If one had asked Manucci during his days as a street urchin, as he sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, Manucci would probably have said that ACs were hot. The first time...
I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today. Wheth...
Quando pregava, entrava in contatto coi suoi genitori, con cui altrimenti non avrebbe più potuto entrare in contatto, ed entrava in contatto con la sensazione che siamo tutti figli che abbiamo perso i...
It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself,
America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.
A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition.
Status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.
The city waits for thunder's echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.
Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence:
Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew's commencement, and Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed's father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the cong...
Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.
One's relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition:...
If the choice is between being held up at gunpoint or holding the gun, only a madman would choose to hand over his wallet rather than fill it with someone else’s cash.
And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
The way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transie...
When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional...
That is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.