A Passage to India: With an introduction by Kamila Shamsie, Women's Prize-winning author of Home Fire

by E.M. Forster

Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more … Islam, an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home.

“Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die,” said Mrs Callendar.

It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides.

Mr Fielding, no one can ever realize how much kindness we Indians need, we do not even realize it ourselves.

Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.

Ought she to break her engagement off? She was inclined to think not—it would cause so much trouble to others;

when he was throwing in his lot with Indians, he realized the profundity of the gulf that divided him from them. They always do something disappointing.

“Yes, but the scale, the scale. You always get the scale wrong, my dear fellow. A pity there is this rumour, but such a very small pity—so small that we may as well talk of something else.”

Tangles like this still interrupted their intercourse. A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry.

He envied the easy intercourse that is only possible in a nation whose women are free.