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A review by emeraldgreen
Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee
3.0
Notes:
anything that teased out infinity.
And yet his influence hangs over some of us like the vault of heaven.
He went to villages and recorded long litanies of anecdotal history, family memories verging on fantasy, and, especially, local songs. (Note: What a rich life!)
The conventional form of Indian femininity projects itself through long-lashed, kohl-rimmed, startled black eyes. Modest women know to glance upward from a slightly bowed head. (Note: lol this is kinda true but also so 90s I don't think anyone in our generation knows how to do this Or maybe we all do an dare just waiting to take off our shells of modern hood?)
the dense clutter of handcarts and bicycles: swollen, restless India on the move.
But not like typical Indian students, those driven rote learners with one obsessive goal: admission to an Indian Institute of Technology.
Family weddings and funerals are the incontestable duties and rituals of Indian life.
Even at nineteen, Anjali was determined not to yield her right to happiness.
“What you wear, how you talk, no wonder! What good boy is going to look twice?”(Note: Oops who needed good boys anyway But omg this is so true)
"Why do you look at people's eyes" Whee am I suppose to look their feet!?
You’ll have kids and a husband who’s jealous of your intelligence and your English and won’t let you out of the house, and that would break my heart.”
Anjali was tuned in to her culture’s consolations for the denial of autonomy.
pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were
boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy.
It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked.
negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it’s tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland.
school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition)
But she trusted the boy; he wouldn’t laugh at her.Read more at location
His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone’s light-hearted conversation.
but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like.
and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it.
Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second.
he had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he’d said about the Indian social and political
She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.
Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his
she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol.
was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh,
could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he’d bought along with his
no questions and requested no favors—posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American
helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If
The numb certitudes of her life: I have no family. The only money in my pocket comes from a man whose world is alien to mine and whom I’ll never see again. I have no job, no skills. School teaches little.Read more at location 1120 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Five hundred and sixty more kilometers to go. Two thousand kilometers behind her.Read more at location 1127 • Delete this highlight
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She, so proud of her Hindi and English and even, if pushed, her Bangla, had been struck deaf and dumb.Read more at location 1134 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete.Read more at location 1145 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probablyRead more at location 1155 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore?Read more at location 1159 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.Read more at location 1173 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, “Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri.”Read more at location 1228 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident breakfasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a languageRead more at location 1248 • Delete this highlight
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with familiar cadences! SheRead more at location 1249 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Suzie. “I don’t know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used toRead more at location 1332 • Delete this highlight
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have some class. I keep hoping I get him—he won’t have the balls to call back again.” Mike started singing, “I get no kick from Champagne.” He had a surprising voice: deep, American. “Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign.” “Well, no wonder he’s crazy,” Angie said, “living in Champagne!”Read more at location 1333 • Delete this highlight
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Mickey?’ What he really wants to know is, what’s the weather like in Bangalore today? What’s playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World?Read more at location 1344 • Delete this highlight
Note: Lol that mall! I've been there Edit
skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside herRead more at location 1396 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine—the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man—she climbed into the stranger’s car. She’d seen this movie a hundred times.Read more at location 1407 • Delete this highlight
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He’d taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.Read more at location 1460 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analysesRead more at location 1471 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
So he inspects buildings that aren’t there, in cities he’s never been to.Read more at location 1478 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe—or perhaps had known only too well—that they would never see England again.Read more at location 1547 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow. No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.Read more at location 1572 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.Read more at location 1601 • Delete this highlight
Note: Isn't this literally the neoliberal feminist idea, though? Edit
Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion’s words: every note a symphony.Read more at location 1620 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
but he described himself as an iconoclast. “Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders,”Read more at location 1803 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.Read more at location 1858 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia.Read more at location 2029 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away.”Read more at location 2319 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was soRead more at location 2348 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
