The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

The Golden Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: When harassed on the street, never respond, since a woman who responds, let alone swears back at her harasser, shall only fire up the enthusiasm of the latter!

Some women were devoted smilers; they smiled with a Spartan sense of duty. How could one ever learn to do so naturally something so unnatural,

The fact that marriage had to tarry before it irretrievably lapsed gave the false impression that there was still hope until you understood it was not hope for the better that you were living for, but hope that the suffering finally would end for both so that each could go his or her own way.

The ear was such a trustworthy part of the human body. No matter how much weight you gained, your ears remained exactly the same, always loyal.

If she belonged to the “pear-shaped” group, for instance, she would have wider hips than shoulders. If “apple shaped,” she would be prone to gain weight in the stomach and chest. Having the qualities of both pears and apples, Rose didn’t quite know what category to fit in, unless there was another group left unmentioned, the “mango shaped,” thick all over and thicker in the bottom.

“Are you trying to tell us that we are penny-pinching people?” Kevork asked. “No, you ignorant young man,” Uncle Dikran said. “All I am trying to tell you is that we care for one another. If we see something good, we immediately share it with our friends and relatives. It is because of this collective spirit that the Armenian people have managed to survive.” “But they also say, ‘When two Armenians come together, they create three different churches,’”

The overwhelming majority of people never think and those who think never become the overwhelming majority. Choose your side.

The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.

History, politics, religion, society, competition, marketing, free market, power struggle, at one another’s throats for another morsel of triumph.

You keep hearing a certain story over and over again, and the next thing you know you have internalized the narrative. From that moment on it ceases to be someone else’s story. It is not even a story anymore, but reality, your reality!”

Nationalism was no more than a replenishment of oppressors. Instead of being oppressed by someone of a different ethnicity, you ended up being oppressed by someone of your own.

Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.

“But don’t you think there is a huge difference between the two sexes when it comes to recovery after an affair? I mean, when women survive an awful marriage or love affair, and all that shit, they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however, it is just the opposite; the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”