Your story in this week’s issue, “Elliott Spencer,” involves a scheme in which down-on-their-luck people are “reprogrammed” and deployed as political protesters. I’m guessing that the story was inspired by accusations from Trump and others that Democrats were paying people to protest at his campaign rallies and elsewhere. Or did the inspiration come from something else?

It came from this idea I’ve had since I was a kid and had a really high fever and noticed that I . . . wasn’t myself. Everything was crappy, and all the things that normally made me happy weren’t making me happy anymore. Then I came out of it and there I was again: same old me. That really stuck with me—how mutable “I” was. Although we think of ourselves as being solid and continuous and consistent and all that, we aren’t, really.

So the story began as a thought experiment: Who would I be if all my memories and my language were erased? If I were like a new computer just out of the box—all operating system, no data? Would residual habits of thought continue to define me? What would it be like to have to learn language from scratch? That sort of thing. In the early drafts of the story, I was just trying to figure out how a guy like that might sound. Trying to find a voice is, for me, the first step—a little challenge to work at until the story kicks in.

Once it did, another set of ideas started to find their way in—this time inspired by something I witnessed while working on a nonfiction piece for this magazine. At a Trump rally in Phoenix, I saw these two otherwise nice-seeming middle-aged guys, one pro-Trump, one anti-Trump, just bellowing at each other, both using stock phrases that they seemed to have picked up from their respective TV networks. It was sad and nightmarish. I got the sense that if one had seen the other with a flat tire he’d have stopped and they’d have gotten along fine. But, in this context, they were ready to kill each other. The whole post-rally scene, in front of the Phoenix Civic Center, seemed very theatrical—a little circle of wild, violent action and then, beyond that circle, people casually standing around, filming it on their phones, checking in with their husbands or wives, talking about their softball leagues, or whatever. And yet the violent action mattered: that was what was seen by the world beyond Phoenix. So that was on my mind, I guess—this brave new world where reality matters less than mass representations of the same, the loss of nuance and gentleness when bodies need to be mustered.

But, honestly, this early in the game, with the story only just finished via our editing process, I’m not exactly sure what it means. I’ve been (we’ve been) working on how it should proceed. That, to me, is the wonderful thing about fiction: the meaning of a story is contained in the way it unscrolls, in the experience the reader has, phrase by phrase. Everything else—the analysis we tend to feel the need to do—is reductive (fun, but reductive). The reading experience, when you think about it, is so complex and lovely and hard to describe: ideas come up and are complicated and refined by the next beat; moral notions arise and are challenged; the language surprises; parallel images from our own life are continually invoked; questions that, in our everyday mode, we’d be more simply opinionated about are endorsed and negated and complicated. All this happens at once, and in a granulated way that’s impossible to describe. I think it’s important to be respectful of how mysterious the whole deal is: a person being moved by a story another person made up. It’s weird but it happens and it can really change people’s lives. I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky.

Your protagonist, “89,” or “Greg,” has had his memory erased and is re-taught language and syntax. How did you decide on your method for showing that typographically and visually?

Usually I work (to an extent that’s hard to communicate adequately) from instinct. A certain thing will just . . . seem good. Or won’t suck as much. And if I follow that feeling, obsessively and iteratively, the story will head off in a direction that I couldn’t have predicted, that will be more alive and weird than anything I could have planned. So, in this model of fiction, the writer is asking, “What would you like to say, story?” rather than ordering, “O.K., story, here’s what I need you to do.”

I did a big tour for my novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” and noticed that, when a person (me, anyway) is talking about how a work of fiction came to be (as one tends to do in that book-tour situation), he’s almost inevitably being too rational, short-changing the actual process by which the book was written, making his intentions sound grander and more cut-and-dried than they really were, or talking as if he knew from the outset what the piece’s charms and power and meaning would be. That’s not how I experience writing fiction, at all. It’s more like a series of optometrist moments (“Is this better? Or this?”), and then you look up after a bunch of drafts and the story is saying . . . something. But you’re not sure what, exactly—it’s got a mind of its own and is talking to you via your attempt to improve those small, line-by-line moments, which, in this case, included things like whether to capitalize after a gap in the text and where to break up the character’s sentences. The story communicates its deeper intentions to the writer through thousands of line-level choices.

Here, I just tried to imagine what the world would look like to this guy whose memory and language had been “Scraped,” and that unusual spacing came to mind as a way of communicating, I guess, “tentativeness.” (I’d used a version of this for the Willie Lincoln sections of “Lincoln in the Bardo.”) One interesting thing is the way that format affects output—a sort of feedback loop kicks in. You see the in-progress text, with those spaces in it, and that colors what comes next. It’s like speaking with an accent: if you speak with a British accent, your thoughts are altered by the sound of that voice coming out of you and you start saying surprising things. (“I am not, my good lord, chuffed about Brexit, but, rather, knackered from bloody talking about it.”)

89 feels real compassion and love for Jerry, who teaches him English and mobilizes him to protest. And the feeling may be mutual. What inspires that connection between these two men?

On Jerry’s side, 89 is just an interesting and challenging chance to experiment on somebody. I think that’s how technology gets out of hand: the technology is developed and, of course, people (specialists!) whose lives have revolved around developing that technology get excited and have no choice, it seems, but to plunge ahead. (Think of the hydrogen bomb. Or Cambridge Analytica. Or some of the overproduced records from the nineteen-seventies.) I think Jerry becomes fond of 89 just from being around this sweet old guy day after day. As for 89/Greg/Elliott, he adores Jerry because Jerry was his savior. He took 89 out of “blankslate”—that language-free state that, because it is technology-induced, is not pleasant. Jerry is really the only person 89 knows and he feels that he owes everything he is to Jerry. Jerry’s a sort of mother or father or Dr. Frankenstein figure: the founder of the feast, as far as 89 is concerned.

There’s a suggestion in the story that these protesters are not being deployed, as they believe, in defense of the poor and the weak.

Right, exactly.

What are they being used for?

Well, that’s left a little intentionally vague. This is set in the future, and my sense is that, in this future time, politics will have morphed to the extent that none of us, transported there, would know exactly what “our” side was anymore. Although there’s a hint, in what the journalist says about union organizers and teachers, that Jerry’s side has helped oppress. Looking at history, it seems clear, at least to me, that there’s a consortium that has always favored, let’s say, materialism/corporatism/violence. And that consortium also often exploits and encourages the degradation of language. And tends to be down on education and workers’ rights. I think that Jerry and his pals work for those guys—for the future incarnation of those guys. And Jerry’s company (which is, in my mind, something like, say, Blackwater, albeit a little more white-collar) has learned to couch its goals in sympathetic language—its representatives talk about things in the “right” way (they are “fighting oppression,” etc.), regardless of what they might actually be trying to do. This seems to be the way of the world. Nobody says, you know, “Bwa-ha-ha, let’s lock up the little kids, and have them sit in their own shit!” They say, “We are working tirelessly, under difficult conditions, to see that the rule of law is respected.” And maybe, to the person saying that, it’s true. But the kid is still sitting in his/her own shit.

