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The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!’
Despite his many jokes and easy laughter, the pouches beneath his eyes were swollen, always, with a reservoir of unshed tears.
Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Those are the three big questions.
you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.’
There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I’d mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.
You know the difference between news and gossip, don’t you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’
a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation.’
Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.’
We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.
What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no
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I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.
Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her—friendship, compassion, sexuality—but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.
Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.
Some men like you less the more they owe you. Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt.
I heard a warning, deep within—we usually do, when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed.
Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened.
Prison systems are black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news.
Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.
you don’t ask a man about the crimes he might’ve committed until you like him enough to make him a friend, or dislike him enough to make him an enemy.
Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.
Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can’t be said to have survived it. And it’s for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.
I closed my eyes, and closed my heart, and willed myself to sleep.
Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve.
They cried openly as they sang, and they laughed together often. And with their music they helped one another to keep love alive in hearts that the city had forsaken, and forgotten.
Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.
Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.
The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we’re violated, is shame at being human.
None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.
my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart.
They’re tough, because there’s a kind of toughness that’s found in the worst sorrow. They’re honest, because the truth of what happened to them won’t let them lie. They’re angry, because they can’t forget the past or forgive it. And they’re lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.
Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie.
Pumping iron is Zen for violent men.
‘It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.’
This is not England, or New Zealand, or Australia, or wherever the fuck else. This is India, man. This is India. This is the land of the heart. This is where the heart is king, man. The fuckin’ heart.
Because they’re Indians, man. That’s how we keep this crazy place together—with the heart. Two hundred fuckin’ languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It’s the heart that keeps us together. There’s no place with people like my people, Lin. There’s no heart like the Indian heart.’
Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.’
‘Hate is a very resilient thing, you know. Hate is a survivor.
It’s stronger than I am. It’s braver than I am. My hate is my hero.’
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.
sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him. And his face, reflected sometimes in the night that filled the window, was as drenched in destiny, and as radiant, as the faces found in paintings of doomed and haloed saints.
WHEREVER YOU GO in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice,’
‘We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.’
And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soulless man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it.’
Tell people as much as they need to know, he said. I remember that he was smiling when he said it, like there was nothing to it. And ask people for help, he said. You’ll be all right . . . Don’t worry . . . It’s a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun . . .’
it is possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.’
‘Sin is a measure of evil,’
We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective. And when we define good and evil on the basis of what we know—to the best of our knowledge at the present time—we are being as objective as possible within the imperfect limits of our understanding.
