Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all. Twice, when he thinks no one is looking, he winks at me.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

Below the red writing there's a line of smaller print, in black, with the outline of a winged eye on either side of it: God Is a National Resource.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that's how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.

You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help
how you behave.

One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover.

Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four.
What do they make? I said, expecting five or three.
Just one and one and one and one, he said.

We are not each other's, anymore. Instead, I am his.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

she was lava beneath the crust of daily life.

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives.

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere.

I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me.

That is how I feel: white, flat, thin. I feel transparent. Surely they will be able to see through me. Worse, how will I be able to hold on to Luke, to her, when I'm so flat, so white? I feel as if there's not much left of me; they will slip through my arms, as if I'm made of smoke, as if I'm a mirage, fading before their eyes. Don't think that way, Moira would say. Think that way and you'll make it happen.

Last week, Janine burst into tears. Aunt Helena made her kneel at the front of the classroom, hands behind her back, where we could all see her, her red face and dripping nose.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

It isn't a story I'm telling.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.