Kiran Manral > Quotes

“There is a charm to letters and cards that emails and smses can’t ever replicate, you cannot inhale them, drawing the fragrance of the place they have been mailed from, the feel of paper in your hand bearing the weight of the words contained within. You cannot rub your fingers over the paper and visualise the sender, seated at a table, writing, perhaps with a smile on their lips or a frown splitting the brow. You can’t see the pressure of the pen on the reverse of the page and imagine the mood the person might have been in when he or she was writing it. Smiley face icons cannot hope to replace words thought out carefully in order to put a smile on the other person’s face, the pressure of the pen, the sharpness or the laxity of the handwriting telling stories about the frame of mind of the writer, the smudges on the sheets of paper telling their own stories, blotches where tears might have fallen, hastily scratched out words where another would have been more appropriate, stories that the writer of the letter might not have intended to communicate. I have letters wrapped up in a soft muslin cloth, letters that are unsigned, tied up with a ribbon which I had once used to hold my soft, brown hair in place, and which had been gently untied by the writer of those letters. Occasionally, I unwrap them and breathe them in, knowing that the molecules from the hand that wrote them might still be scattered on the surface of the paper, a hand that is long dead.”
― Kiran Manral, The Face at the Window

“When I do decide to run away, you will never find me. Remember that. Not only will you never find me, but you will lose yourself trying to find me.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“That’s what she was, broken pottery, patched up with gold, the gold shimmering through the places where she had been cracked open, and left bleeding.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“Grief isn’t elegant. It is messy, snot-nosed, feral, aching. A beast that slobbers into one’s sane moments and scratches the door of one’s composure insistently, demanding to be let out.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“This wasn’t just lust or infatuation, this was intoxication, a craven’s craving I could not explain. But then, what was love but a want of the flesh, or a want of the soul. I wanted this man. I couldn’t not want him. I couldn’t not breathe. I wanted him in a way that was so absolute I couldn’t care if he didn’t want me back the same way.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Miss was a word that couldn’t quite express the hollow pit of my stomach filled with nothing but cold gusts of air where the intestines should have been, walking around with a gaping hole in my chest where my heart had been pulled out from, feeling hollow within and without. It was a missing that filled me up, an absence that was a presence, a bereavement that wasn’t a release.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“And I would let him go and let him return. Over and over again, until there were no spaces between him going and returning and the rhythm of our coming together and separating made a music all its own that would fill through my days of waiting.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Infidelity, he now realised, had nothing to do with the lack of love, and everything to do with the lack of respect.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“When you finally gather the courage to release what you’ve been hanging on to for a while, you realise it is not just a release, but also a relief. It frees you to find something else to hold on to, something else that was also waiting to be held.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“We could love, I realized, without the promise of exclusivity that one had been raised on. And there was no shame or guilt in that, it was just the way the human heart was, four-chambered, with an infinite capacity to contain others, more than it could contain itself.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, ‘Mother, I’m cold.’ Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There was a sudden click, the red light of the heater lit up, the bed and blanket warmer began radiating life-giving heat again and I felt myself thaw out, emerge from the scary limbo which marks one’s descent into another dimension, and the shadow faded out from the rocking chair right in front of me into complete transparency and the icy presence in the bed faded away to nothingness.”
― Kiran Manral, The Face At the Window

“Over each year, the pauses in his sentences had elongated themselves to become silences. The silences eventually stopped punctuating conversations, and the conversations became silences punctuated with words.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“To say I was socked in the soft spot by this message from Pixie would be an understatement. I was socked very hard in the soft spot, and ergo was breathless with the suddenness of the shock.”
― Kiran Manral, Once Upon A Crush

“When I looked in the mirror today, I saw a stranger. The woman staring back at me as unblinkingly confident. She had found her centre. Her eyes were calm and did not brim over with the saltiness of the soul that often anymore. She was at peace. I was at peace.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Hadn't he taught her that monogamy was a social construct that held no relevance with the reality of the human heart? That the heart could love, over and over again and unshackle itself from the bondage of loyalty it owed one person without a smidgeon of guilt.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“The waters were getting higher every year, they told me. The world, beyond this canopy of green, ringed by the incoming sea and the outgoing river, was changing. Perhaps, here I would be safe from the change I didn’t want to be part of. Falling off the radar was easy.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“She followed him, with the curious camaraderie that comes from having done something death-defying together.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“If you leave assumptions lying around unchallenged and uncorrected, it isn’t long before they morph into facts.”
― Kiran Manral, The Face At the Window

“Perhaps there was nothing to be said, and there was nothing to be heard. Perhaps all we were destined to be were moths to the flame, burn ourselves out in the pursuit of the next light we saw. This light had burnt me out. And all I could do was wait till I rose, phoenix-like, only to be burnt again.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“The newly minted maternal heart, it completely melted into mush, the oxytocin I know now, had kicked in, and how. I would fight tigers barehanded, climb down cliffs, throw myself in the path of a speeding car, and even do calculus again if I needed to, for this child.”
― Kiran Manral, Karmic Kids: The Story of Parenting Nobody Told You

“Aren’t you in the thick of hotfooting it around the holy fire in a few months?”
― Kiran Manral, Once Upon A Crush

“It was strange, this feral creature, the body. It would stay denied for months, for years, and then, at one touch, a moment’s trembling indiscretion, it would raise itself and reach out without a moment’s hesitation for what it wanted, in complete contravention of all previously held notions of honour, propriety and morality.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“Every heart needed to contain stories that were too overwhelming to reveal to another human being.”
― Kiran Manral

“The heart, it still beats stoically in my ribcage, but it knows its time is up. Strange how the repository of one’s existence is one’s heart, when all the heart does is pump the blood through the body. Not the soul that puts the life force into the body. The soul is intangible, it floats beyond oneself. It returns, pulled back by threads of loves, old and new, of the lives connected with one, of the belief that no, it isn’t time yet. The heart would beat on until the moment it decided it had done quite enough beating for a lifetime. A miracle organ, the heart, constantly beating through sickness, through health, through wakefulness, through sleep, through sorrow so terrible you think it would stop then and there, and through joy so intense you wish it would stop right then to freeze that moment forever. It beats on, regardless. And when it finally does stop, so does the body. Switched off, like a machine, the engine that powered it shuddering to a halt. The life force swirling away into the ethers, wherever it was that life forces went after the body had perished. Right now I am alive. The heart is beating, the soul is still restless, the feeling that there is more to come niggles. What more though, I don’t know.”
― Kiran Manral, The Face At the Window

“Daylight always had that ability to make things less fearful, whether it was cuts and bruises or the monsters in the dark corners of the mind.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“It would be difficult to explain how her mind sometimes twisted in on itself, like Kekule’s snake and sometimes swallowed its tail.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“Outside, a brisk wind churned the wind chimes on the porch into a forbidding cacophony of discontent.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“Love is a country where you leave the passports of rationality at the customs when you enter, to be collected when you exit.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and glue
them back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelming
in a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had been
playing when….”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“...what dystopian forces in the universe had conspired to get the two of them, with their destroyed souls, together, in this dance of despair.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead