Arundhati Roy

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined

Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn’t really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them—just as an education, a protection.

It was as though the window through which their father disappeared had been kept open for anyone to walk in and be welcomed

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.

History’s smell.

Like old roses on a breeze.

It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.