Kaustubh Dudhane’s Reviews > The Glass Palace > Status Update

“Your Burma is so golden you can pluck nuggets out of people’s farts…”

Finally, I had smiled after endless days of sadness.

“It feels more like the sensation you have when you sit down very heavily in a chair: the breath rushes out of your body, and you find yourself gagging. It’s hard to make sense of it—any of it. You want the pain to be simple, straightforward—you don’t want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways each morning, when you’re getting up to do something else—brush your teeth or eat your breakfast…”

“That’s gulai tumis, fish cooked with pink ginger buds, bunga kuntan.”
“And this?”
“Prawns roasted in pandanus leaves.”
“Peanut crumpets.”
“Nine-layered rice cakes.”
“Chicken with blue flowers—bunga telang.”
“Pickled fish with turmeric leaves and lime leaves and leaves of purple mint.”
“A salad of shredded squid and polygonum and duan kado, a creeper that smells like a spice-garden.”

Yummy!

“Then he uttered a shout of laughter and threw his cheroot high into the air. They stood looking at it, side by side, laughing, watching as it rose circling above them. Suddenly the glowing tip disintegrated and a shower of sparks came floating down. It was as though fireworks were raining down from the heavens."

“She was like the palace itself, a thing of glass, inside which you could see everything of which your imagination was capable.”

“She had been just a child, and yet she had touched him like no one else and nothing before. In her wide eyes, saturated with fear, he had seen his own aloneness turned inside out, rendered visible, worn upon the skin.”