The Perfumist of Paris (The Jaipur Trilogy, #3)

by Alka Joshi

And for anyone who thinks they can’t: You can.

They say a guilty conscience is a lively enemy. The battle is always raging inside me.

I love my girls, but if I had to stay home all day I’d suffocate.

In Hinduism, the left and right sides of the body carry different meanings. The left is the feminine, the right the masculine. The left is temporal and earthly, the right pure and sacred.

“The measure of us isn’t in the day-to-day. And it’s not in our past or our future. It’s in the fundamental changes we make within ourselves over a lifetime. Samaj-jao?”

What woman wants to stay home all day? That’s just a fantasy men make up.

“Being a woman is difficult. I can see why my mother didn’t like her own gender. We can do so much. Give so much. But not everyone wants what we’re offering. And in the end, we’re left with...pieces of a whole. Shards. Splinters. Chips. Pick them up, they cut our hands. Leave them on the ground, they cut our feet. It’s hard for us to just walk away.”

There will always be a Ferdie in our lives. We have to do our best despite them.

“Did you know there’s a Hindu belief that the people known to you in this life are the same people you knew in your last life but in different roles? And that we’re always trying to learn how to coexist with those people in a better way?

Is that erasure of us something other people do to us or do we women do it to ourselves?

I’ve come to think that some people are meant to be in our lives for a certain length of time and not a moment more.