Near the end of his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recalls a phone conversation with his wife Michelle after getting elected to the U.S. Senate, a conversation during which he began to tell her about a significant piece of legislation that he was fighting to get passed. But Michelle Obama had something else on her mind. She said to her husband, “We have ants.”

Ants?

Yes, they were the problem. In the kitchen and in the bathroom upstairs. Michelle wanted Barack to pick up ant traps for their home. This conversation made the rookie Senator wonder if someone like Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.

The point of the anecdote, I think, was to establish that Obama’s needs, and his family’s needs, even when he became a Senator, were ordinary. But a part of the story’s purpose is also to tell us that it is Michelle Obama who keeps Barack practical and grounded.

Was this the task that she was once again burdened with on Monday night?

Not to put too fine a point on it but ants just didn’t belong in Pepsi Center. The place is huge, its interiors soar. The very scale of things suggests size and ambition and vast sums of money. It occurred to me as I stood outside was that the building could swallow several of Saddam’s palaces.

In fact, I was still unprepared for the immensity inside and it took my breath away. If the practical entered the picture, as it must, at the level of planning and detail, it was only in the service of something grand. Michelle Obama delivered a powerful and deft speech, telling the story of her family and attempting earnestly to define herself for strangers. Except that she was also responding in a very precise way to criticism made of her in the past, and this open act, because it was being performed on such a big public stage, threatened each utterance by exposing its fragility.

I understood this more fully only when I came out of the Pepsi Center, and a friend of mine, who is black and a writer, sent me a text message from upstate New York saying that Michelle’s humanity had been diminished that evening: the white majority had imposed on her the view that she could be considered acceptable only if she said nothing critical of her own country.

It is of course self-evident that political conventions are merely as real as made-for-television movies. Everything individual or human, even at the moment it is trying to assert itself, gets quickly swallowed up in the staging of the spectacle. Except when life departs from script, as when Obama’s daughters appeared on screen and little Sasha kept interrupting her father during his video appearance from Missouri: “Hi, Daddy.” “Hi, Girardo family.” “Daddy, what city are you in?” While Sasha had the mike in her hand, it was as if television had returned us to the accents of the real.

This is the right moment to turn to Hillary Clinton who is surely the most artificial politician to have achieved prominence in the world in recent times. And tonight, inside a packed Pepsi Center abuzz with anticipation, I was waiting with a barely suppressed dread for her speech to begin. And to see beamed on the giant TV screen behind her, the trademark tight thin-lipped smile stretched while delivering a cutting remark. Or, heaven forbid, her hideous laughter.

But when she began to speak, I was moved by the emotion of the crowd in the tiers that rose above me. In the opening moments, we were looking at a sea of white placards which had Hillary’s name written on them. The crowd seemed to let out a sigh like the sea. It would have been easy to let the moment get drowned in regret, but, instead, there was a shift. Instead of speaking about why she ran in the race, and what she learned during it, Clinton began to speak more clearly about the need to support and elect Barack Obama. Everyone was now waving thin blue signs that said Hillary on one side, and Unity on the other. The euphoria was intense.

After having sat through some good speeches and several bad ones, and, needless to add, worse music, the crowd was on its feet and screaming by the time Hillary Clinton began to quote Harriet Tubman. “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going…”

But, as always with Hillary, it is easy to fall into the trap of ambivalence and contradiction: the piece of advice in the throats of twenty thousand inside the Pepsi Center tonight—keep going!—was that the advice for the nominee, or more for her own loyal and embittered cadre?

My second dispatch for the Indian Express.

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“It is Michelle’s blackness that has deeply disturbed many Americans and much of the press, and it is that same blackness that has endeared her to many, but not all, black Americans. For those of us who share her race, gender and generation, the negative reaction she has inspired is stunning. As with Michelle, we are the daughters of hard working, even struggling, parents.

And, when we went off to predominantly white, elite colleges and universities it was with the reminder that we must do better than well, and that we dare not forget those we left behind. Why are black women like Michelle Obama, black women who have been educated alongside and worked with white Americans as equals, so unfamiliar to so many Americans?”

This from my friend Farah Griffin blogging for NPR from Denver. Read more.

The Sepia Mutineers are here too. I have spent some time with Abhi and Ravi, and will write about them in one of my dispatches.

[P.S.: My friend and colleague Kiese Laymon says anyone but Hillary Clinton as the chief ally.]