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He was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity.
They weren’t like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her proofreading files. Eventually he gave up trying to amuse her. He learned not to mind the silences.
the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.
They didn’t bother her, these scattered, unsettled matters. She seemed content with whatever clothes she found at the front of the closet, with whatever magazine was lying around, with whatever song was on the radio—content yet curious.
FOR THE GREATER NUMBER of her twenty-nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools.
News spread between our window bars, across our clotheslines, and over the pigeon droppings that plastered the parapets of our rooftops.
Their rancor toward Bibi was fixed on their lips, thinner than the strings with which they tied our purchases.
