The Marvelous Mirza Girls Quotes

“Noreen’s therapist had once quoted a writer, comparing grief to having a broken leg that doesn’t heal right and still hurts when it’s damp outside, but eventually you learn to dance with a limp. It was a weird analogy, but it had stuck.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“that when he asked her a question, he always waited for the answer.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“More TV—do you know this show Gilmore Girls?”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Pooja had explained that, in North India at least, heavy marijuana ingestion plus transgression meant blitzed men thinking they had carte blanche to harass and grope women.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Itna stupid. Who would trust a man with that rule? And anyway, how many male artists have slept with their young assistants? It’s practically part of the job description.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“But my parents didn’t quite get it. My mom kept asking, what does this mean for your life now? How do you live as a gay? What about children? What if you get AIDS? Can’t you still marry a girl? And my dad—I had so much admiration for him, he was a brilliant surgeon with a very generous heart. If anything happened to one of our relatives or someone in the community, he would be the first there to help, and he’d never expect anything back.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“was ashamed, so I did what a lot of gay young men did back then, bury it deep and overcompensate. I dated Kavita, a smart, future doctor Indian girl from my community, I was part of the youth group at temple, I had a poster of Madhuri Dixit on my wall—”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“He’s right. These conversations need to happen,” Camille said. “I’ll tell you, being a white woman in India can be très difficile. Men here assume white girls are easy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been propositioned or touched. In order to make it happen less,”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“She could swear like a Punjabi truck driver and was funny as hell—last time Noreen had hung out with her, she’d told a story about her first time using a squat toilet that had her rolling on the floor.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Eventually,” she said. “They can’t let your father’s actions define their life, prevent them from achieving happiness. And neither can you. You are not your dad, Kabir, like I’m not mine.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“do believe women! I am a feminist! I have been in the trenches, fighting this fight since I was a girl! How many young female artists have I mentored?” Meena retrieved the decanter from the bookshelf and poured a shot of whiskey into Inder’s glass, swirling it a few times before drinking it down. “You’re still a child, Kabir. You don’t know anything about the world.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“The truth doesn’t matter. I am screwed. If I even utter one word in my defense, those young, rabid feminists will eat me alive. Woh sab mujhko kha jaingi. What kind of generation is yours, that casts such a wide net and leaves no room for nuance? Tell me, who is vetting these anonymous posts? Don’t they understand that what they are doing can destroy a person’s life, his life’s work?”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“So every day there is puja in your house but no Quran. Do you even have Allah’s name written anywhere? Or now you rely on Ganesh to protect you?” “Sonia had Allah’s name in every room of her house, but it didn’t protect her, did it?” Ruby said.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“You come here and it’s all yoga retreat and paint a few walls for the less fortunate and isn’t India amazing,” Ankita said, her voice excoriatingly polite. “We don’t need you to save us. India does not exist to bless you, or so you can post photos of you and all the happy poor brown orphans on social media. Do you even have a clue what the fuck is going on in this country? But why should you bother?”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“That sidewalk!” she said. “It’s built like a game of Tetris, up and down and up and down, and then suddenly it ends, and then it’s up and down again—it’s like they want to make walking as unpleasant and stressful as possible. Though I suppose it’s my fault, for leaving my palanquin and manservants at home.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“You see the lives most women have here, how they’re treated by men; even money doesn’t save you from it, and imagine if you have none. You were their scapegoat for something beyond your control”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Don’t worry,” Tara said. “We’ve never looked to America for moral high ground.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“They made a Bollywood movie about Mary Kom, the legendary Olympic boxer from Manipur, but instead of casting an actual Northeastern actor to play her, they cast Priyanka Chopra,” he explained.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story was a nice narrative, her mother said, but the truth was that the course of most people’s lives, all over the world, was determined by the circumstances into which they were born.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“It’s not as though his cup brimmeth with options,” Inder said, but Meena was looking past him.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Everything she read online said girls who felt unloved by their fathers went on to have shitty relationships with men as though it was a given.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“You were never clueless. I was so busy rebelling against my parents that it took me longer to grow up. You see how I still am with my folks. Your personality, your life, your circumstances . . . you may be of me, but you are not at all me.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Sometimes I think I’m attracted to ruins because I find the present so depressing. There’s so much hatred in India now, other places too. Sometimes I wonder if we’re one seismic event away from collapse. But I digress. Shall we enter the main palace?”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“What a waste, Noreen had thought when she’d told them this, to live in India and not like Indian food.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“My best friend is a recent widow and I’ve been helping her with online dating. Don’t worry, Yash!” Geeta Auntie slapped Yash Uncle’s thigh. “I only have eyes for you.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“India doesn’t have a monopoly on the mistreatment of women. One in four female undergraduates will experience sexual misconduct by the time she graduates, so we should also worry about American college campuses.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Azra lay gazing at the ceiling, her hands folded over her stomach, feeling sorry for herself because while her elder daughter had followed the right path, her younger was a divorced single mother who’d always made foolish decisions, was making them still.”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“You know they hate Muslims in India. Do you know what they are doing to Muslims there?”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“Noreen wasn’t one for alcohol, or pot. In varying degrees, both brought her down, then pummeled her with dark thoughts—you’ll never write anything worthwhile and anyway your writing sucks, your mother could die, Adi Uncle could die, you could die, if you were funnier/smarter/prettier/a better writer maybe your father would want to know”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India

“All the late nights and practice tests and extra-credit assignments and Amnesty International petitions and cross-country meets, all in service of College, those four years of transformative learning and personal growth, where she would take screenwriting classes and find forever friends like her mother had found Adi Uncle and travel and maybe even try improv because”
― Sheba Karim, The Marvelous Mirza Girls: A Young Adult Romance of Grief, Family Scandal, and Finding Home in India