When Mowgli first entered the village he hoped to feel at home.
These people were the same kind of creature as him.
But their language felt strange and their customs made no sense.
They cooked their food and slept inside houses with walls.
Mowgli had never done any of these things in his life.
He missed the wolf pack and the river and the trees.
Mowgli belonged fully to neither world he knew.

When Mowgli entered the human village for the first time he expected to feel at home.
These were his own people — the same kind of creature as him in shape and in size.
But their language felt strange in his mouth and their customs made very little sense to him.
They cooked their food and they slept indoors and they avoided the forest after dark.
Mowgli had done none of these things in his entire life and could not understand why they did.
He missed the sound of the wolf pack and the smell of the river and the feel of bark under his feet.
He was human by birth but the jungle had made him into something that fit nowhere completely.
Mowgli belonged fully to neither world he knew.

When Mowgli first entered the human village at the edge of the jungle, he had fully expected that he would finally feel at home.
After all, these were his own people in the most basic biological sense — the same species, the same shape, the same general way of existing in the world.
But their language felt awkward and foreign in his mouth, and their customs made almost no sense to him when he tried to observe them carefully.
They cooked their food with fire instead of eating it raw, they slept indoors inside stone walls, and they avoided the forest altogether after the sun had gone down.
Mowgli had never done a single one of these things in his entire life, and he could not quite understand why the villagers insisted on them.
He missed the specific sound of the wolf pack hunting at twilight, the smell of the river in the hot afternoon, and the feel of rough bark beneath his bare feet.
He was human by birth, certainly — but the long years of jungle living had made him into a creature who fit neither world completely and could not pretend otherwise.
It was not that either world rejected him outright; it was that each world had expectations he could only ever partly meet.
Mowgli belonged fully to neither world he knew.