Small things start us in new ways of thinking
Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don’t sit down, sahib? It ain’t dirty. Is just how it does look.’ Ganesh didn’t sit down. ‘...
It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard. ‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it...
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...
The chaos lies all within.
Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.
How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
...Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hair...
For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it ...
It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form ...
paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer
A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.
For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives; not to be unmaried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow.
