He looked at her, in her red plaid skirt and strawberry T-shirt, a woman not yet thirty, who loved neither her husband nor her children, who had already fallen out of love with life.
Subhash was angry with himself for going along with it. For still needing to prove he could. He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan wo...
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who’d embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of...
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.
He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcut...
And yet she didn't want to kill herself. She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, th...
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired...
…avevo bisogno di una lingua differente: una lingua che fosse un luogo di affetto e di riflessione. —ANTONIO TABUCCHI
Will you remember this day, Gogol? his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. How long do I have to remember it? Over the rise and f...
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me--e...
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a cover is a sort of translation, that is, an interpretation of my words in another language -- a visual one. It represents the text, but isn't...
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The
In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can't create anything.
In American, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.
Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days...
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic po...
To Travel without moving an inch.
Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was eas...
I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.