What you don’t want is always going to be with you What you want is never going to be with you Where you don’t want to go, you have to go And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.
In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick on the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.
At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope – that the good fortune of others might one day be hers.
The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves.
Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don’t leave you be.
Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else.
It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.
She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.
It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like.
Asha believed a person seeking betterment should try as many schemes as possible, since it was hard to predict which one might work.
But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence.
If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?
The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible.
In the age of globalization – an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age – hope is not a fiction.
The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe.