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Evelyn and I then did our first duet of that story.
It wasn’t good wine—this country didn’t speak its language yet—but
the subject dropped to the floor and crawled off into the past.
The air in the room was so charged that it seemed to dart madly around me, smashing into things,
A delicate balance was required, and I was almost certainly too drunk to hold it.
A rectangular pocket of light burst into the room as her phone awoke.
In my stomach, an elevator packed full of hope and excitement snapped and plunged down.
Are you allowed to be irritated at the timing of a terror attack?
Pamir sucked in what he was 50 percent sure was his last breath.
The cow looked resigned to its fate, while the young man seemed still open to fighting his.
“Are we just going to let that sentence pass? Or should we, I don’t know, unpack it a bit? Decide if it’s the most stupid thing anyone’s ever said, or merely one of?”
Everything felt possible, and that’s the feeling travellers cherish most.
“Is there an Old Delhi?” Evelyn asked. “You only ever hear about New Delhi.” “Yes. There’s an Old Delhi. It’s a walled area inside of Delhi.”
Further proof of how many possible new endings there are to conversations with even the most familiar beginnings.
Why were saucepans scattered over the ground? Why was a man unconscious? Why was a cow in makeup?
He accompanied the gestures with choice words in a language we didn’t speak.
We were fate’s patsies, he and I.
“Holy cow.”
It’s dangerous to be in an accident here, where they still practice mob justice.
If this crowd could be angry at a man whose only crime was getting electrocuted helping strangers, it could be angry at us.
I silently prayed to Hanuman, the part-man-part-monkey god. I liked him the best: I was more monkey than man.
we’d been driving like the wind, which is an expression that makes more sense in a place where there is wind.
To say that the thirty-seven-metre-high, four-armed man in the lotus position was out of place would be to concede there was a place such a thing could belong.
hitting pause on a moment to create something you hope will later allow you to hit play in your memory.
It’s easy to become jaded in this life. The best antidote to it is to surround yourself with people who understand their good fortune better than you do.
The small things are the big things, served in bite-sized chunks. While it’s always tempting to chase peak experiences, life is 99 percent trough experiences. It’s what we do with these that determines how we feel most of the time.
Enthusiasm is a gift that you give: a conscious choice you make to lift something up from that trough.
It was a special night: for the first time, we all knew we’d finish the race.
Al fresco dining sprinkles meals with a spice of refinement so pungent it should be listed as an ingredient.
He was, literally, having a trough experience.
Time stopped. I turned, and my eyebrows crashed together.
It explained why, now, at thirty-four, I still felt like a child playing dress-up.
At some point, doing the wrong thing is better than doing nothing at all. I was through with doing nothing at all.
Kerala had been flirting with prohibition. Some towns were dry while others had just a few licensed bottle shops, or the odd tourist hotel with an exemption.
like riding on a really rubbish, heavily polluting magic carpet.
Locals played beach cricket between red flags warning potential swimmers that “this surf bites.”
Even if butter didn’t melt, it might still plagiarise.
to tremble and cower like a defecating dog.
Death is the ultimate destroyer of routine. The permanent all-inclusive holiday.
Is this Heaven or Hell? It was both: it was India.
Our confidence, my hip, and her shoulder were bruised.
Winnie said nothing, struck dumb by the intensity of her feelings for us. Either that or she was an inanimate object.
It reminded me of how the hard part of anything isn’t the doing—it’s the saying yes. Yes creates momentum, a commitment, and a fear of failure that propels you forward.
It was a thick layer of icing on an already compelling cake of personality.
I wanted to find this guy and go Middle Ages on him.
Independence looks like strength, but it’s often just fear masquerading as indifference.
The room’s white walls, tablecloths, and fabric-covered seats worked hard to sell an innocence that doesn’t exist in the world.
It was like watching a toddler rugby-tackle Santa.
I tried not to think about the cleanup costs. I tried not to think about how I was trying not to think about the cleanup costs.
They were rock, I was roll: roll over and give up.
