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But there’s something reassuring about this car. It makes me feel as though I were riding in the belly of a whale on the crazy seas of the Tamil Nadu highways.
It’s the thing that surprises me every time I land in India. Despite all the blatant deterioration, all the decomposition, things survive. In fact, they thrive. Things are ready to bludgeon you with their aliveness.
That was the moment I knew we were doomed. Any man who forces cannibalism on his wife after childbirth is a monster. Nothing was going to change that, not even you.’
Our neighbours were meek people, content to stroll to the end of the lane that joined Harrington Road with their shopping bags, waiting at the appointed time for vendors with their carts to buy vegetables.
People who met her said she could make you follow her anywhere. But in the pictures she looks like an alien, always with a banal saying typed along the bottom: It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.
Her family were a hybrid of Tamil Christians who had intermarried with Hindus, and as such, they were a syncretic household, befitting the town of Tranquebar, where every evening you would hear the adhan intermingling with the sounds of temple and church bells. Jesus was the main point of focus in my mother’s house, of course, but there was a dedicated puja room where concessions were made for major Hindu deities.
That ever since she had known her, my mother had had an irrational longing to escape. ‘Always, there was something calling her away.’
Here in Paramankeni it’s the time when goat herders lead their animals home, fishermen sit by their boats smoking and mending their nets, and village boys rush out in their underwear, diving in and out of the waves. On weekends, there will sometimes be a group of city slickers playing volleyball in the ramshackle resort down the road, but it is still mostly isolated.
It’s Mallika’s penis-worshipping the puppies that’s bothering me, the bloody propagation of patriarchy by women in this country. I’m telling myself that I’m strong. I’m standing outside my own house, the dogs are here, it’s fucking daylight!
want to call Praveen out on this. Say something about how the burden of child-rearing always falls on the woman. That he is judging her because she is overweight and dishevelled. But I like him too much and am bored of everyone else.
When Samir finally left, Blake and I were uneasy with each other. Whatever balance we had created for ourselves had been pulled apart.
of a fresh lime soda. People stare. Wherever we go someone is looking at us – gazing unabatedly, not with malice or curiosity, but some kind of stupidity. Families travelling with other families, honeymooning couples, busloads of day trippers from Kerala, mostly men. In them all I find something to despise. I see only smallness in their lives. Who am I to say? It could simply be that they don’t know how to look. That, like the waiters at the club, they only need time to familiarise themselves. But I see only the imprint of failure. Those newly-wed women leaning into their husbands’ chests –
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Nihilism. Constant depression and cyncism and hopelessness
We used to sleep like dead trees. Weight on weight. At first, there was a comfort to it, then a kind of dismay.
Why? What is wrong with you ?
Nothing in him would ever surprise me, and it was this lack of guile that began to gnaw at me.
felt I’d married into some kind of stability.
All the shrinks I went to said it was anxiety. I told them about my dissatisfactory childhood, but they said no, it must be something more.
Which shrink would ever ignore a dissatisfactory childhood?
When I think of weddings now – all the waste and propaganda – I prefer to remember that fake spring union of Misrak and Abebe. We understood that the dangers of hours and hours of cohabitation would never touch these two, and as such, they were gleaming, like the afternoon itself. We knew as well that our own futures were bound to be different. About romance and companionship we knew little, but watching those two commit themselves felt honourable, the way marriage was intended to be, a transaction devoid of the complications of love.
think it has to do with birthing,’ he said. ‘Only women are capable of doing it. Perhaps what you really want is a baby?’ Always, we came back to this.
I think i really dislike the main character. I despise her - her cynicism , her selfishness and her inability to commit.
This is the female version of the dissatisfied white academic character who dominated the booker prize lists in the 90,. The type that uses sex as a method to fill the void within them.
I think commitment takes bravery and self knowledge. Wht this girl needs is a therapist and someone to call her out on her bullshit.
‘You used to be a woman who needed stuff. You loved things. You had a shelf of toiletries. Now you’re a woman who can travel with a toothbrush. It rarely works that way. Usually you start off with the toothbrush and get into accumulation. You’re finding things out.’
He’s like an anorexic seal making sounds of pleasure as he slides towards me.
WTF?!!
