In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness.
-- Narrator (chapter 1)

Importance: This line establishes loneliness as a culturally specific problem rather than a universal feeling. It frames the story’s later separations and migrations by contrasting a densely social home world with the isolations that follow.

But foreign students were on a visa that did not allow them such employment, and those who couldn't afford to return home, or labor for free, took up jobs on campus and were tutored in the assorted moods of being solitary in the wintertime.
-- Narrator (chapter 2)

Importance: The sentence links loneliness to policy, money, and weather, showing how isolation is produced by institutions as much as by temperament. It also captures how survival in a new country becomes a lesson in endurance rather than belonging.

Home means mother. Home means one's own bad-tempered cat.
-- Narrator (chapter 23)

Importance: The definition of home shifts from geography to intimate, ordinary attachments. By grounding home in a...