Amit Majmudar > Quotes

“How little we knew each other, though for centuries our homes had shared walls. How little we will learn, now that all we share is a border.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“I am grateful to every reader, whoever you are, wherever you are. Your time has been a gift.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“Now picture a volume of human / Reduced to planes and fluttering / Under my thumb like a flipbook / Showing the disease in action”
― Amit Majmudar, Dothead: Poems

“Nothing holds her in, nothing holds her together. Through all those holes and rents she has dispersed, though yet living. Neither the will to live not the will to kill herself. No will at all. This is a state I had not thought possible. I am dead but not deadened; she is deadened but not dead.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“He knows his caregiving is neither Muslim, nor Sikh, nor Hindu. Or rather, it is all three of these. The name, on the man or on the God, is something around it, not of it---thinner than the gloves on his scrubbed hands and peeled off just as easily.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“Already - beetle, bumblebee, earthworm, spider - words are getting attached to things. In a few years, words will proliferate and swarm and carry off the pictures in the books she reads, black ants hauling off the butterfly. Eventually just words will be left. The things themselves will have been devoured. What a loss! All creation. To be stuck reading instead of looking.”
― Amit Majmudar, The Abundance

“But her confusion gives me hope. If there's one thing dangerously abundant right now it is certainly. Certainty makes possible in men the most extreme good and the most extreme evil. A land like the Punjab, five rivers and three faiths, could do with a little less certainty.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“After Mala found out, she would behave differently. She would be careful. That occasional harshness of hers—I would miss it. Because harshness, paradoxically, is intimate. You have to be very close; you have to be family. My nearness to death will estrange me.”
― Amit Majmudar, The Abundance

“Abhi turns on the television, but in vain. Not silent is not the same as full.”
― Amit Majmudar, The Abundance

“All poets are liars.' And they are, aren't they? Inventors of myths and stories, conjurers of emotions, and sometimes cynical pluckers of heartstrings.”
― Amit Majmudar, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now

“They say flesh is grass, and flesh does grow and wither the way grass grows and withers, but not so that the eyes notice. You need an old photograph to realize how much you have changed, or the exclamation of a friend you haven’t seen in years. Or word of your mortality from a pale bespectacled man in a long white coat, practiced in giving sympathy and news—a chart of the circulation system on the wall behind him, a swath of crinkly paper on the examination table, the back of your gown open to the air.”
― Amit Majmudar, The Abundance

“My former attitude was the luxury of a sheltered child who got to his twenties without ever doubting the stability (and, smugly, I know, the superiority) of his country, without disaster. As it did to so many of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should have broken well before. It seems impossible to me that people who weren't alive then will soon be getting their driver's licenses. When I zoom out, much of this country's history since that day seems a fitful, graceless descent to overseas violence and domestic paranoia. Terrorism works.”
― Amit Majmudar, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now

“The sky, I realised, was just a partition between the world an an emptiness, an illusion put there to let us go about our work. The blue sky, all this time no better than a painted ceiling.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions

“When he finds the kafila, he wonders if he wandered in a circle and ended up joining the same one that bore him to Pakistan. The faces here resemble the faces there. The clothes are the same, the bundles and mules and families the same. Gashes often run the same angle. The relationship of attacker to victim flash before him, plain as statuary: this gash glanced across the shoulder of someone running away; this one struck the forearm of someone who saw the blade descending and tried to block it. Everything is familiar. It's only after he gets close that he can see the residual flecks of bindis on the Hindu women, or the steel kangans and hard topknots on the devout Sikhs. Externals, indistinct in the twilight, unseen by nightfall---yet precisely at nightfall, the marks by which they are targeted.”
― Amit Majmudar, Partitions