In a way, the story is almost a fairy tale: this man was a mess in his previous life and now has a chance to start fresh. Without entirely giving away the ending of the story, do you see a possible happy future for 89?

Probably not materially—he’s in a rough spot. But, to the extent that he’s still himself—or his “new himself”—I think that his decision is a good and hopeful one. There, at the end of the writing/editing process, the story seemed to want to “be about” the notion that, as long as we have our minds and good intentions, that’s heaven. Or, you know, heaven’s within our grasp: we can do better, we can relate to our situation (even if it’s a bad situation) and change it, or come to some accommodation with it. 89 tells himself something along the lines of “I can still learn, am still learning.” He’s starting to understand being more articulate as a way of being “a better person.” That’s all promising, I think. These days, I take some comfort in trying to see life as a series of small, local moments. I’ve recently discontinued my (already pretty negligible) social media “presence” and it has felt good, to see how my mind responds to the removal of that particular form of projection; the world, actually, is right here, too, not just “out there,” and, in fact, the world “out there” is one degree less real than the world “right here” since seeing the world “out there” requires us to essentially project on top of someone else’s projection (those posts of someone’s trip to Malawi or a cat bench-pressing a can of tuna fish or whatever). So 89’s got some time left and, during that time, he’s going to continue to become more articulate and develop a more authentic relationship to the world as he finds it, which is, I guess, all that any of us can hope for. Of course, he might also be recaptured or die alone somewhere. One never knows.

You’ve written a number of stories that involve a kind of technological-psychological manipulation of human guinea pigs. What keeps you coming back to this theme?

I’m really not sure. I think it’s just something that I feel I can make come alive. That’s how I start—by looking for a language that’s fun to write, that I can sustain, and that keeps tricking me into making plot. And that (eventually) will divert me (temporarily) from my simplistic everyday moral positions. It’s a process that gets me out of “me”—always a relief. I don’t really have any intentions re theme or worldview. More and more, I have no idea what I think of anything. It’s as if the world were this very strange beast under a big tarp. Writing is a way of poking at the tarp. You can watch what the beast does during the poking and maybe surmise something about the sort of beast it is, but you also don’t want to be too confident in your theories. I really like the fact that, these days, I can’t say what writing is for, what it’s supposed to do, or how it’s supposed to affect us. I just like doing it.

Also, in thinking about this question, I remembered having a really powerful experience as a kid with “Flowers for Algernon.” If I’m recalling the story correctly, the main character is given this intelligence-increasing drug and then his speech changes accordingly (until he lapses back). I love that notion—of using a voice change as a character indicator.

Are there any other stories or novels you love that explore this terrain?

I think “A Clockwork Orange” is pretty hard to beat—the way that the invented language allows Anthony Burgess access to some really scary new moral spaces. I also think of “Faithful Ruslan,” by Georgi Vladimov. It’s told from the point of view of a Siberian concentration-camp guard dog and is a great illustration of the way that “limited” language can destabilize our habitual, lazy ethical constructions—can undermine our usual “us and them” way of thinking. My wife, Paula, and I just saw a staged reading of a wonderful new play, as part of the Santa Cruz Shakespeare series, called “The Formula,” by Kathryn Chetkovich—a sci-fi reimagining of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” that, through the device of a love-inducing chemical spray, was able to say some new and lovely things about the nature of passion.

Last Saturday morning, Sylvia Saucedo had her dog Sasha, who was old and ill, put to sleep. The dog “was like a member of our family,” Saucedo told me recently, sitting in her darkened den, in El Paso, surrounded by family pictures: a bullfighting brother who’d died from a heart attack; a Vietnam-veteran brother who’d died of cancer; her father, born in Juárez, who’d died, at eighty-two, after suffering multiple strokes. A fifty-eight-year-old former military-base accountant—who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, pulmonary fibrosis, and fibromyalgia, which forced her to retire early—Saucedo is active and upbeat on Facebook. She frequently posts pictures of her ninety-one-year-old mother, Silvestra; religious musings; favorite expressions in English and Spanish; and lots of emojis. At a quarter to six, on the same morning she said goodbye to her dog, she’d shared a quote attributed to Jane Goodall: “How is it possible that the most intellectual creature to ever walk the planet Earth is destroying its only home?” A few hours later, at 7:26 A.M., she took a photo of Silvestra lying down exhausted in bed in the house that they share. It had been a long week of mourning.

As a distraction from losing Sasha, and because they needed groceries, Sylvia and Silvestra drove to the Walmart four miles away, at the Cielo Vista Mall. While she was parking, Sylvia received a text from a friend inviting her to breakfast. She sent back a picture of the Walmart lot, at 9:21 A.M. Inside, they shopped. Then, smelling pancakes wafting from the McDonald’s within the store, they decided to have breakfast. “Thank God we stayed there,” Sylvia told me.

Midway through their meal, as her mother sipped her coffee, Sylvia noticed people running inside the store. “It must be a big sale,” her mother quipped. Sylvia sensed that something was wrong. “That’s when we heard the shots from the parking lot, by the main door,” Sylvia told me, which was only twenty feet away. “The cashier lady said, ‘¡Tirense en el suelo, esto es un tiroteo!’ ” (“Get on the floor, this is a shooting!”) “Mom got stuck on the bench, so I pulled her down by her blouse. She fell. I was afraid she’d break something.” Sylvia called 911. No answer. She called again, with the same result. “So I started recording with one hand,” she said. With the other, she held her mother, who was quietly praying and crying. “Her cheeks were shaking with every shot,” Sylvia told me.

Sylvia considered posting the video to Facebook with a plea—“There’s a devil here shooting at Cielo Vista, come help!”—but decided against it, worried that the shooter would somehow see the video and find her under the McDonald’s table. “So,” she told me, “I thought, No, I’ll wait.” In all, she stopped and started three short videos, from the floor, beginning at 10:39 A.M. They capture legs running through the store; a person crouching by a cash register; another body prone under a McDonald’s table; a stunned man looking for his wife as an employee begs him to take cover; another body dropping, limply, in an aisle.

Sylvia showed all three videos to me, narrating what happened. At one point, she referred to the shooter as “that demon over there.” She added that she meant “demon” literally. A third clip showed the view that she had of their eventual escape route, through a side door, beckoned by a Walmart employee. “I said, ‘We need to get out of here.’ Mom said, “Quiero mi café.” (“I want my coffee!”) “She was in shock. I told her the shooter was maybe looking for more ammunition, we had to go.” As they left, leaning against each other for strength, they realized that they were the only people still in the restaurant.

