Megha Majumdar

where if she is standing in front of a business, the business owner tells her to go away.

She often makes a living begging for money on trains and on the street.

But at the same time, she is believed to have a close connection to the divine.

So people who have newborns at home welcome her so that she can bless their baby.

She is invited to weddings so she can bless the newlyweds.

So she lives in this strange place where she's both revered and respected in some ways, but also reviled in other ways.

Lovely's voice is written in a kind of non-standard language.

English in the present continuous.

And part of that is I really wanted to gesture toward the very complicated colonial history of the language English in India.

It was, of course, once the colonizer's language.

And

Now it occupies a place where it is the language of privilege.

It is the language of the elite.

When I was growing up, I absorbed the lesson that English was what I needed to learn in order to move ahead and gain success later in life.

So you're taught that you have to know English to move up.

And there's a great sense of aspiration and striving bound up with English.

So I really wanted to have that quality in Lovely's voice.

So he is a school teacher.

He's a gym teacher.

And the reason why he's called PT sir is that's what we used to call our physical training teachers when we were in school, PT teacher.