Woetoe’s Reviews > Short Stories from Rabindranath Tagore > Status Update

‘But there can, I admit, be poison in words: no words are wholly without effect.’

‘When the sun went down begind the crags, a long shadow fell, like a curtain abruptly ending the drama of the day. Here in this cleft between mountains there was no real dusk, no mingling of light and dark.’

‘If a material thing gets broken it can be dovetailed together again; but there are no clean edges along which two people who have been apart for a long time can be stuck together. This is because the mind is a living substance, changing and ripening with every moment.’

‘I had once spoken in the very same way to someone else. And that very moment, above the bakul tree, over the tops of the jhāu bushes, under the yellow slice of the moon, right from the eastern to the far western bank of the Ganges, a laugh sped swiftly, a rolling laugh. I cannot describe that heart-rending laugh, the way it seemed to split the sky. I lost consciousness, and fell from the stone seat.’

‘As the darkness pressed my eyes, the shadowy shape of my wife’s languid body, the dim pallor of her loose sari, stirred me with inexorable passion. But she seemed like a shadow herself — impossible to hold in my arms.’

‘Actually, Jaykali did not say very much; she could stop even the mightiest verbal torrents with a couple of words or by saying nothing at all.’

‘The book was a piece of her parental home: a much-loved memento of her short residence in the house of her birth; a brief record of parental affection, written in round childish letters.’

‘Human beings can hate each other more than death.’