At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular o...
As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.
And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.
And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.
He wanted to relive those confused days, that life of discovery, to be bound to those round tables and lectures and exams. There were things he had always meant to understand better [...] He wanted to...
É como se um prédio por cujo projeto ele fosse o responsável tivesse desabado na frente de todo mundo. E, no entanto, ele não pode culpá-la de fato. Ambos tinham agido pelo mesmo impulso, esse foi o e...
Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela’s name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time,...
They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out...
There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads.
There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.
The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity’s pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.
She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned...
She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way.
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This w...
It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ash...
It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem....
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there wou...
I think it's a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, bel...
For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parent...
