Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.

Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.

I have learnt that a good marriage is healing for the soul, something to relish. But a bad marriage is long-suffering, a thing to be endured. The only good thing about marriage is that it’s perishable like human life.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

She stood above the sink and broke the Swarovski glass frame – a wedding gift – with her hands. Her thumb got cut. As blood drops fell into the sink, like mercury balls she thought, she lit the photo on fire. Ashes fell into the sink. Fire and vermilion. Ashes and blood. Her marriage from start to finish.

Of all the roles she’d played – daughter, student, employee, sister and wife – wife was the smallest and in proportion the most difficult, as though it had run out of steam with its own scale. The word ‘wife’ was too small to accommodate its responsibility.