Kindle Notes & Highlights
For the next decade, he documented his attempt to teach the girls language, upright movement, and a moral life. Despite his efforts, Amala died within a year of capture, of nephritis. Kamala lived to be about sixteen, when she died of TB.
Chronologies only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.
feral moment
my mother, a woman whiter than any white person we know. She had brown-green eyes.
is relevant to the story I am telling, it accompanies it. In the quick, black take of a body’s flight, a body’s eviction or sudden loss of place, the memory of descent functions as a subliminal flash.
“I saw them first.” Flailing then rigid then soft.
Father smacked my side with a wand.
To cull the sal for export, the British erased sections of the forest, then re-planted it like a Norfolk copse, brutally. Linearity is brutal.
Have you ever seen pink moonlight? It is frightening. It is a cousin to shadow, just as a wolf is to a dog.
‘I will go to England and teach English to the English'.” And he did. He dragged himself out of the field and into the sky.
“One peculiarity was especially noticed during this illness: her tongue became active, and she commenced talking in a fashion that amazed us all immensely. Though the words were broken, yet she expressed herself in a wonderful way.”
When conditions fluxed, I built a flux gate. I made a cut in the trees and let her go.
Kamala is called into Joseph’s study where he bites her back. Beats her with a bamboo wand, then pricks her in the palm with its tip.
She killed her face.
but I didn’t drink it because it wasn’t boiled. It wasn’t clean.
took a leaf from the Home to dry it, to make a piece of paper with three raised seams.
Passive to India, dazzled, I did not resist him
The sand was white, as were the other holidayers. I felt bitterly the contrast of our own exposed skin against the blueness of the sky and the waves. Your legs were frankly an embarrassment: visible chunks of flesh taken from your thighs and shins at another point in history. Mummy’s bright yellow sari with its schizophrenic border of green and black zig-zags, and so on.
In a companion text, intrusion functions as an organizing principle.
debilitating effects of poverty, early malnutrition and the multiple musculo-skeletal traumas that he appeared to have sustained as a child.
violence done to my father’s body
There are scooped out places where the flesh is missing, shiny, as they would be regardless of
They dragged her from a dark room and put her in a sheet. They broke her legs then re-set them. Both children, the wolfgirls, were given a fine yellow powder to clean their kidneys but their bodies, having adapted to animal ways of excreting meat, could not cope with this technology. Red worms came out of their bodies and the younger girl died.
My own mother told me another story of possession, with its attendant fable of exorcism, as a child.
Is it wrong to feel immediately at home in India, where, if its citizens knew you felt that way, would laugh you out of the house?
A girl returns to her jungle home, shedding her dress at the perimeter.
Each time she crosses, in truth or fiction, she breaks the tracery of delicate glass threads that marks the border. A border is felt in the body as fear and sometimes … no, I cannot speak for her now.
