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stranger, and the searching starts all over again. It’s not what it was. It’s always different. It’s always something else. But the new forest that grows back in a scarred heart is sometimes wilder and stronger than it was before the fire. And if you stay there, in that shine within yourself, that new place for the light, forgiving everything and never giving up, sooner or later you’ll always find yourself right back there where love and beauty made the world: at the beginning. The beginning. The beginning.
‘An amateur is anyone who hasn’t learned how not to do it,’ I said.
He expressed the uniqueness when what we are, is what we’re free to become.
But there are some people, some loves, that worry every goodbye, and leaving them is like leaving the country of your birth.
‘Spear of Karma?’ Rosanna sneered. ‘Crazy fascist fuckers, all of them. They’re nothing. Just a fringe group. Nobody listens to them.’ ‘The fringe usually works its way to the centre that ignores or insults it.’
‘I stand for your right to create and present art, but I think that rights come with responsibilities, and that we, as artists, have a responsibility not to cause feelings of hurt and injury in the name of art. In the name of truth, maybe. In the name of justice and freedom. But not in the name of art.’
The violence of the past was just sand in the swash of a new wave, breaking on the Island City’s shores. Political thugs travelled by the truckload, brandishing clubs, and mafia gangs of twenty or thirty men had grown to hundreds of fighters. We are what we fear, and many of us in the city feared reckless days of reckoning.
And more honest than my mind, my sleeping body bent at the knees, pressed against the closed door of her curved back, and beat on it with the fist of my heart, begging to be loved.
Any dark past is a vampire, feeding on the blood of the living moment, and letters are the bats.
She once told me that every woman has four smiles. ‘Only four?’ ‘The First Smile,’ she’d said, ignoring me, ‘is the unconscious one that happens without thinking about it, like smiling at a kid in the street, or smiling back at someone who’s smiling at us from a TV screen.’ ‘I don’t smile at the TV.’ ‘Everybody smiles at the TV. That’s why we have them.’ ‘I don’t smile at the TV.’ ‘The Second Smile,’ she’d persisted, ‘is the polite one, the kind we use to invite friends into a house when they come to the door, or to greet them in a restaurant.’ ‘Are they paying?’ I’d asked. ‘You wanna hear
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For a long time I stared at that blue glass ball in the palm of my hand after I found it on the ground and picked it up. In such fragile things and subtle ways is the pattern of our lives revealed to us. We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.
Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart.
Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love.
‘Okay,’ Vishnu said, when the month of two minutes ended.
Let Danda go. Get on your motorcycle and go. If you kill Danda, I’ll have to kill you. He’s my cousin. And I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not today. It’s my wife’s birthday, you know, and there’s a party.’
thik hai,
danced on a river of wet light. Storms rolled, while the sea came to the earth. Winds leapt at us like a pack of happy dogs. Lakes of lightning splashed the street.
Straight cops are all alike; every crooked cop is corrupt in his own way. They all take the money, but some accept it reluctantly, others hungrily; some angrily, others genially; some joke and some sweat as if they’re running uphill; some make it a contest, while others want to be your new best friend.
Fortunately, like all bullies, he was susceptible to flattery.
‘Fines are imposed by the court, not by the police,’ Dilip observed, a sly grin wet on his lips. ‘Of course, you’re completely right,’ I smiled, ‘but a man of your vision can see how dealing with this matter in a forceful fashion, right here and now, will save the valuable time of the court, and the public purse.’
‘Oh, I can think of five thousand reasons why,’ I replied, pulling a prepared wad of rupee notes from my pocket, and beginning to count them. ‘A man of vision could think of many more reasons than that,’ Dilip frowned. It was too late. He was already looking at the money. ‘Lightning-ji,’ I said softly, folding the notes over double and sliding them across the desk beneath the cover of my hand. ‘We’ve been doing this dance for almost two years now, and we both know that five thousand reasons is all I’d have to give the sub-inspector to make a full . . . explanation . . . of my interest.
‘There was this very fat cop. I called him Constable Three-Pigs-Fucking. And another one, I said he was stupider than a monkey’s pet coconut. And I said
‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ Divya demanded of Naveen. ‘He’s with me,’ I said.
gamine
‘So, you’re Lin!’ she said, cutting him off and turning to face me. ‘Keki Uncle, may his spirit shine in our eyes, used to talk about you a lot.
‘Mom –’ ‘Do you know how many ditches there are in this area? This is the peak area for ditches. And your father searched through every one of them, looking for your scrambled eggs corpse. And you have the shamelessness to stand here, in front of us, without a scratch on your miserable hide?’ ‘You might at least be limping,’ a young man said as he approached us to shake hands with Farzad. ‘Or slightly disfigured, na?’
‘So, you were at the Drum Beat nightclub,’ Arshan said quietly, ‘which I warned you against, many a time, son.’ ‘What warnings?’ Anahita asked, slapping Farzad on the back of the head. ‘Ow! Mom! Cut it out, yaar!’ ‘Your warnings are delicious to him! He eats them up like sweeties. Yum, yum, yum! I’ve told you, operant conditioning is the only thing that works on this boy, but you’re such a Steiner fan. I’d say your son got fairly Steinered last night, wouldn’t you?’
