""Ah," Said Madame Lacan with a caustic smile that was just a twist of her grey lips. She was doing her accounts, had not removed her spectacles from her nose, and was ostentationusly keeping her pen going, dipping it into the ink well and scratching with it loudly while the cigar grew its knob of ash in a bowl nearby.

"You are not real? And I am not real? I did not realise?"

"Not in the way they are," Laila assured her, pressing on the counter with both hands in her eagerness. "We don't dress like that in Paris, or dance like that, or move or sing like that.""
-Anita Desai, Journey to Ithaca, p. 202




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