Outside, she went on, “it was like a nightmare, like a horror movie: people running and crying all over.” A man in a blood-soaked shirt stumbled toward an ambulance. Their car was at the back of the lot, and her mother was having trouble moving, so they caught a short ride there. As Sylvia finally drove out of the lot, with her hands shaking, a police car, coming the other direction on a one-way street, missed striking hers by inches.

Back home, Sylvia collapsed in her room. She crawled under her sheets and picked up the phone. She called her adult son. Then she logged on to Facebook, where her online community waited. After resting for about forty-five minutes, she posted a clip from the shooting—the one taken under the table that did not show anyone dying. Alongside it, in Spanish, Sylvia wrote, “What a horrible experience!!!! Shooting in the Walmart at Cielo Vista!! My mom and I were under the table recording! 911 never answered! We are very grateful to Jehovah God for having taken care of us!!!” The video has since been shared thirty-three thousand times and drawn nearly six thousand comments on the social-media platform. It has been viewed nearly two million times.

Some of the earliest viewers of Saucedo’s video of the shooting were journalists. She was flooded with so many texts and calls and direct messages from the news media that she couldn’t keep track of texts from her family and friends. She turned off the notifications on her phone.

Among the first to discover her video and reach out to her, Saucedo said, was a local El Paso TV news station. It aired and then shared her video with “Good Morning America”—without her permission, she told me. Saucedo assumed that that was how things worked. She was picked up at three-forty-five the next morning, as requested by “Good Morning America” ’s producers, and, after hours of coaching, briefly appeared on the show. Following that appearance, Saucedo—or her video, or both—made their way to CNN, ABC, and Univision. She was interviewed by Jorge Ramos and David Muir—“very professional and handsome,” she said of both. She received calls, or was otherwise contacted, by reporters and producers from Serbia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Colombia. A few offered her “a lot of money” for rights to the video, which she declined. “Every single channel reached out except Fox News,” she told me. (Days later, she offered to provide the videos to the F.B.I., and they looked through her phone, she said, despite her protests that she had personal photos and videos—of her recent attempts to lose weight—mixed in with the clips they were after.)

Saucedo took videos of eager journalists interviewing her, capturing one reporter who thrust his microphone in her face and said, “Can I ask you, what happened on Saturday? Just tell me your story.” She answered his questions and didn’t turn any other reporters away. “I wanted to help everybody,” she said. “I look at the interviews now,” Saucedo went on, in her living room, “and God knows what I was saying. I was like a zombie. I don’t know how I was even walking or talking.” She froze during an interview with MSNBC, she said, unable to speak. “The pressure,” she went on. “ ‘We want this, we want that.’ ”

During some interviews, bystanders pressured her to make political statements. Standing in front of the Walmart, where many of the interviews took place, strangers called out to Saucedo. “ ‘Why don’t you say this was Trump’s fault—labelling us as rapists, criminal, drugs dealers?’ ” she recalled them asking. “ ‘This is why this evil person killed so many Mexicans.’ ” In that moment, she was too shocked and scared to think critically about what had happened. “I couldn’t say it yet,” she told me. “And they got mad.” Speaking with me five days after the shooting, she said the cause of the shooting was clear. She said that she had added to the top of her original post, “Perfect definition of WHITE SUPREMACY,” in Spanish and English. “I do believe that now—that the President’s words helped cause this. But I couldn’t say it then. I couldn’t post on Facebook about white supremacy until a few days later,” she told me. “I was scared they’d come find me,” she said, of why she’d waited. Who would find her, I asked? “Crazy people,” she said. “White people. White supremacists. I don’t know.”

Her mother wandered out of a room in the house, where she’d been watching television in a floral nightgown. She sat down near us, petting a stuffed alpaca and watching Sylvia talk.

Saucedo went on, “The cameras, I said to them, ‘I’m still very hurt, I’m crying, I’m scared. I’m locked in my room. My mom and I are here by ourselves.’ ” But she did the interviews anyway. By Wednesday, by her own accounting, Saucedo had done nearly fifty interviews, most resulting in sound bites—“Good Morning America” aired about a minute—describing something she was still processing: hiding under the McDonald’s table as a twenty-one-year-old man, wearing safety glasses and ear protection, gunned down twenty-two people near her, injuring even more, with a legally purchased AK-47-style assault rifle.

There was another set of questions she was hearing, too, which made the questions about her trauma even harder. “People saying, ‘Why did you record that video? That’s not right,’ ” she recalled. “Well, I had faith we weren’t going to die. But I thought he’d shoot us, too. It was confusing, feelings going back and forth. I wanted people to see what we went through, to see that this isn’t right. Maybe to see my last moments, too, to make sure my son sees it.” She added, “People got mad, which made it all harder.” On Facebook, she replied to comments with heart emojis, not words. “I don’t hate,” she told me.

And what Saucedo felt now—beyond fear and anger at the shooter, the President, and a country consumed by hate—she wasn’t sure. After I arrived at her house, she closed and double-bolted her front door, which her dog had guarded for the past twelve years. An hour and a half into our conversation, Saucedo heard a faint noise in her house. It sounded innocuous to me, like a running toilet. She stopped suddenly, midsentence, to investigate. Fifteen minutes later, when there was a rapping at the window, she shot out of her seat and ran to the door. “¡Dios mio!” she said, discovering her sister outside. Saucedo began crying a little later. There was a tightness in her chest, she said, “a pain that won’t go away.” She went on, “I’m so scared. Now that the attention is going away, it’s just me and my thoughts.”

I asked how this experience would affect her politics. “I usually don’t vote,” Saucedo said. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. Not very political. But I’m sick of what the President has been saying about Mexicans. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I think he’s a racist and he needs to get voted out. I can say that now, finally.” Working on a military base for nearly two decades, Saucedo had encountered—and trusted—many kinds of people in her life. She’d never been afraid of particular races. But now white people will get a second look.

She didn’t know what to do with the viral video, though, which remained on her phone and on her Facebook page. The other, more graphic videos, she decided, would never become public. She asked me what I thought. I had no answer. She paused and said, “I guess I’ll leave it up a little longer. Then I need some rest.”

Some celebrity deaths knock you a bit further askew than others. The singer and songwriter David Berman wasn’t a celebrity, exactly, but, to many who came of age in the nineteen-nineties, in the thrall of indie rock, he was a beacon: a dark, elegant, and deeply nimble songwriter, a dude who seemed to know more than anyone should about the banalities, glories, and ravages of modern life. As my colleague Sarah Larson wrote, “Berman’s music seemed to alchemize pain; by the time it reached us, it had become beauty, wisdom, even humor.”

