I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable–but I always was so, only I never knew it!
The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.
Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.
She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.
May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.
Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart’s dusty corners.
Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.
I don’t put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.
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.
How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?
In the white marble hall of the hotel, I’m waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we’re dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.
No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.
Danger will come upon us when it will. We can’t stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There’s no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.
It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.
Fenugreek, Tuesday’s spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.
Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.
I’ve been interested in dreams myself for a long time, and it’s a big part of the Indian tradition, especially where I was brought up in Calcutta in my family, which is quite traditional.
As I remember my grandfather and those Christmas mornings he gave for a little girl’s pleasure, I know that often a big life starts with doing small things.
We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant ‘big day.’
I came from a traditional family, and it was an exciting but challenging transition to move to America and live on my own. The world around me was suddenly so different.
Strong women, when respected, make the whole society stronger. One must be careful with such rapid changes, though, and make an effort to preserve, at the same time, the positive traditions of Indian culture.
I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works.
I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. None of them had much to say, if at all, about Dayton, Ohio.
India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer’s imagination.