But Mr. GG cut through Minnie’s veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion’s middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longedRead more at location 2349 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“That’s it. We’re soldiers in a social revolution.”Read more at location 2382 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She’d grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence.Read more at location 2520 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Bollywood has no use for India’s women, apart from ornamentation.Read more at location 2707 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor’s badge out of the guard’s hand; and clippedRead more at location 2984 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.Read more at location 3050 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“I am in love. With Bangalore.”Read more at location 3156 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Appearances can be deceiving,” he said, smiling. “I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe.”Read more at location 3178 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.Read more at location 3197 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and she realized she wasn’t safe at all.Read more at location 3213 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.Read more at location 3224 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. ARead more at location 3233 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she’d ever known.Read more at location 3241 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Maybe all the men in white shirts she passed on the streets had been doing the same thing aRead more at location 3269 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.Read more at location 3285 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?Read more at location 3325 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The TV episodes depressed her.Read more at location 3363 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
dollars. Insofar as reality can be composedRead more at location 3388 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspiredRead more at location 3389 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness.Read more at location 3727 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp.Read more at location 3743 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
copies. I am just a copy. InRead more at location 3775 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
You think you’re moving forward, you think you’re beginning to figure things out, and it’s all a trap.Read more at location 3781 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Her father dreaded—had dreaded—looking foolish.Read more at location 3832 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and insisted that only his wife could cook rice perfectly. Read more at location 3993
Note: Ugh men why do patriarchal Edit
Their homes and their neighborhood would reflect the best of the West they’d grown rich in and the romanticized best of the country they’d abandoned as ambitious young men.Read more at location 4009 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
freshness before haggling over the price with a fishmonger. Curried Read more at location 4043
Note: She's still so guilty Edit
She’d never felt so comfortable with a boy. Why can’t we get what we most want in the world?Read more at location 4059 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“I’m jealous of anyone in love. Even more jealous of anyone loved back.”Read more at location 4067 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
you still dream of meeting someone who’s fallen in love with you for something you’ve written or painted, something you’ve created.Read more at location 4075 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“It’s revolutionized my art!” Then, conspiratorially, “We could always arrange his drowning. The crocs know their business.”Read more at location 4089 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“No holing up,” Parvati snapped. “We have opinions too.”Read more at location 4106 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Theirs was a struggle—lost, in Baba’s case—against communalism and caste-ism and poverty and superstition and too much religion.Read more at location 4357 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
What a sad, pathetic thing it is, a man’s cry for what? Favors? Companionship? His private little prostitute?Read more at location 4368 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
unending dedication to duty, duty, duty. No mention of joy, fulfillment,Read more at location 4458 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
or happiness—it’s heroic.Read more at location 4459 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The tears were for Peter, who still cared for his protégée, and for her father, who, in his clumsy way, had cared too much for the rebel daughter.Read more at location 4486 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Let Citibank Srinivasan aim for nirvana; she was happy to be mired in maya.Read more at location 4506 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Who needs the mafia,” Auro joked, “when you’ve got an Indian extended family?”Read more at location 4518 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The best I can come up with is you’re like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be.”Read more at location 4566 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She had a sudden thought: Nothing bad can come of this. I’m down to one iron in the fire. Debt-recovery agent. If anything is to come of this night, or the future, she thought before turning in, I owe it to bats and crocodiles. How to explain the wonders of this world?Read more at location 4619 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
anything that teased out infinity.
And yet his influence hangs over some of us like the vault of heaven.
He went to villages and recorded long litanies of anecdotal history, family memories verging on fantasy, and, especially, local songs. (Note: What a rich life!)
The conventional form of Indian femininity projects itself through long-lashed, kohl-rimmed, startled black eyes. Modest women know to glance upward from a slightly bowed head. (Note: lol this is kinda true but also so 90s I don't think anyone in our generation knows how to do this Or maybe we all do an dare just waiting to take off our shells of modern hood?)
the dense clutter of handcarts and bicycles: swollen, restless India on the move.
But not like typical Indian students, those driven rote learners with one obsessive goal: admission to an Indian Institute of Technology.
Family weddings and funerals are the incontestable duties and rituals of Indian life.
Even at nineteen, Anjali was determined not to yield her right to happiness.
“What you wear, how you talk, no wonder! What good boy is going to look twice?”(Note: Oops who needed good boys anyway But omg this is so true)
"Why do you look at people's eyes" Whee am I suppose to look their feet!?
You’ll have kids and a husband who’s jealous of your intelligence and your English and won’t let you out of the house, and that would break my heart.”
Anjali was tuned in to her culture’s consolations for the denial of autonomy.
pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were
boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy.
It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked.
negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it’s tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland.
school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition)
But she trusted the boy; he wouldn’t laugh at her.Read more at location
His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone’s light-hearted conversation.
but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like.
and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it.
Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second.
he had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he’d said about the Indian social and political
She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.
Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his
she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol.
