Partitions Quotes

“How little we knew each other, though for centuries our homes had shared walls. How little we will learn, now that all we share is a border.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“I am grateful to every reader, whoever you are, wherever you are. Your time has been a gift.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“He knows his caregiving is neither Muslim, nor Sikh, nor Hindu. Or rather, it is all three of these. The name, on the man or on the God, is something around it, not of it---thinner than the gloves on his scrubbed hands and peeled off just as easily.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“Nothing holds her in, nothing holds her together. Through all those holes and rents she has dispersed, though yet living. Neither the will to live not the will to kill herself. No will at all. This is a state I had not thought possible. I am dead but not deadened; she is deadened but not dead.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“But her confusion gives me hope. If there's one thing dangerously abundant right now it is certainly. Certainty makes possible in men the most extreme good and the most extreme evil. A land like the Punjab, five rivers and three faiths, could do with a little less certainty.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“The sky, I realised, was just a partition between the world an an emptiness, an illusion put there to let us go about our work. The blue sky, all this time no better than a painted ceiling.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“When he finds the kafila, he wonders if he wandered in a circle and ended up joining the same one that bore him to Pakistan. The faces here resemble the faces there. The clothes are the same, the bundles and mules and families the same. Gashes often run the same angle. The relationship of attacker to victim flash before him, plain as statuary: this gash glanced across the shoulder of someone running away; this one struck the forearm of someone who saw the blade descending and tried to block it. Everything is familiar. It's only after he gets close that he can see the residual flecks of bindis on the Hindu women, or the steel kangans and hard topknots on the devout Sikhs. Externals, indistinct in the twilight, unseen by nightfall---yet precisely at nightfall, the marks by which they are targeted.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions