Siddhartha Deb’s “City of Brume,” one of the novellas that make up his 2023 novel The Light at the End of the World, is set in a nightmarish “near future” version of Delhi. The story epitomises the turn away from the global city that has been explored in this volume. Reflecting on Deb's novella and the essays in this volume, this Afterword asks, what new critical vocabularies and interpretive modes do we need for reading the contemporary city? How do cultural texts grapple with a city’s uneven arrival at “the global”, and what kinds of affective experiences define contemporary forms of urban disaffection?