Ravan & Eddie Quotes

“It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“What did she think about behind that tranquil face of hers? Whatever the provocation, she never clenched her jaws, swore or got angry. Did she watch everything from a distance, as if even her own life was happening to someone else? Nobody could see it but instead of a face, she wore a mask. No, Ravan wanted to rephrase that. What he and everybody else saw was the mask, not what went on inside.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“Parvatibai had heard that the gods visit trials and travails upon mankind to test them. Test what? Their faith, their loyalty, their fortitude, their capacity for suffering? She thought that this was what rotten parents did: they did not know how to handle their impotence and rage against their partners, fate or the world and so beat their children and said it was for their own good. She had no idea what good ensued from piling hardship upon hardship, evil and torture. If watching people lose heart, break down and squirm, gave the gods pleasure, then they were stranger than men and women.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“She was willing to put in as much effort as necessary to discipline Ravan and bring him back to the straight and narrow. But Ravan's mute forbearance wore her down. All her life she had assumed that persistent endeavour was always followed by success. She now realized she was wrong.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“You couldn’t ever be off your guard with this boy. Even when you had just saved his soul and begun to trust him, he would spring a rotten question on you and drag you all the way down to perdition.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“In India, as in other poor countries, we have a line that is invisible and abstract and yet more powerful and pervasive than anything the West or the Japanese have invented. It is called the poverty line. Above the poverty line are three meals a day. Below it is a spectrum that stretches all the way from 2.99 to zero meals. As familiar as a clothes-line, most people in India spend their entire lives trying to reach out beyond it. It is their greatest aspiration. If you are fortunate, if the gods smile and you are lucky, you may get a glimpse of it. You can’t see the line, you can’t touch it, and five hundred million people are trying to get to it.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“Even the Hindu neighbours had no way of figuring out what the priest recited, though it was in their mother tongue, Marathi. He didn’t give a damn about the meaning of the words, the feeling behind them, the poetry of the language or the complex manoeuvres of the plot line. He had no thought for metaphysical implications nor time to translate them in terms of everyday life. He was telescoping words, sentences, paragraphs, hurtling through chapter after chapter. He was vomiting all over the place, choking on his own breathless mess. What came forth were huge boulders and sharp and clangorous bits and parts of iron pistons and bridges and girders.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“Rains are an act of God in India. And God as we know is a law unto himself. He is not responsible, neither is He accountable. That is the essence of God: He gives with two hands and takes away with eight more. Why else would Indian gods and goddesses have several pairs of hands?”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie