I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!
And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.
And have you come to set me free finally, Govinda? he asked. Have I paid sufficiently for my theft?
This time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wast...
The bird began to carry them to a new life in a new land. We'll be happy ever after, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. A...
It’s not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we’re willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values...
Did you think of the impact your actions would have on the women of the city? That men would punish their wives harshly or even discard them for the smallest refractions, saying King Ram did so. Then...
Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer. If you can hold on to this, no sin can touch you. Instrument,
The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as...
Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable.
Early in my life, I learned to eavesdrop. I was driven to this ignoble practice because people seldom told me anything worth knowing.
Drupad was mystified. He'd had little to do with the Kaurava clan, whose kingdom lay to the northwest, in Hastinapur. From what he'd heard, their blind ruler, Dhritarashtra, was a quiet, careful man.
Anger and self-pity are useless emotions, so I push them away and speak calmly, even though my heart is breaking all over again.
Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.
Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was somethi...
I don’t agree with you that the private life must be sacrificed for the public one. And that is the final advice that I leave for my children: my dearest boys, balance duty with love. Trust me, it can...
Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person - even Anjali and Basudha - is distinct, separate...
But truth, when it’s being lived, is less glamorous than our imaginings.
So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.