Megha Majumdar > Quotes

“Mother, do you grieve?
Know that I will return to you. I will be a flutter in the leaves above where you sit, cooking ruti on the stove. I will be the stray cloud which shields you from the days of sun. I will be the thunder that wakes you before rain floods the room.
When you walk to the market, I will return to you as footprint on the soil. At night, when you close your eyes, I will appear as impress on the bed.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Many years ago I would have been asking why is this happening? But now I am knowing that there is no use asking these questions. In life, many things are happening for no reason at all.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Whenever I am calling god, her line is busy.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Her husband threw acid on her but, somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“The depth of night always felt adjacent to real life, a fourth dimension of the world that allowed the honesty and courage that daylight forbade. Perhaps it was that the moon and stars reminded people of their finite lives in the margins of the universe’s story—what did it matter what human beings did or didn’t do? Or perhaps it was only the clock losing its tether to the day’s routines and yielding to pure time.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“I have been performing all my life," I was saying to him. I was performing on trains, on roads. I was performing happiness and cheer. I was performing divine connection. "Now," I was telling him, "just let me practice for the camera".”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Where public feeling goes, the court follows. Freedom will result not from boxes of papers and fights over legality but from a national outcry.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“The pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound. Didn’t they understand that? Didn’t they understand that he wanted every opportunity to examine the wound?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“The system doesn’t always work for us. But you see that, now and then, you can make good things happen for yourself.” And I thought, only now and then? I thought I would have a better life than that.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“This was the city he believed in, the city in which knowing somebody once was knowing them forever. The city in which knowing somebody meant laying claim to their time, and expecting them to lay claim to one’s own time. Everything beautiful, and everything useful, about the city could be found in these relationships of dependence—with one’s barber, one’s rickshaw driver, one’s editor, one’s neighbor. How had Dadu forgotten that?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“With all respect, we have to take care of the people before taking care of the ideology. Through people is how we will spread ideology, not by neglecting them.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Clouds like cotton pulled from a roll are moving under the moon, sometimes hiding it, sometimes revealing it. I am feeling that the world is so big, so full of our dreams and our love stories, and our grief too.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Here it is, a special cell for the soon to be dead. A room under the ground for the ones who will be soil.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Perhaps the true adventure was not only in seeing the world but also in seeing the versions of one's own self that the journey revealed.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“He was too old to commence life in a new country. In America, he knew, he would be a diminished version of himself—uncertain of social mores, unaccustomed to the accents, wary of car culture. There would be nobody in that place acquainted with his boyhood self. Was such an escape rescue or its own ruin?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“He understood, from everything he had endured in his own life, that the worth of honesty, presented as noble before schoolchildren, was itself a lie. The honest souls who paused to deliberate on morals found, when they made their choice, that the treasure was gone. What was absolutely true and right, and what was absolutely false and wrong, and how could any sane person live without crossing the borders every day? Lies were the lifeblood of the world.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“He watches his wife´s legs opened by the true men of this country, and he appears to die before we can kill him.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Nothing is simple for a person like me, not even one hour on the train. My chest is a man's chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in the whole city as truly woman as me.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Lovely continues seriously, as if she has not heard. “I am an actress, so I need to be reading scripts and having fluent English, you understand? So that is how I am knowing Jivan, sweet girl. She was spending her time on teaching the poors. How many of you are doing that in your own life?” she demands. “Who are you all to judge her?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled. Is anybody believing that she was innocent? Is anybody believing that I can be having some talent?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“I am opening a card as if it is a flap of my heart. Opening and closing the card, opening and closing the card – I am ready for my heart to be tearing at the fold.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“But I am surprised to find that it is bearable. I cook ruti, I clean the new exhaust pipes which malfunction. Americandi’s eyes follow me from task to task, waiting for my breakdown. But it doesn’t come. From my mother’s immense strength, I have borrowed a little.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Paying for the tandoor in a sheaf of cash, he feels rich. He feels powerful in how casually he decides that he will buy it, that he will pay the full amount right away. Monthly installments are for the common man.
He as ascended.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one's own pain.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief

“That is how my life is going forward—some insult in my face, some sweet in my mouth.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Not one of them has ever said: “This man is really something! Everywhere there is a robbery, a domestic problem, a fight between neighbors, this man happens to be walking by! Is he Batman or what?”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“Don’t be humble. You can’t be humble in politics.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“On the fourth day, a reporter, or maybe a passerby, spits on my face outside the courthouse. My lawyer finds a canteen napkin with which I wipe my face, but there is no time to find a bathroom and wash. I sit with that stranger’s hatred on my face all day.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning

“In my mind, I have resisted being imprisoned. In my mind, every morning I dress smartly, clip on my badge, and take the bus to my job at Pantaloons. That morning will come again. The clock, though reluctant, moves forward.”
― Megha Majumdar, A Burning