10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

human beings exhibited a profound impatience with the milestones of their existence. For one thing, they assumed that you automatically became a wife or a husband the moment you said, ‘I do!’ But the truth was, it took years to learn how to be married. Similarly, society expected maternal – or paternal – instincts to kick in as soon as one had a child. In fact, it could take quite a while to figure out how to be a parent – or a grandparent, for that matter. Ditto with retirement and old age. How could you possibly change gears the moment you walked out of an office where you had spent half your life and squandered most of your dreams? Not that easy.

People thought you changed into a corpse the instant you exhaled your last breath. But things were not clear-cut like that. Just as there were countless shades between jet black and brilliant white, so there were multiple stages of this thing called ‘eternal rest’. If a border existed between the Realm of Life and the Realm of Afterlife, Leila decided, it must be as permeable as sandstone.

life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.

possessions were as ephemeral and rootless as dandelion seeds. One stiff breeze, one torrential downpour, and they would be gone, just like that.

These were not tears of rage or resentment. They were tears of resignation, of the kind of defeat that is tantamount to a loss of greater faith.

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.

Although most people in this eastern town were ignorant, crushed under the weight of religion and rigid convention, with the right kind of education they could be saved from their past.

Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you.

He who has not travelled in the world has no eyes

maybe she was only a half-broken horse, too frightened to bolt, too lame to dare, but still able to remember the sweet taste of, and therefore to yearn for, freedom.

It’s a serious thing to believe in someone,

You could traverse deserts, climb mountains, sail oceans and beat giants, so long as you had a crumb of hope in your pocket.

perhaps her home was not where she was born but where she chose to die;

that’s what communism amounted to: a monumental waste of decent, well-meaning people’s hard work! She hadn’t slogged away all her life so that a handful of misguided radicals could come and tell her she must now distribute her hard-earned money to gaggles of idlers and loafers and paupers. No sir, she would never do that.

people who overused the word ‘natural’ did not know much about the ways of Mother Nature. If you told them how snails, worms and black sea bass were hermaphrodites, or male seahorses could give birth, or male clownfish turned female halfway through their lives, or male cuttlefish were transvestites, they would be surprised. Anyone who studied nature closely would think twice before using the word ‘natural’.

she caught him watching her with resentment, as though he blamed her for his own regrets.

The first year together she tried, over and again, to understand him and his needs. Her own were unimportant. But he was never happy, the frown lines on his forehead reappearing fast, like a window that steamed over as soon as it was wiped.

she had the bizarre feeling that they wanted her both to remain within reach and to disappear completely.

They supported each other with the kind of loyalty that only those with few to rely on could muster.

dreamers of the same dream.

they simply ignored the things they couldn’t be bothered to take on board.

Know yourself and know an arsehole when you see one.

No signs of collective memory. No shared knowledge of history.

if ever she came across someone partying too wildly, she did not judge them; who knew

just like her, they too might be overcompensating for a childhood deprived of party hats.

who knows who deserves heaven more – this unlucky woman or the zealot who thinks he is the only chosen of God.’

there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family.

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 collected inside like black soot. It was therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined. But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years. They would never know that there were times when water ran thicker than blood.

it was not as if the state was disposed to showing gratitude.

religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.

There was something strangely comforting in the way different cultures had arrived at similar customs and melodies, and in how, all around the world, people were being rocked in the arms of loved ones in their moments of distress.

Far in the distance, beyond the roofs and domes, was the sea, shimmering like glass, and deep in the water, somewhere and everywhere, was Leila – a thousand little Leilas stuck to fish fins and seaweed, laughing from inside clam shells.