The Good Muslim Quotes

“Before placing her in her mother's arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births, hello, little amphibian. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“It was like that with her mother – memory upon memory stacked together like the feathers in a wild bird, there to keep her warm, or when she needed to, fly. She was the wings of her, the very wings.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“So Rehana printed a few cards and sent them with boxes of sweets to everyone she knew. Orange-studded Laddus and curd-dusted Pranharas, the sweet named for heartache.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“She felt the urge to tell him more, to explain about the abortions she had done after the war, and that she hadn’t realised until later, much later, that she had racked up a debt she was still struggling to repay. How could he know – he was just a soldier, he had killed as a matter of principle, but the war babies, the children of rape, had been left to junior doctors, the volunteers in ragged tents on the outskirts of town.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“Sufia began to grind turmeric with a giant stone shaped like a rolling pin. She passed the stone back and forth over the turmeric bulb, smashing it into a rough paste, and then went over it again and again until it turned smooth, darkening to the colour of crushed marigolds.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“Her eyes adjusted to the new contours of the building. The decline was far worse than she had imagined. Here, grey streaks across its back, where the drainpipe had leaked; there, the slow sinking of its foundations, as if the house were being returned to the earth; and, above, the collection of shacks that made up the first floor, built by her brother out of a mixture of brick and tin and jute, making it appear as though an entire village had fallen from the sky and landed on the rooftop.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“She didn’t think of the debt she was repaying, that each of the babies she brought into the world might someday be counted against the babies that had died, by her hand, after the war.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim