Status Updates From Running in the Family

"And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut."

"the food so hot it would sear back the drunkenness and sleepiness"

"I long for the moment in the play where Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester and it never happens. Look I am the son who has grown up. I am the son you have made hazardous, who still loves you."

"During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed."

"The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making. It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together."

"The country is cross-hatched with maze-like routes whose only escape is the sea. From a ship or plane you can turn back or look down at the disorder. Villages spill onto streets, the jungle encroaches on village."

"But Lalla could never be just a mother; that seemed to be only one muscle in her chameleon nature, which had too many other things to reflect."

"the bride prayed for half an hour beside the bed and then started singing hymns, so Vere departed, forgoing nuptial bliss, and for the rest of her life the poor woman had a sign above her door which read 'Unloved. Unloved. Unloved.'"

"Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover’s spine."

"This island was a paradise to be sacked. Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe: cardamons, pepper, silk, ginger, sandalwood, mustard oil, palmyra root, tamarind, wild indigo, deers’ horns, elephant tusks, hog lard, calamander, coral, seven kinds of cinnamon, pearl and cochineal. A perfumed sea. And if this was paradise, it had a darker side."

"When ships were still approaching, ten miles out at sea, captains would spill cinnamon onto the deck and invite passengers on board *to smell Ceylon* before the island even came into view."

"Heat walks across the house as an animal hugging everybody."

"It is delicious heat. Sweat runs with its own tangible life down a body as if a giant egg has been broken onto our shoulders."

"my watch collecting sea under the glass and gleaming with underwater phosphorus by my bed at night."

"Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons."

"Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stones of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence."

"Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity."

"The waves on the beach collected champagne corks."

"There were racetracks all over the island. If you sat in the grandstand all bets were five rupees. Then there was the two-rupee enclosure and finally, in the middle of the track, the “gandhi enclosure” where the poorest stood. 'From the grandstand you could watch them leaving like ants a good hour before the last race, having lost all their money.'"

"The rulers of the country genuinely believed that betting eliminated strikes; men had to work in order to gamble."

"[...] singing both male and female parts from Italian operas which the others had never heard of—so they all thought at first that he was singing a Sinhalese baila."

similar to the remark of the pigin aquisition in the Diamond Grill of "high muckamuck"!

"When he got into a fight he would remove his false teeth and put them in his back pocket."

"And poor Wilfred Batholomeusz who had large teeth was killed while out hunting when one of his companions mistook him for a wild boar.”