Baljit > Recent Status Updates

‘It was this single thought that would cross his mind again and again over the next four months. How this it come to this?’

‘Hashim Khan had learnt to fear the white man. After coming to England in the seventies, he had learn that wariness and deference were necessary in all dealings with the majority race. Now, called upon to protect his son, he knew no amount of deference would help.’

‘The coins and notes that I stuffed into her hand on my way out the door were a symbol of a separation between us that couldn’t be measured: it was a disjuncture between our very lives. Money couldn’t close the gap; it was the gap. We knew nothing about each other.’

‘Our rule in this country depended on our claims to moral superiority. It was unspoken but obvious in everything we did. We believed in it. The empire was a force for good. It had to be, otherwise why we here?’

‘In their eyes, they and their kind had built this country and now everything they’d made was threatened. How, after everything they’d done done for this land, could the natives have the effrontery to want to send them all packing back to Blighty?’

‘They were like a hybrid flower transplanted to India and acclimatised to such an extent that if returned to Britain, it’d probably wither and die.’

‘As an Englishman, one rather assumed that the natives are either for you or against you, and that the ones employed by the Imperial Police Force must be amongst the most loyal.’

Wedding Season:
‘This would never be her-Tejas’s- none of it. To have family come and carry you on their backs to the next place. For a moment it made her want to cry: she had not chosen it.’

The Neighbors:
‘For a moment I could not bear to look at her face, full of humiliated anger. She looked too much like me.’

A Simple Composition:
‘To me, music was the unity and division of tones, like a painting was the arrangement of colors. Beauty was a mathematical certainty that arose from precisely correct combination.’

‘When everything I think of as mine- my belongings, my family, my life- can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature.
Already broken.’

‘The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it’s like locking eyes or touching someone’s hand for the first time, and we feel it it, too.’

‘Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.’

‘Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each after his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex dramatic ones; not until then did everyone feel important and happy. Will they never grow up? thought Sandeep irately.’

Such astute observations of a customary greeting.