The finger cut, to save the hand.
Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks.
A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.
Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook but he’d read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.
Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.
For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
I think he loved us equally, but differently.
After all, life is not a Hindi movie.
It’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’t know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.
I guess some stories do not need telling.
She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
You don’t order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them ‘sister’ the next.
It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.
If there was a God, he’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing.
She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.
You’ve always been a tourist here. You just didn’t know it.
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.