It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.
I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone? From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself.
In the next room Baby Kochamma heard the noise and came to find out what it was all about. She saw Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced.
Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel’s eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha’s words’ had been. He couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.
Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end.
There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.
The doors had not two, but four shutters of paneled teak so that in the old days, ladies could keep the bottom half closed, lean their elbows on the ledge and bargain with visiting vendors without betraying themselves below the waist. Technically, they could buy carpets, or bangles, with their breasts covered and their bottoms bare. Technically.
It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.
Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their time, attention, funds, research, space, sophistication, and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, then the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than non-violence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable.
She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
Thinking made her throat ache. That was a good reason not to think about seeing a psychiatrist.
When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors. It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill.
Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?
The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death.
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn’t committed.
Funding as fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.
Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.