was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh,
could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he’d bought along with his
no questions and requested no favors—posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American
helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If
The numb certitudes of her life: I have no family. The only money in my pocket comes from a man whose world is alien to mine and whom I’ll never see again. I have no job, no skills. School teaches little.Read more at location 1120 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Five hundred and sixty more kilometers to go. Two thousand kilometers behind her.Read more at location 1127 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She, so proud of her Hindi and English and even, if pushed, her Bangla, had been struck deaf and dumb.Read more at location 1134 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete.Read more at location 1145 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probablyRead more at location 1155 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore?Read more at location 1159 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.Read more at location 1173 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, “Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri.”Read more at location 1228 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident breakfasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a languageRead more at location 1248 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
with familiar cadences! SheRead more at location 1249 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Suzie. “I don’t know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used toRead more at location 1332 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
have some class. I keep hoping I get him—he won’t have the balls to call back again.” Mike started singing, “I get no kick from Champagne.” He had a surprising voice: deep, American. “Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign.” “Well, no wonder he’s crazy,” Angie said, “living in Champagne!”Read more at location 1333 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Mickey?’ What he really wants to know is, what’s the weather like in Bangalore today? What’s playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World?Read more at location 1344 • Delete this highlight
Note: Lol that mall! I've been there Edit
skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside herRead more at location 1396 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine—the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man—she climbed into the stranger’s car. She’d seen this movie a hundred times.Read more at location 1407 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
He’d taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.Read more at location 1460 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analysesRead more at location 1471 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
So he inspects buildings that aren’t there, in cities he’s never been to.Read more at location 1478 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe—or perhaps had known only too well—that they would never see England again.Read more at location 1547 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow. No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.Read more at location 1572 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.Read more at location 1601 • Delete this highlight
Note: Isn't this literally the neoliberal feminist idea, though? Edit
Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion’s words: every note a symphony.Read more at location 1620 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
but he described himself as an iconoclast. “Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders,”Read more at location 1803 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.Read more at location 1858 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia.Read more at location 2029 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away.”Read more at location 2319 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was soRead more at location 2348 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
But Mr. GG cut through Minnie’s veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion’s middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longedRead more at location 2349 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“That’s it. We’re soldiers in a social revolution.”Read more at location 2382 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She’d grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence.Read more at location 2520 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Bollywood has no use for India’s women, apart from ornamentation.Read more at location 2707 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor’s badge out of the guard’s hand; and clippedRead more at location 2984 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.Read more at location 3050 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“I am in love. With Bangalore.”Read more at location 3156 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Appearances can be deceiving,” he said, smiling. “I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe.”Read more at location 3178 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.Read more at location 3197 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and she realized she wasn’t safe at all.Read more at location 3213 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.Read more at location 3224 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. ARead more at location 3233 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she’d ever known.Read more at location 3241 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Maybe all the men in white shirts she passed on the streets had been doing the same thing aRead more at location 3269 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.Read more at location 3285 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?Read more at location 3325 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The TV episodes depressed her.Read more at location 3363 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
dollars. Insofar as reality can be composedRead more at location 3388 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspiredRead more at location 3389 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness.Read more at location 3727 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp.Read more at location 3743 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
copies. I am just a copy. InRead more at location 3775 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
You think you’re moving forward, you think you’re beginning to figure things out, and it’s all a trap.Read more at location 3781 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Her father dreaded—had dreaded—looking foolish.Read more at location 3832 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
and insisted that only his wife could cook rice perfectly. Read more at location 3993
Note: Ugh men why do patriarchal Edit
Their homes and their neighborhood would reflect the best of the West they’d grown rich in and the romanticized best of the country they’d abandoned as ambitious young men.Read more at location 4009 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
freshness before haggling over the price with a fishmonger. Curried Read more at location 4043
Note: She's still so guilty Edit
She’d never felt so comfortable with a boy. Why can’t we get what we most want in the world?Read more at location 4059 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“I’m jealous of anyone in love. Even more jealous of anyone loved back.”Read more at location 4067 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
you still dream of meeting someone who’s fallen in love with you for something you’ve written or painted, something you’ve created.Read more at location 4075 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“It’s revolutionized my art!” Then, conspiratorially, “We could always arrange his drowning. The crocs know their business.”Read more at location 4089 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“No holing up,” Parvati snapped. “We have opinions too.”Read more at location 4106 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Theirs was a struggle—lost, in Baba’s case—against communalism and caste-ism and poverty and superstition and too much religion.Read more at location 4357 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
What a sad, pathetic thing it is, a man’s cry for what? Favors? Companionship? His private little prostitute?Read more at location 4368 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
unending dedication to duty, duty, duty. No mention of joy, fulfillment,Read more at location 4458 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
or happiness—it’s heroic.Read more at location 4459 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The tears were for Peter, who still cared for his protégée, and for her father, who, in his clumsy way, had cared too much for the rebel daughter.Read more at location 4486 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
Let Citibank Srinivasan aim for nirvana; she was happy to be mired in maya.Read more at location 4506 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
“Who needs the mafia,” Auro joked, “when you’ve got an Indian extended family?”Read more at location 4518 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
The best I can come up with is you’re like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be.”Read more at location 4566 • Delete this highlight
Add a note
She had a sudden thought: Nothing bad can come of this. I’m down to one iron in the fire. Debt-recovery agent. If anything is to come of this night, or the future, she thought before turning in, I owe it to bats and crocodiles. How to explain the wonders of this world?Read more at location 4619 • Delete this highlight
Add a note