“The thesis was good. Kiran didn't have the academic training to evaluate it formally, but she had the instinct — the market instinct, the reading instinct, the Neeta-trained instinct for recognising quality — and the thesis was good. Beena wrote clearly, specifically, with a passion for her subject that leaked through the academic language like sunlight through curtains. She wrote about girls who couldn't read their own names and, after six months of daily lessons, could read newspapers. She wrote about a woman named Savita who learned to read at thirty-seven and cried when she read her daughter's school report card for the first time. She wrote about the politics of literacy — how keeping people illiterate was a form of control, and how teaching them to read was a form of rebellion.”