ‘the smart set’.