When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.

Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.

Amma and i went to each house to tell them we were leaving. They all said, 'Don't forget us. Keep visiting.' At the age I was then, this seemed absurd. i had grown up among them - how was it even possible to forget these people? Now I see what they meant.

It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul to particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you would wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sills in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the trail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it.

In poverty, people are possessions. In the middle class, possessions means things,

The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.