Kindle Notes & Highlights
If two lines of lightning touch the same spot on earth do they merge or fizzle out?
May he lose many more of your things to make you happy.
Only mothers and sisters, or those who become like mothers or sisters, can irritate one in this precisely disproportionate way.
Familiarity, one of the small consolations of ageing, I think, but don’t say. Such sententious thoughts are best kept to oneself.
friends. Or perhaps I’m the unusual one, having refused a patron, refused to travel, refused childbirth. And embraced instead these interrupted conversations, scribblings, memories.
To live briefly in the eternal youth of conversation, poetry, music, dance. In the shadows thrown by lamps, wayward, whimsical, almost anyone seems alluring—at least for a while.
I looked up. She was half-smiling, half-laughing, in that semi-shy, semi-mischievous way to which I would become addicted. Our eyes met, held. The room fell silent. Stripped bare, I stood on the threshold of birth. Gazing into fire. She was in white, all white against the redness. Was her hair open, as if freshly washed? Or is memory playing hide-and-seek with fantasy?
exchanged orhnis.
Letters—all over the world, people are writing them to each other, and have been writing them for centuries. Surely they must repeat the same phrases. Sometimes I wonder if our faces are repeated too—how do I know that a hundred years ago there wasn’t a girl who looked exactly like Chapla or that a hundred years from now there won’t be another? Why am I so sure that these letters I now almost never look at are unique? That no one ever said just this in quite this way?
Kishen, Sona and the other children are clambering all over it. And near them I see a small, starved-looking lion. Afraid, I call them to come back in. They rush into the house, we follow, and the lion comes through the door too, but I chase it out.
Weaving through the crowd, her glance, evanescent as a breath. Her eyes directly on me, just for a moment. That night, a few yards of air, a few thin walls between us. After the mehfils were over, and everyone had gone to their rooms,
‘Show me your books?
‘Mmh, white skins, most unattractive.
Something about people in groups breeds the pleasures of backbiting—courtiers, poets, musicians, and all of us, we were all the same.
Does anyone remember our eyes meeting across crowded rooms, as wine and conversation flowed? Nadira? Sharu? Often, she would signal that she was tired of her admirers and wanted to slip away and sit somewhere, complain of them and recuperate before returning. And who better to slip away with than me, whose absence few would notice? Other times, even on the same evenings, she seemed to thoroughly enjoy flirting with those same admirers, each glance, each laugh a dagger sweetly piercing.
Nadira paid less attention than usual to my goings-on because in addition to Bakhshi’s affairs, she was busy with a courtier from Hyderabad who was wooing her.
Gar nazneen ke kahne se maana bura ho kuchh/ meri taraf ko dekhiye main nazneen sahi (If you’re somewhat offended at my calling you a sweetheart/Take a look at me, I don’t mind being a real sweetheart).
a thin, dark,
It comes back to me in scenes, not so different from the way she comes back to me in dreams.
‘We fall on each other like animals,’ she said the second time we embraced. But we lacked the violent simplicity of animals.
If we could all do that, would there be no difference between a dream and life?’ She smiled wryly. ‘Only if we all had the same dream.’
Yah tujh ko samajh ke dil diya hai Tu yaar hai aur bawafa hai
Death at one blow or from bleeding drop after drop. Most fall somewhere in between.
like Majnun, but in life emptiness takes different shapes. ‘
But they shared a city,
a heritage—perhaps that is stronger glue than the language of poetry.
