50 quotes
The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food.
A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)
It's a very strange middle class…Full of operators and people on the move. It really doesn't value disruptions in that activeness. It doesn't have time for any privileging of daydreaming.
‘Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...’
Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)
Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life.
Friend of My Youth (2017)
History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.
Odysseus Abroad (2014)
There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims.
A New World (2000)
‘The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.’
Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)
‘All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.’
Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)
Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end.
Friend of My Youth (2017)
‘Light shafted obliquely on it.’ ( The Steamer )
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)
‘The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.’
Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)
‘... he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.’
The Immortals (2009)
‘Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact ...’
The Immortals (2009)
I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony.
Friend of My Youth (2017)
An hour's a symbolic duration.
Friend of My Youth (2017)
The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.
Odysseus Abroad (2014)
‘I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly/white houses.’ ( The Bandra Medical Store )
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)
‘... invisibility was one of Bengali modernity’s prerequisites and cardinal achievements.’
‘And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils ...’ ( Kitchen )
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)
‘As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)