Reading. Ideally, reading happens in a vacuum, a safe place to leave your body behind. You find somewhere peaceful to sit so that some chunk of your frontal lobe can climb up behind the machinery of someone else's eyeballs and take in the view. That's the ideal situation anyhow. Reader arrives via library, via quiet morning in bed, via some sort of sensory deprivation chamber and knocks back the whole work in one glorious gulp. This sort of thing used to be pretty common.

Of course these days most of the words that make it to my eyeballs are beamed up from the little screen nestled in my palm, and I am rarely reading them in monastic isolation. I'm on at the back of a crowded bus, or on a subway platform, or waiting for a friend at a bar. I look up, get distracted, loose the thread and then dive back in, dragging all that new material from the world in alongside the text. This results in an entirely different reading experience, and an interesting cross-pollination of story and the surrounding scene can occur. Some new third thing is born - a storyscene creature. And on this morning that third thing felt bigger, by far, than its component pieces.

I'm visiting Becca & Meg at the moment, and Becca is the assistant coach of the women's rowing team at Stanford. One of the many perks of hanging out with these guys is that I am occasionally invited to come to rowing practice, which activity occupies an oddly nostalgic place in my heart. I did not love my stint as a rower in college, but I do miss the cultish camaraderie of it.  And even though Stanford runs a much fancier, better funded and competitively successful cult than I was ever part of, the component pieces are still there: the hellish hour, the private sunrise, the magical chunk sound of oars snapping out of the water in unison.  And the pride.  At my school, the pride came from being part of an underfunded program that operated out of a rusted shed and pushed off from a rotty plastic dock. At Stanford it seems to be the pride of the victor, not the underdog. It's a pride that feels at home in a boathouse that could easily be mistaken for a mansion, a pride that takes for granted its fleet of $40,000 boats, to say nothing of its world-class coaching staff.

And that was generally where my brain was at while I sat in the front seat of the truck we'd arrived in, waiting for practice to wind down. After a few minutes of waiting, I flipped on my phone and started reading articles from the New York Times's Sunday section, the very best of which was Ellen Barry's Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats, a brief and brutal look in to what life is like for women in low caste, small town India. Barry follows a group of women over the course of several weeks as they fight the village elders for the right to work in a local meat factory. The story itself is gripping, but the most vivid sections are where she is giving the reader some context, helping us understand the full futility of the position these women find themselves in.

The women of their community live by rules: If an older man approaches, they cannot sit on any surface above the ground, so it is not unusual to see them suddenly slither down off cots and chairs. They are forbidden to have physical contact with men from outside the community, with the exception of physicians or bangle sellers.

After reading that paragraph, I looked up to find Becca. Outside the truck, the Stanford girls were cooling off from practice, chatting, stretching, hosing off the boats and grazing from the box of granola bars and oranges that had been set out in the trailer. Becca was across the parking lot, deep in conversation with the head coach, and the other assistant coach was over to one side, explaining things to a young recruit and her mother. The sun was fully up and the day looked like it was going to be perfect and blue in that way only days on the California coast can be. After a while, the girls began to collect around the coaches, to be debriefed before being released for the rest of Saturday.

I looked down at my phone.

At first they went to work with their stomachs knotted with fear that a strange man might grab their hand. At this prospect, even Geeta’s nerve collapsed. Once, while carrying a load of mud at a factory that crushes bones for animal feed, she slipped and fell into a 10-foot trench, her leg buckling beneath her. But when the factory’s clerk, a Muslim, reached a hand down to help her up, she jerked away, as if his touch would scald her.

And on it went. This was not an article about overcoming the odds. It was a very clear-eyed look at what life is like for women in a country that will soon (5 years?) become the world's most populous. Or, to put it another way, a clear eyed look at horrors that are becoming more common.  The cross pollination of scene and story began to balloon. Sitting here, amongst elite female athletes from one of the most elite institutions in the richest country on earth, I was reading about the world's poorest female workers: illiterate, beaten down and literally fighting their way up from the muddy ditch outside a factory that grinds bones.

It is difficult to imagine two groups of women sharing less, and yet the simple fact that they are women made the world around me almost shimmer for a moment. Looking through the windshield at the college students, stretching in their burgundy spandex, then looking down to the screen where women of the same age hunkered in the mud, wrapped in rags, the immediate feeling was a kind of vertigo. If I had been somewhere else - a library perhaps - my brain would have known what to do. A story of the downtrodden would have merited a furrowed brow or a shake of the head before moving on to the next article. You leave your body behind in a library. But here, reading amidst the perfect counterpoint to the thing being read, I felt implicated somehow. For the briefest instant I was the medium of transmission point between two poles. The unholy symmetry of the thing had stretched my moral imagination to the breaking point, and I watched, thoughtless, weightless, as this third thing rose up between the text and the context, encompassed it all for a blinding, incomprehensible moment and then faded back in to a pale blue California minute.