“There’s beasts and there’s men / And there’s something on this earth that comes back again.” Berman was always writing perfect little lines like that—hilarious and dire, good enough to jangle around your consciousness for years. When Berman announced his new project and a new record, both titled Purple Mountains, you would’ve known it was his music just by glancing at the song titles: “All My Happiness Is Gone,” “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” “Margaritas at the Mall.” Nobody else could be so funny and astute about the grand human paradox: that we all go on living, knowing full well that we’re dying.

“Margaritas at the Mall” recounts the beginnings of an existential crisis—fear of a godless universe, panic over impotency, inadequacy, and so on. Berman gave it this chorus:

Berman sang with a chatty, knowing baritone. His voice wasn’t particularly distinctive—it was rickety and loaded with ennui, the default mode of singing for lanky, middle-aged guitar players—but something about his deadpan intonation always made you feel as if you were in on the joke. His delivery was a squeeze on the arm.

Click Here: online rugby store malaysia

I interviewed Berman prior to the release of “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea,” in 2008. He’d just started talking to reporters again. We had a few old friends in common, people we’d known in Charlottesville, where each of us had briefly lived. (Our time in Virginia didn’t overlap, but I still recall mutual pals pointing out Berman-related landmarks—places he’d worked or drunk—as if they were sacred ground, which, I suppose, they were.) We met at a hotel bar in Greenwich Village. His wife, Cassie, was next to him; they seemed so happy. The three of us grinned the entire time. Berman was thrilling to talk to—loquacious and weird. A ten-word question might generate several paragraphs of rumination. Language just seemed to come so easily to him. (An e-mail from Berman was a gift, and that is something I have never in my life said about e-mail—warm, playful, bounteous.) I remember being cowed and excited by his intellect and strangeness, by how willing he’d been to engage with nearly any half-cooked idea or feeble theory that I could think of. After, I slipped my recorder back into my pocket, and squeezed it, like a good-luck charm, and thought of a Berman lyric: “I’m gonna shine out in the wild kindness / And hold the world to its word.”

I’ve spent many blissed-out hours trying to understand the way Berman’s songs work—what his tricks are, why they soar. One of my favorite tracks is “How to Rent a Room,” from 1996’s “The Natural Bridge.” The song’s meaning changes often for me—it is a weather system—but most days I understand it as a revenge fantasy of sorts, in which a jilted lover takes his own life, just after telling his wife to “Read the Metro section / See my name.” The Berman button is that precise reference to the Metro section, the most ordinary and banal part of a daily newspaper. A man’s entire life, now reduced to the Metro section! It is funny, and it is awful, and Berman instinctively understood that there is beauty and humor in these dumb, ordinary things—that the mundane might be the only place to really go searching for the sublime.

On Friday morning, Donald Trump said, on Twitter, “Serious discussions are taking place between House and Senate leadership on meaningful Background Checks. I have also been speaking to the NRA, and others, so that their very strong views can be fully represented and respected.” In a second tweet, Trump added, “I am the biggest Second Amendment person there is, but we all must work together for the good and safety of our Country. Common sense things can be done that are good for everyone!”

Trump isn’t the only Republican talking up the possibility of expanding the current system of background checks for gun purchases. For months now, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, has been sitting on a universal-background-checks bill that passed the House of Representatives. During a radio interview in his home state of Kentucky, on Thursday, McConnell rejected Democratic demands for an immediate recall of the Senate from its summer recess. However, McConnell also said that the issue of background checks would be “front and center” when Congress reassembles on its regular schedule, in September. “The President called me this morning about this,” McConnell added. “He’s anxious to get an outcome, and so am I.”

We have been here before, of course. Early last year, after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, Trump called for universal background checks and raising the age limit for purchasing rifles. Shortly after having dinner at the White House with the leaders of the N.R.A., however, he abandoned these proposals, citing a lack of political support. This humiliating retreat demonstrated that Trump, despite his popularity with Republican voters, wasn’t strong enough, or determined enough, to break the N.R.A.’s veto over gun policy.

In recent days, commentators and Republican political strategists have offered a number of reasons that things may be different now. For starters, opinion polls show overwhelming public support for enhanced gun-control measures, including the elimination of loopholes in the current background-check system, which doesn’t apply to unlicensed gun sellers. In a Morning Consult/Politico poll taken this week, eighty per cent of respondents, including seventy-four per cent of Republicans and people who lean Republican, said that they strongly support requiring background checks on all gun sales. (The figures are even higher if you include people who said that they “somewhat support” universal checks.) “I think we’ve reached a tipping point,” Scott Jennings, a political adviser to McConnell, told the Times. “The polling clearly supports that notion, and as long as the president is going to be for something, I think there will be momentum for it within the party.”

The N.R.A. has consistently opposed strengthening background checks, and almost all other gun-control proposals, of course. In a statement issued on Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the organization, declined to comment on his “private conversations with President Trump,” but he did say that “the NRA opposes any legislation that unfairly infringes upon the rights of law-abiding citizens. The inconvenient truth is this: the proposals being discussed by many would not have prevented the horrific tragedies in El Paso and Dayton.”

This response was eminently predictable, but the N.R.A. is facing a dual challenge to its grip on Capitol Hill. Internally, the organization is in turmoil, with supporters and board members questioning the lavish spending being done by LaPierre and other senior executives. After the Parkland shooting, according to a report in the Washington Post, LaPierre tried to get the N.R.A. to buy him and his family a 6.5-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in a Dallas gated community, because he needed somewhere more secure to live. Last week, three members of the N.R.A.’s board of directors quit. In a resignation letter, they said, “Our confidence in the NRA’s leadership has been shattered.”

Externally, the N.R.A. is also under fire. The office of the New York attorney general is investigating the organization’s tax-exempt status. And, in many parts of the country, a reënergized and well-financed gun-control lobby has challenged it politically, and even outspent it during the 2018 midterms. “I’ve never seen them weaker,” John Feinblatt, the president of the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, told USA Today. “I think they have been very much sidelined.”

That sounds encouraging. Still, as Trump decamps for the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical, beginning with the calendar. The usual pattern, which the N.R.A. and other opponents of gun control rely on, is for the political momentum behind gun-control efforts to ebb as memories of the latest atrocity recede. Congress isn’t due back until September 9th, which is a full month away.

Also, it is Trump we are dealing with, and he is notoriously averse to crossing rural and suburban gun owners, who make up a key part of his base. Even if the polls currently show overwhelming support for expanded background checks and other measures, Trump will be sensitive to a possible backlash, especially if the opposition includes some of his right-wing media outriders, such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Furthermore, there is a possibility that Trump will try to tie any gun-control measures he endorses to immigration-law changes that Democrats oppose, such as lengthening the period for which asylum-seeking families can be detained after crossing the border. In a tweet on Monday, Trump suggested “marrying” immigration and gun control. On Thursday, the Times reported that he has told some advisers that he “would like a political concession in exchange” for acting on gun control. If he insists on this linkage, the chances of getting any legislation passed are slim.

