I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.
I don’t pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.
You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond?
I don’t think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live.
I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.
Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca.
Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her – the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.
To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.
May we not be as foolish as we are almost bound to be. If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred. May we see that we could have been born as each other. May we, in short, believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, love.
In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.
Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18.
The past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.
Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.
Sometimes i write the best about the things that I care about least.
It was a warm evening, and there was less silk and more fine cotton than at Savita’s wedding. But the jewellery glittered just as gloriously. Meenakshi’s little pear-earrings, Veena’s navratan and Malati’s emeralds glinted across the garden, whispering to each other the stories of their owners.
I have learned to follow another voice, to be alone and to understand things – maybe to be alone and to be misunderstood.