The worst thing about being a human being is being a human being. ‘I wish I was bird’, as the railway clerk in Nissim Ezekiel’s poem says. But if I were, the worst thing about being a bird would be being a bird.

Welcome to the world of Adil Jussawalla, poet, columnist, critic. The essays and entertainments collected in this volume take in everything from language to poetry, from ethics to model aeroplanes, from death and addiction to travel and alienation. In these pages, you will meet poets, novelists, construction labourers, gamblers and, most startlingly, Jussawalla himself—as a boy who lost himself at the movies; as the acned adolescent on a ship watching a storm at sea; as the flaneur of South Mumbai.