Finally, Trump has already passed on the most urgent need in the issue: a restoration of the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons, which mass shooters used, in the span of a week, in El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Gilroy, California. During a back-and-forth with reporters on Wednesday, Trump said that “there is no political appetite for it from the standpoint of the legislature.” He made this statement even though, for years, polls have consistently shown that most Americans favor restoring the ban on assault weapons, which a G.O.P.-controlled Congress allowed to expire, in 2004. In this week’s Morning Consult/Politico poll, seventy per cent of all voters, and fifty-four per cent of Republicans, expressed “strong support” or “some support” for prohibiting such weapons. Among Republican women, the support level was at sixty-four per cent.

The public is ahead of the political system. Tightening up background checks would help prevent criminals from purchasing guns. Expanding so-called red-flag laws would help families and judges to disarm some people who are clearly disturbed. But many of the individuals who have carried out gun massacres bought their weapons legally, or got somebody else to purchase them. Often, family members and friends don’t identify shooters as serious threats prior to their rampages. (On Friday, the Times reported that the mother of the shooter in El Paso did express concerns to police about her twenty-one-year-old son purchasing an AK-47 assault rifle, but she declined to identify herself or him.) As other countries have demonstrated, by far the most effective way to keep assault weapons out of the hands of these individuals is to ban their sale in the first place. That isn’t going to happen.

When she looked at you and addressed you by your Christian name, she made it sound like a promise, one that stood on the side of everything that was juicy, smart, black, amused, yours. In the old days, when ladies were “colored” and she herself was just a child, she had learned from those ladies, probably, the same eye-rolling, close-mouthed look of incredulity that she employed when she recounted a glaring error of judgment on someone else’s part, or something stupid someone said or didn’t know they were about to say. After she gave you that look, you never wanted to say anything dumb again, ever. If she took you in as a friend—and this was rare in a world where so many people wanted her time and felt they had a right to her time, given the intimacy of her voice—she was welcoming but guarded. Then, if you were lucky enough and passed the criteria she required of all her friends, which included the ability to laugh loud and long at your own folly, and hers, too, she was less guarded, and then very frank: there was no time for anything but directness.

Once she told me that when she was a young single mother raising her two boys, she would look in on her children as they slept. Here, Toni, the former student-actress, would clutch at her blouse to convey wonder and self-sacrifice as she looked down at her children. “This is the view I had of myself then,” she said, the laughter starting to bubble up in her chest. Because, the truth is, her kids weren’t having it. Indeed, one of her boys asked her not to roam around the room like that at night, it frightened him. And here she would burst out with a laugh that mocked the very idea of self-perception, let alone self-dramatization: they would always be knocked down by someone else’s reality.

She was a wonderful conversationalist with beautiful hands; good manicures were one of her few indulgences after a lifetime of tending to others, washing dishes, cleaning up, making do. When we first met, in 2002, she didn’t have to straighten out anyone else’s mess. Like the older women she described so beautifully in “The Bluest Eye,” she was, by that time, in fact and at last free. Free from the responsibility of having to please anyone but herself. She was excited to be herself. When you visited her, or ran into her at an event, she sat and told stories. She did this without the benefit of an iPhone to look certain details up. The details were in her head; she was a writer. As she described this or that, she drew you in not just by her choice of words but by the steady stream of laughter that supported her words, until, by the end of the story, when the scene, people, weather, were laying at your feet, she would produce a fusillade of giggles that rose and fell and then disappeared as she shook her head.

More truths: she didn’t like something I wrote about one of her books in an early piece and she said so. We were sitting in a large, empty restaurant near her home in Rockland County. She had driven us there with a speed and force that shocked me, but, then again, why should it have? She was Toni Morrison. This was one of the first times that we were alone. (Previously, we always met through friends.) When she said that my criticism displeased her, I turned around; I truly did not know whom she was talking to, and told her so. The person who wrote what she didn’t like was someone I didn’t remember being, someone I no longer identified with, a person who had probably tried to big himself up because ants always think they’re taller crawling on the shoulder of giants. After I said some version of all that, she said that she understood. And then the conversation began in earnest, but not before I had another shock, this one of realization: I had hurt Toni Morrison. Somehow, Toni Morrison could be hurt.

When you were with her, the fabled editor came out, and she saw your true measure as a person, and what you could do, or what she felt you could do, because she came up in publishing when editing was synonymous with care. I think she worried about my tendency to worry and not take up too much space as a writer, to let others go first, to draw a veil between me and the world out of shame and fear and trepidation. She had probably seen this tendency in a number of the women writers she nurtured over the years, and in some of the gay black male artists, such as Bill Gunn, whom she had loved, too. (When he was sick with AIDS, she went to the hospital to see him with one of her famous cakes. “I knew he couldn’t eat that cake,” she said. “But he was happy to have that cake.”) So when you stepped out, she applauded you. Once, I had gone with a friend to have some shoes made by a cobbler. When the shoes were finished, Toni saw me wearing them at a dinner party. I told her the story. She looked at me, beamed, and said, “That’s right, my shoes.”

Boldness can make you lonely, but she never complained of loneliness. She talked about the world as though it were in conversation with her. I have yet to meet anyone who could “read” the media with that kind of swiftness and sanity that she could. She saw the madness we’re living in now years ago because of certain trends in reporting and in literature. “The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me,’ ” she said.

As a gorgeous-looking student at Howard University, in the nineteen-fifties, Toni acted a bit with the Howard Players, a group then nurtured by our mutual friend, the late, great director and writer Owen Dodson. He told me what a superb actress she had been, beautiful in form and voice, and it’s always interesting to me how so many of the women writers I’ve admired—Colette, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni—had, without knowing it, first started to look for themselves, for their writer’s voices, on the stage. Acting and singing requires the performer to do two things simultaneously: be themselves and not be themselves but a character, giving life to a script they did not write.

Of course, that condition is not unknown to women in general, and when Toni used to say, “I didn’t want to grow up to be a writer, I wanted to grow up to be an adult,” she was saying a lot. Because being an adult required a lot, namely taking the human race and one’s role in it seriously. She wrote what she called “village literature,” for the tribe, by which she meant black people. To be understood in the diaspora that we call black life requires a high degree of intellectual alacrity and technical finesse: black people speak many languages in part because they’ve had to survive many different kinds of dominant cultures in order to live, let alone prosper, make things, make a mark. It takes a hugely ambitious artist to say that I will speak to these people—my people—in a voice we can all understand, together, just us, and if anyone else wants to follow, they can. To do that, Toni closed the door on what far too many writers and artists of color become preoccupied with when they make, directly or indirectly, “whiteness” their subject. Toni kicked patriarchy to the curb with barely a backward glance.

