People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.
I feel the illusion I’ve twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet.
It is odd, isn’t it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It’s a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer’s block, so I’ve done it ever since. Librarians must hate me.
In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.
A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.
People don’t believe in consequences anymore.
There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.
Lightning’s echo comes as thunder. And the city waits for thunder’s echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.
Children are excellent judges of character, you know.
I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter.
Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honour the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mould.
Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help.
She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste.
One’s relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire. Moreover the pane of a window could itself become shrapnel so easily, shattered by a nearby blast, and everyone had heard of someone or other who had bled out after being lacerated by shards of flying glass.
A little paranoia crawls into my lap, purring loudly.
I get in, and she turns the music down. It’s Nusrat, remixed and clubby, but damn good as always.
I read it over and over again, until I notice the paper getting wet, the ink blurring into little flowers.
They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been to the deserts of Chile an seen the stars an was it all he had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this lie, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.
Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.
If he stayed, it would not be for them – need not be for them – but for himself. And yet each day he did stay. Bored and tense, true, but he stayed. And he discovered thereby how badly he wanted to stay. That the impulse to live was in him stronger than he might have imagined, undiminished by his bleak circumstances.
You’re so beautiful,” her mother said as she was leaving. “You should get a gun.