‘You can’t badge this cop. You can make his life very unpleasant for a while, and get him moved somewhere for a while, maybe, but you can’t badge him. He knows too much about too many people. No-one’s saying he doesn’t deserve it, but if you make his life unpleasant, sooner or later he’ll come back. And when he comes back, he’ll disturb your happiness again. Probably forever.’ ‘Are you saying we shouldn’t do anything about this?’ Ali asked. ‘I’m saying that if you go up against this guy, be prepared for a war. Don’t underestimate him.’ ‘I agree,’ Arshan said quietly. ‘What?’ Ali and Jaya asked
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Harlan Ellison?’
They’d torn their homes apart, true enough, but they’d replaced them with a common space of sharing. They’d turned their lives upside down, but it was an adventure: a voyage within themselves. They made sense of the dream they lived. It was still fun, for them, and I liked them very much for it.
if you strip a religion down to its most basic parts, the parts that make it work so well and last for hundreds and hundreds of years, it boils down to this – nice words and the fear of horrible punishments that never end. You and me. You can’t beat a combination
More often used in the singular, Ooperwala, it could be roughly translated as The Person Upstairs. Used in the plural, the term meant The People Upstairs.
I’ve spent a large part of my life in the company of men. Ten years of my life in prisons, seven years in gangs, twenty years in gyms, karate schools, boxing clubs, rugby teams, motorcycle groups, and all my growing years in a boys’ school: more than half of my life in exclusively male societies. And I’ve always felt comfortable there. It’s a simple world. You only need one key to every locked heart: confidence.
I should’ve let him win. It would’ve cost me nothing. And he was my boss, in a sense. But I couldn’t do it. There’s a corner of contempt we reserve for those who hate us, when we’ve done them no wrong: those who resent us without cause, and revile us without reason. Andrew was corralled into that corner of my disdain as surely as he was trapped in the dead end of the training corridor. And contempt almost always conquers caution.
‘The Buddha was a backpacker, travelling around with what he carried. Jesus was a backpacker, lost to the world for years in travelling. We’re all backpackers, Saleh. We come in with nothing, carry our stuff for a while, and go out with nothing. And when you kill a backpacker’s happiness, you kill mine.’
‘I always say,’ Didier observed, ‘if you can’t say something nice about someone, rob him and shoot him.’ ‘Sage words,’ Abdullah mused. ‘Sage words?’ ‘It is self-evident, Lin,’ Didier said. Abdullah nodded agreement. ‘Just because you can’t find something nice to say about someone?’ ‘Certainly, Lin. I mean, if you cannot find even one nice thing to say about a man, he must be an absolute swine. And all of us, who have experience of life, know that sooner or later, an absolute swine will cause you grief, or regret, or both. It is simply a prudent precaution to beat and rob negative people,
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‘Lin, it has been almost two years since you have seen Karla.’ ‘I know.’ ‘But . . . in matters of the heart, of love –’ ‘I know.’ ‘– those two years are simply two heartbeats.’ ‘I –’ ‘No, please! Let me say it. Lin . . . you are . . . you are in a darker place than you were two years ago. You are a darker man that you were when you first arrived in Bombay. I have never said this to you. I am ashamed to say that a part of me was glad to see it, at first. It was comforting. I was glad of the company, you might say.’ He was almost whispering, and speaking in a fluid rush of syllables so swift
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I thought of the things we three unwise men had done, together and alone, since we’d met as exiles in the Island City. There were things we regretted, and things buried. But there were also things of triumph, and light. When love cut one of us, the others cauterised with sarcasm. When one had to become two, the others brought their guns. When hope faltered in one, the others filled the hollowness with loyalty. And I felt that loyalty like a hand on my chest, as I looked back at them, and I hoped hard for them, and for myself.
Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are. And hope, that ancient seed, redeems the heart it feeds. The heartbeat of any conscious now is poised on the same choice that hope gives all of us, between shadows of the past, and the bright, blank page of any new day.
love and its glory, hate and its prisoners, the soul and its price.
‘Okay. Someone once said that the sophistication of any community of people is inversely proportionate to their capacity to be aroused to violence by what people say in public, or do in private.’
There were times when I hoped that it would happen. But wanting more was a sign of how little we had. We were friends who didn’t try hard enough to make it more.
I was missing something, a conflict more fundamental than Lisa’s objection to my life on the edge of the Sanjay Company, or even her desire to be with others. Something else was happening, and I couldn’t see it right or even feel it right, of course, because it was happening to me.
‘Believe me, if you honestly tell the whole of the truth, about anyone at all, someone will want to harm you for it.’
In the movies, men fight for long minutes, taking turns to hit one another. In a real street fight, everything happens much faster. Everyone swings at anything they can, and if you’re knocked to the floor, most of the time you stay there. Sometimes, of course, the floor is the safest place to be.
Abdullah hesitated. There was an instinct working in him. I knew it. I’d heard the voice of that instinct, behind the wall. In that moment he wanted to kill Concannon more than he wanted to live. I stepped in beside him, as men had stepped in for me in prison, guarding my heart as much as my life.
Pain is just proof of life.
I couldn’t tell him that I felt too weak and beat up to climb a mountain: sometimes, all the guts you have is the guts you pretend, because you love someone too much to lose their respect.
it was disappointment. It was the kind of disappointment that belongs to friends, not enemies.
I had no resistance to her. I couldn’t do anything but listen, and smile, and try to be funny now and then. But it was alright. It was okay. It was a renegade peace, in those moments on the morning after the mountain brought her back to me; the morning of that softer, sadder eye.