Part of the extraordinary power of “Sula” is that it’s a world where men are not the focus. It’s the sound of women’s voices that takes precedence, makes the story. About two-thirds through the book, Sula, an artist without an art, a free colored woman, returns to the town where she grew up and where she was raised, in part, by her grandmother Eva.

The brilliance of this conversation is in its economy and the reality of the women’s talk: if you grew up anywhere near these types of characters, it’s like listening to a transcript of dialogue that you’ve heard in the privacy of your own home, or a relative’s. Sula shows her ass to show her anger, and then some.

When Toni talked about writers and books she admired, like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” she let it be known that she was a little annoyed by Ellison’s presupposition that his protagonist didn’t exist in the world because white people didn’t see him. Ellison’s protagonist wasn’t invisible to her, she said; she knew those guys. And she showed us how her other characters knew her men: sometimes in anger, sometimes in strife, always with great interest. She turned the mirror of the world—her world—on them, and in doing so forced her male characters to do what black men weren’t supposed to do very well in real life: stay, if only for a time. And by having them stay, they changed things, even if they were crazy, like Shadrack, in “Sula” (1973), or the doomed Plum, in the same novel, or the tyrannical Macon Dead II, in “Song of Solomon” (1977), or the dead Bill Cosey, in “Love” (2003), or Frank Money, a latter-day Odysseus searching for his sister, in “Home” (2012). The point is the men were engaged, seen.

In “Tar Baby” (1981), we meet Jadine, a black fashion model who falls in love with Son, a renegade soul. Class, one of the great, unexplored subjects in our disparate black American life, is what separates them, ultimately, but I don’t think even Morrison’s pal, James Baldwin, saw that. In an interview that Baldwin gave with Quincy Troupe toward the end of his life, he said that Toni was an allegorist, but that’s not really true. Baldwin came of age as a novelist during the days of “From Here to Eternity” and “The Naked and the Dead”—an epoch defined by “muscular prose” and stories steeped in realism. Baldwin got lost in Toni’s atmosphere, which she sometimes got lost in, too. In a 1981 interview, she said, “I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, ‘Would you stop this beauty business.’ And I say, ‘Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.’ ”

Toni, an avid gardener, was a naturalist in a world where nature had been abused, and used for commerce, just as the bodies that harvested it were used for commerce. Nature appears through the cracks of many of her books. Sometimes flowers don’t grow in her stories, because life is stunted in one place; sometimes the junk surrounding junked lives becomes a kind of garden. Close your eyes and remember poor doomed Pecola Breedlove at the end of “The Bluest Eye,” pecking among all that broken glass, with her dream of beauty—white beauty—contributing to her downfall. Or the outrageously lush landscape that makes up the ground at Isle des Chevaliers, in “Tar Baby,” or the woods and plain in “A Mercy” (2008): the outside world is beautiful and remains beautiful, even after we get our hands on it. Sometimes, when I read her, I think of that extraordinary remark by Diane Arbus, when she described the beauty and despair she found when photographing in nudist colonies: “It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation had said, ‘All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.’ And they did.”

Toni’s greatness as a novelist had a lot to do with her skill—her great ability—to show how we mucked up the landscape, not just in the world but in ourselves. Slavery was one way we mucked it up, of course, and the enormous wound at the center of “Beloved” (1988) has to do with how slavery not only killed bodies but made a mess of our minds, thus creating a particularly American way of thinking. Because of this history, Toni’s characters live in her stories and stand outside of the action at the same time. Her late masterpiece, “A Mercy,” is a novel about the mental institution of slavery in this country, but, on another level, the book is about voices and how those voices fill a new American landscape with difference: We all came from somewhere else, so what makes an American? One of the more powerful voices in “A Mercy” belongs to Florens, a young woman whose search for love leads her to some pretty dangerous places, including a deep vulnerability of the heart. You can hear it in her voice, especially after her lover, the Blacksmith, leaves her on the plantation where she’s a slave.

Toni’s Florens is an imagined voice rooted in the author’s brilliant ability and desire to feel what flesh feels like outside one’s own experience, and what it takes for love to survive, even when it’s been left. Her work is a more-than-credible argument for the power of invention. “Stop thinking about saving your face,” she said, in her 1993 Nobel Prize speech. “And tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.” She made up stories, all right, tales she developed within a distinctly literary context. Indeed, she’s not given enough credit for being a high modernist, the equal to the modernists she admired and wrote about in graduate school: Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She also adored Gabriel García Márquez, another novelist who was interested in the corrosive and redemptive power of natural phenomena, plant life, and the earth. Once she asked me what I thought of his work. I confessed that I hadn’t read it in a long time. She smiled, and said, “Me? I gobble it all up.”

What these artists have in common, of course, is a grandness of intention shaped by certain ideas of what fiction can do and should do for the reader of literary books. From the beginning, Toni was working on several levels at once, but complexity of thought—ideas in fiction—was chief among her concerns. Nearly equal to that was the desire to find the plasticity in language, that which can bend and flow with a character’s thoughts and feelings. This is different from being postmodernist. As a postmodernist, she would have had to intrude on the story with her own observations and comments, and where would the fiction be in that? If she were going to create a fractured world, as she did in “Jazz” (1992), the fracture had to exist in whole cloth, so to speak, which is to say within a narrative that she shaped and controlled.

She believed that storytelling was the best way “to learn anything.” Part of what readers respond to in her work is how she gives them the copyright on their own lives. And she created the illusion, at times, that her characters arrived at your doorstep, full-blown. (She used to joke that Pilate, in “Song of Solomon,” was so powerful a presence when she was writing her novel that she had to remind the brilliant matriarch that it was her book.) But not one of them could have found their freedom without her extraordinary discipline. It was the discipline underlying her craft that allowed us to hear her fictional citizens as they talked to one another and themselves, thus allowing Toni’s readers to talk to and listen to themselves, as well.

Still, no matter the individual isolation of Toni’s characters, they are generally given the opportunity to speak to someone else; this was one way she showed us their complexity in the world. Claudia and Pecola, in “The Bluest Eye”; Nel and Sula, in “Sula”; Milkman and Guitar, in “Song of Solomon”; Jadine and Son, in “Tar Baby”; Sethe and Denver and Beloved, in “Beloved”; Joe and Violet and Dorcas, in “Jazz”; the women in “Paradise”—all of these beings are alone together and made up of a multiplicity of intention, of hate and love, creation and destruction, hope and crap. Sometimes the love is strongest between two men, sometimes between two women, and sometimes, now, I wonder what it would have been like for her to create a world that was as fluid as her language, one where gender wasn’t seen in opposition to or in support of itself and just was. What an interesting, provocative thing to say, she might have said. And then she would have tucked the idea away, maybe, to make use of at a later date, perhaps, in yet another one-of-a-kind of novel.

