Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.

She touched her shoulder, muscles knotted beneath the skin. Pressed down, and knew what it was to be without family; no one’s hands but your own to minister to your suffering.

She couldn’t tell if he was trying to impress her or if he was the kind of man in love with his own charm.

listening with interest to even her most banal observations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own in the manner of most of the men she knew.

“Perhaps we’ll run into each other again” really meant “I have no particular wish to see you after this.”

I know anger is the way you express your concern but, just don’t.” Anger is the way I express my anger,

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

What was the point of surrounding yourself with other versions of yourself all the time?

Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”

You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits.

he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking.

jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.

Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief;

grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world.

Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

Some irritations dissipate in a marriage, some accumulate.

her touch made something in him stop, something else in him start.