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Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.
They respected him the way cruel and powerful people have been respected since the dawn of time – with abundant fear, and not a speck of love.
Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.
Just as the sour could hide beneath the sweet, or vice versa, within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity.
Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden – that such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards. This was the only form of affection she had learned from grown-ups, and the teaching would come with dire consequences.
She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them.
No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and seen the things that people did, simply because they could – destroying the water hose on the wall, breaking the door handle, drawing nasty graffiti everywhere, peeing on the hand towels, depositing every kind of filth and muck all over the place, knowing that someone else would have to clean it up.
Jameelah was born in Somalia to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. Her early years had been blissfully free, though she would only realize this long after they were gone. Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind – a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood. Even today, if Jameelah closed her eyes and listened
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He said, ‘If you must leave, then you shall, ya ruhi. Make friends, good ones. Loyal ones. No one can survive alone – except the Almighty God. And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.’
The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.
Until then she had not understood how divided the revolutionaries were among themselves. Maoists despised Leninists, and the Leninists loathed the anarchists. Leila knew that her beloved was destined to follow a different path altogether: that of Trotsky and his Permanent Revolution. She wondered whether, just as too many cooks spoiled the broth, too many revolutionaries could ruin a revolution, but once again she kept her thoughts to herself.
How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.
Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle? Successive research had also shown that more than a thousand genes continued to function in cadavers days after the person had been pronounced dead. All these
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‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’
families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home. As for the water family, this was formed much later in life, and was, to a large extent, of your own making. While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain
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‘My mother – I used to call her Auntie – she often felt the same way, maybe worse. People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy we make it stronger. Like a boomerang. You hurl it away, it comes back and hits you with equal force. Maybe what you need is to befriend your depression.’ ‘What a funny thing to say, honey. How am I to do that?’ ‘Well, think about it: a friend is someone you can walk with in the dark and learn lots of things from. But you also know you are different people – you and your friend. You are not your
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Perhaps nothing was worth worrying about in a city where everything was constantly shifting and dissolving, and the only thing they could ever rely on was this moment in time, which was already half gone.
A heavy and dense sorrow had settled in him; a fist had closed around his heart. A sorrow he’d kept hidden from everyone, and nourished all these years, because what was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?
Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