A couple of years ago, the Indian blogger Mayank Austen Soofi took me, in an auto-rickshaw, to his favorite brothel. It was in Delhi’s illegal and infamous red-light district, on Garstin Bastion Road, or G.B. Road, a crumbling commercial thoroughfare that I had encountered only in the lewd imaginings of school friends years before. Soofi had a firmer grasp of the place. He had spent two years regularly visiting the brothel, first as an English teacher for the proprietor’s sons and, later, as a journalist. He published a sensitive, book-length account of the brothel’s workers, in 2012, titled “Nobody Can Love You More,” and he had stayed in touch with the people who live there.

After being accosted on the twilit G.B. Road by pimps in T-shirts who asked “Jana hai?” (“Want to go?”), we climbed a flight of steep, uneven, betel-stained stairs and entered a large pistachio-green waiting room with a low ceiling. A single light bulb cast a bleary gleam on framed pictures of the Hindu god Krishna, the Sikh saint Guru Nanak, and a Muslim Sufi shrine—a menu of sin absolvers to choose from. A tall woman in a sari shook our hands and led us into the next room, where we were greeted by a domestic scene: two men sprawled on the ground drinking tea in front of an industrial fan; a five-year-old boy in a skullcap, praying on a mat; two young men loafing before a PC; and two sacrificial goats, straining into the room from their tether on the balcony. This was the one-room living space of the proprietor’s family. At night, the adults slept on the floor of the pistachio-green waiting room; when customers arrived, later in the evening, they would step over and around the adults’ supine bodies.

“So, Soofi, when are you going to get married?” the woman in the sari asked, playfully.

Soofi laughed. “Could we get some tea?”

Soon, we were sitting barefoot on the floor, listening to one of the men—the fiftysomething owner, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, a lungi, and a white vest—as he offered a practiced lament about the dying brothel business. The boy and the two young men—the three sons—had gathered round, too; Soofi introduced them fondly. “This one almost became a fundamentalist but now writes a blog called Red Light Insider,” he told me, gesturing to a bespectacled man in his twenties. The next oldest son was a bodybuilder. “You like Eminem, right?” Soofi asked him. The young man shook his head, muttering his new enthusiasm for an artist whose name I’d never heard. The youngest child, the one who had been praying, attended an élite private school—although, Soofi said, the boy never told his classmates where he lived or what his father did for a living.

“How did he get admission?” I asked the owner, knowing the scarcity of seats in such schools.

“This man who’s laid down on the ground,” the owner said, pointing to Soofi and smiling. “He’s the one who got him into private.”

Soofi is a waifish man with glittering eyes and a tumultuous mop of prematurely graying hair. His head was resting on a pillow by this point, and the top buttons of his slim-fitting blue shirt were undone, revealing two pendants. “Why am I not coming here more often?” he said. “It’s like home.”

For the past thirteen years, Soofi, now thirty-nine, has made it his business to get to know the most neglected corners of India’s capital and to develop an intimacy with them that he transmits through various print and online franchises: a feverishly updated blog, called the Delhi Walla; a swollen Instagram feed; a biweekly column for a leading newspaper; and four guidebooks, in addition to his book about the brothel. His pieces range from quick sketches of the down-and-out in Delhi to bitchy reports of literary parties and on-the-go shots of trees, monuments, doorways, and the gorgeously polluted sky. His blog and his Instagram feed have a dreamy, in-medias-res feel to them. “They are like migratory birds who make permanent, if makeshift, nests in a faraway land,” one post, about a group of forty Kashmiri men whom Soofi saw living in Old Delhi’s Turkman Gate Bazaar, begins. In another, he explains that the traditional “goatskin waterbags,” once used to sell cold water, are called “mashaks.” Occasionally, his voice rises to complaint: “Outrageous. No other word to describe it. A new garish pink building, still splotched with cement stains, now stands right beside what is probably the last important Mughal monument in India—Zafar Mahal.”

These are details about the city where I grew up that I would not have known were it not for Soofi. There are other Delhi enthusiasts online, but no one can match Soofi for volume: he has published nearly three thousand blog posts and about thirty thousand Instagrams; he uploads fifty photos a day and is trying to profile one per cent of Delhi’s population. He’s up to only two hundred and twenty-three so far. Still, it’s impossible to doubt the sincerity of his crazy goal. He is so devoted to the idea of the city that he has refused to establish a permanent residence in any neighborhood, preferring instead to sleep at the houses of various friends or at his parents’ place—or in the homes of readers, whom he promises to profile in exchange for a bed. All of his work together may add up to one of the most eccentric and encyclopedic ground-level portraits of a megacity in the Internet age.

When Soofi came to Delhi, in 2003, at the age of twenty-three, from the corruption-riddled state of Uttar Pradesh, he was intimidated by the city’s cosmopolitanism. “For the first few years in Delhi, I couldn’t stop inside McDonald’s,” he told me. “I would think, Could I coherently place my order in English?” He was poor and depressed, performing odd jobs at a major hotel. Living in a slum, he began venturing out to Delhi’s book bazaars, where he discovered Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Marcel Proust, Arundhati Roy. After enrolling in a Web-design course at the behest of his parents, he started a blog called Ruined by Reading.

Then, one fateful night, as Soofi tells it—he loves to indulge in the large, breathless gestures of an art promoter—he found himself in Nizamuddin, the shantytown that surrounds the eponymous Sufi tomb where individuals of different faiths congregate to make wishes and receive blessings. The site’s domed mausoleum, built in the fourteenth century, is an oasis of marble, and devotees recline quietly on its ample platforms. One reaches the tomb via narrow alleys that are contrapuntally chaotic. When I visited Nizamuddin with Soofi, after tea at the brothel, the alleys were dense with diners thronging food stalls; parked scooters, with live goats tied to them, in preparation for Ramadan; bent beggars, asking for alms; and a group of skullcapped men, from the evangelical group Tablighi Jamaat, solemnly sitting at a long table. “It sounds crude,” Soofi told me, of his first visit to Nizamuddin, “but, at that point, I saw the meat shops and crowds, and I felt I was in West Asia”—“Arabian Nights” territory. He also glimpsed the secular and pluralistic India that he had previously only read about in books and seen in movies.

