With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.
When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
I am a Maoist sympathiser. I’m not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.
Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.
The fact is that America’s weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.
By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.
People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it’s distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it’s everywhere. So it’s a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I’ve spent my whole life fighting tradition. There’s no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.
I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.
Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They’re the symbol of nationalism to many.