An important intellectual change had overcome me. I had begun to read. I am unable to recall why this should have happened, but it might have been because I had decided that I needed better English in Dehli. I still read only fitfully, but the foray into the world of books made me see the world in a new way. I could be in a Dehli Transport bus in Daryaganj and a voice running in my head would name the objects I saw being sold on the street, their colors, the look of the eyes in the sellers. I was observing the world around me and stringing my observations into sentences. Words gave my world its crucial form. I had not stepped out yet of the confusion that I had felt in Patna, but language was giving me a chance to name my hitherto undescribable feelings.
-Kumar, 92
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I have an image for this time in my life. I could be traveling on a train in India and I would pass a house in the dark in which through an open window I could see burning a dim bulb. It would be a momentary glimpse, but it would be enough to evoke in my mind a memory of Patna and the lives of many relatives. As I reflect on this image, I think that this awareness of the pain of others around me was both deep and genuine. But it was already accompanied by a sense of detachment. This guaranteed a certain pathos: I was inclined toward a romantic cultivation of sadness.
-Kumar, 91
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"Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless emergencies, and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times suffocating. I felt it deep in my ribs, as I had felt the furious drone of the engine on the SS Roma."
-Lahiri, 175
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"The town we have come to is only another heap of hovels clinging to the hillside. It is true that there is a river racing through the gorge below, and if it were in the wilderness it would be beautiful but, as it is, the whole town gathers there to bathe, wash clothes, to fetch water, as well as dispose of garbage so that it is almost a public sewer. the temples that line its banks seem only to add to its horrors."
-Anita Desai, Journey to Ithaca, 297
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"Apart from my condition I am perfectly healthy," she maintained, seating herself on a bench along the footpath where courting men and women strolled hand in hand. "I have never had a cold or flu. I have never had jaundice. I have never suffered from colic or indigestion." Sometimes we bought her smoked corn on the cob sprinkled with lemon juice, or two paisa caramels. We consoled her; when she was convinced a man was giving her the eye, we humored her and agreed. But she was not our responsibility, and in our private moments we were thankful for it."
-Lahiri, 167
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"This is where I lived before you came," I said, stopping at Mrs. Croft's chain-link fence.
"In such a big house?"
"I had a small room upstairs. At the back."
"Who else lives there?"
"A very old woman."
"With her family?"
"Alone."
"But who takes care of her?"
I opened the gate. "For the most part she takes care of herself."
-Lahiri, 193
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""A yogi who lay in the sand with with his head buried underneath it. Completely. I checked. For forty minutes. And people did nothing - stood and watched, he could have been dead. They threw a few coins on the sand and went away. I talked to a man - his name was Mr. Pandey - who told me it is the study of yoga that makes such a thing possible. I waited for forty minutes and then he rose. he was alive. That is what I saw, I promise. A few paces further, an old sage. Ancient, with a white beard. Please do not laugh. He read from the Gita - and people sat by and listened to him. Oh, his voice was like the ocean. You should have heard!"
"Perhaps he was the Sage of the Sea," Matteo laughed, "The Ancient Mariner. Did he lament the Albatross?"
"What?" Pierre Eduard pur down his mug. "He was a sage, expounding a holy book, not natural history. Please tell me, on what beach in the West will you meet such a one, or hear such a thing?" I tell you, it is the spiritual experience for which you must search in India, nothing less."
"Oh please," groaned Sophie again, "What is spiritual about sticking one's head into the sand? Is an ostrich holy, Pierre Eduard?""
-Anita Desai, Journey to Ithaca, p. 36
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"The woman bellowed, "A flag on the moon, boy! I heard it on the radio! Isn't that splended?"
"Yes, madame."
But she was not satisfied with my reply. Instead she commanded, "Say 'splendid'!"
I was both baffled and somewhat insulted by the request. It reminded me of the way I was taught multiplication tables as a child, repeating after the master, sitting cross-legged, without shoes or pencils, on the floor of my one-room Tollygunge school. It also reminded me of my wedding, when I had repeated endless Sanskrit verses after the priest, verses I barely understood, which joined me to my wife. I said nothing.
"Say 'splendid'!" the woman bellowed once again.
"Splendid," I murmured.
-Lahiri, 180
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"She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in the mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate or see."
-Lahiri, 142
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They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that is what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest town, but they'd seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was a two-hour drive away.
-Arundhadi Roy, from The God of Small Things, p. 6
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The dentist was sloppy but we liked him because he was part of our own caste. Caste was important in Patna.
-Kumar, 89
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"The nature of her illness, which struck without warning, confined her world to the unpainted four-story building in which her only local family, an elder cousin and his wife, rented an apartment on the second floor. Liable to fall unconscious and enter, at any moment, into a shameless delirium, Bibi could be trusted neither to cross a street no board a tram without supervision."
-Lahiri, 159
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"I have been living in this country for the past two years. Everyone tells me that the first years are the ones in which you have to struggle the most. I think that is natural."
-Kumar, 240
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According to Estha, if they'd been born on the bus, they'd have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn't clear where he'd got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.
-Arundhadi Roy, from The God of Small Things, p. 6
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“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes”
-Salman Rushdie
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I wrote a few poems, a couple of short stories, and some journalism. when I was bored in my classes, as when the economics teacher droned on about the relative merits of buying butter or guns, I wrote poems. These poems were filled with metaphysical longing--they were a testimony to my sublimated sexual yearnings. My stories and the journalism, betrayed other knowledges. I had left Patna; I had been elsewhere. When I wrote of Patna it was with new eyes.
-Kumar, 92
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"Against the mythologies of the Hindi films that offer paens to the glory of the abandoned nation, apart also from more sophisticated fictions of writers who understand the magical realist drama of diasporic lives, what I would like to know more about are the day-to-day struggles, successes, failures, and confusions of the ones who leave home to seek better fortune elsewhere."
-Kumar 223
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