Secularism is enshrined in the Indian Constitution and was, before the ascendance of Hindu nationalism, in the nineteen-nineties, a dominant strain of political thought in India, an antidote to theocratic Pakistan, across the border. But secularism in India never involved the absence of religion. Rather, it idealized the kind of syncretic practice embodied by Sufism, which is an osmotic form of Islam and has Muslim and even some Hindu adherents. Soon after his epiphany at Nizamuddin, Mayank, who grew up Hindu, adopted the last name Soofi, adding Austen as a middle name, in tribute to Jane. (A pendant bearing her face in profile hung from a thread around his neck until he lost it, last year; the necklace was sent by an admirer from England.) The blog about reading gave way to a blog about Delhi, one that has never stopped growing.

He returns to the Sufi tomb every night. The shopkeepers and beggars all know him; a man at the entrance to the shantytown said, “I follow you!” when he spotted Soofi on our visit. Until a year ago, Soofi was never without his Canon 6D camera, which hung prominently from a leather strap around his neck and did for him what the white suit did for Tom Wolfe: marking him as an eccentric, licensed to do eccentric things. These days, he primarily uses his iPhone to shoot, brandishing the camera only occasionally. During our visit, Soofi spied a handsome Muslim man in a black kurta and an elaborate yellow shawl sitting on the marble floor outside the shrine. “Can I take your picture?” Soofi asked him. Bemused and on his cell phone, the man shook his head. “Please?” Soofi said. The man shook his head again, and Soofi glanced longingly at him as we walked away, comparing the experience to romantic rejection. “It’s like when a person turns you down, you really want to have sex with them,” he said.

Usually, after a little coaxing, even Delhi’s hard-bitten inhabitants melt. Soofi takes their pictures with his camera or with his iPhone, jots down a quick profile or caption on his phone, and uploads the photos. I asked if he feels a kinship with Humans of New York, the popular online project created by Brandon Stanton, a bond trader turned photographer from Georgia. Soofi bristled. “I started before Humans of New York,” he said. “Just because you’re in New York, which is considered a real place, he’s getting noticed.” When Stanton visited Delhi in 2014, as part of a global trip to document places that he said generated “the most extreme headlines,” Soofi penned a deliciously comic account of the “handsome New Yorker” being mobbed by frenzied selfie-seeking fans. (Stanton had to flee the meet-and-greet.) Soofi’s own aesthetic is much less slick, and more antiquarian, than Stanton’s, and Soofi’s captions have a more idiosyncratic voice—they often employ silly and pretentious literary references that seek to elevate the subject, however nonsensically. A well-groomed bearded man bending over a broad-lipped cup mysteriously represents “The Edward Said Way of Drinking Hot Milk #food #orient.” A woman’s foot poking out of a sari is “A Rare Glimpse of Poetess Emily Dickinson’s Dayjob Feet #feet.” Soofi is sensitive and elegiac in his treatment of poverty; in one moving photograph, a homeless Muslim man with a white beard and a sun-darkened complexion nods off outside the bright-blue tarpaulin folds of a makeshift tent. The caption reads “Imperial Chamber of the Present Mughal.” In the comments, a reader sheds emoji tears.

Soofi likes to maintain an air of mystery about himself and his past. His blog and Instagram account convey a sense that he is in constant motion, surveilling the entire city. Many posts begin, “One evening The Delhi Walla came across,” and pictures are often captioned “Seen somewhere in Delhi,” as though he had happened upon something by accident, when, in fact, the sighting may have been orchestrated. (When we met for lunch one day, he took a photo of me, which he later labelled as an “Author Spotting.”) Inspired by roving photographers like Eugène Atget and Bill Cunningham, he has turned himself into a character—the restless, dreamy flâneur, at peace only in the streets.

But, these days, the streets are not often peaceful: the news is afire with stories of Muslims being lynched for supposedly carrying beef. Just last month, a Muslim man accused of stealing a motorcycle in the state of Jharkhand was tied to a post and beaten for twelve hours while being forced to chant the names of Hindu gods. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reëlected in May, by an even larger margin than expected, expressed “sadness” over the incident but did little to quell the rising anti-Muslim hysteria that helped bring him to power. Soofi is drawn primarily to the marginalized and to the literary; he rarely photographs Delhi’s Punjabi residents, who are roughly thirty-five per cent of the city’s population. He also avoids politics. In his photographs, Muslim men and women lounge picturesquely in the narrow streets of their neighborhoods, but we get little sense that these are the people whose lives are threatened by the rise of Modi and of Hindu nationalism. Soofi’s work, which once felt to me like an extension of reality, now increasingly feels like an escape from it.

Don’t his wanderings take him to the doors of Hindu nationalists? I asked Soofi recently. After all, they make up a majority of Delhi’s electorate. (Modi’s B.J.P., or Indian People’s Party, won all seven of the city’s seats in the Indian parliament.) “I don’t talk about politics now, because, no matter what you say, you’re walking on eggshells,” he said. “In my kind of work, I don’t want distractions. I just want to work, to find beauty and sadness and express it.” He went on to say that, of course, he wanted “to write about people who I don’t agree with, because they are part of my world.” But he said that he didn’t “need to go to their houses and tell them I don’t agree with them. I’ll do it indirectly. What are their pursuits, what they wear, what are the gods in their drawing rooms? They’re not foreigners.”

Occasionally, however, Soofi makes oblique political gestures. In May, after Modi took a dig at Delhi’s liberal élites by terming them the Khan Market Gang, a reference to the upscale shopping district that Soofi visits daily, Soofi posted photos, on Instagram and Twitter, of the working-class people in the market who often go unseen: the tea sellers, sweepers, and day laborers. He captioned one of the photos “To Honest Hardworking Khan Market Jobs That Pay the Bills.” More recently, when Modi's government took a series of alarming steps to assert control over the disputed territory of Kashmir, India's only state with a Muslim majority, Soofi posted a photo of an elegant man draped in textiles next to the caption “Lost in Thoughts… a Hawker from Kashmir.” But otherwise, since Modi’s reëlection, Soofi has kept to his usual routines. He visits a new neighborhood in the morning, for his newspaper column, and ends up in Khan Market, where he stops by Bahrisons Booksellers, before departing for Nizamuddin. This is not a panoptic vision of the full variety of Delhi; like a novelist who creates an illusion of comprehensiveness from a sliver of metropolitan life, Soofi wants us to inhabit his version of the city.

Soofi says that Proust is his favorite writer, and his project has, over the years, taken on an increasingly Proustian quality. He has been passing in and out of the same neighborhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes, ones that might not be evident to a viewer unless she clicked a hashtag on Instagram and scrolled through reams of old photos of one place or another. How did a tea stall on a particular corner change as the surrounding city swelled past sixteen million inhabitants? What clothes came into fashion? What once familiar items began to vanish? Did the brothels of G.B. Road fall, unnoticed, into disrepair? Years from now, one might answer questions like these by rummaging through the archive of the Delhi Walla, even if the secular Delhi he so fondly chronicles has ceased, once and for all, to exist.