These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.
There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. They were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.
All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die.
An Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown.
Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught, Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.
The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.
Silence hung in the air like secret loss.
He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn’t tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?
Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.
Reading Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.
To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?
But it’s hard to say where experience ends and imagination begins. The story is by no means a true story. But the feelings in it are.
As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought.
Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.
I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It’s India’s best export.
Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war.
They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu’s songs, people avoided her, making little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.
Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.