Nilanjana Roy > Quotes

“The past is an inheritance, and how it reaches you depends on many things—how conscientious your family is, the presence or absence of public libraries, what they teach in schools, whether you’re from a caste whose privileges include owning their history or from a caste low on the totem pole, deprived of its own history along with so much else.”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“The darkness may seem empty and vast, but my whiskers say it is criss-crossed with the paths of the birds—can you not feel them? High up, the rough drumbeat of the cheels carves broad highways above the clouds; over our heads, across the trees, you can trace the soaring songlines of the bulbuls, the trails left by the sharp swift sorties of the parakeets.”
― Nilanjana Roy

“But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“You leave the heaviness of the ground behind, because here there is only the sky and then, if we could keep flying long enough, the stars.”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Hundred Names of Darkness

“He said to me, Badshah, you can see the signs. But she is stubborn, she will refuse to leave.'

'Leave where? Delhi? For what?'

'The country, Rabia. You can't have missed what's happening around us. Even in your own colony, the trouble at Arshad's wedding two years ago ...'

'But it's always been this way!' she cries.

'Some pushing and pulling, yes, some clashes between us and them, yes. We are used to a hundred little fires breaking out here and there, smouldering. Then people calm down and the fires go out, leaving only the memory of ashes behind. But this is different. When someone blows on each fire and sends the flames rising higher, when they bring fresh coals every time, when a hundred fires join together and become a thousand-I see it happening. We are in our middle years, Rabia, I am at the lip of old age. Too old to stay and spend the rest of my life fighting for a space to breathe.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“He has been more than a simple farmer. He has seen the world, been out in the world. Been a truck mechanic, a construction worker, a road builder, a part-time driver, a butcher. His daughter was born in a big city. She had been given life first by one woman, then another. Their lives could not be folded down so neatly, he wanted to tell the television people, not into these bloodless sentences, all the marrow sucked out of their experiences.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“Jolly says, 'You see? Mr Pilania, I asked your men to come here, I asked my poor neighbour to come here, to assure you of one thing. Whatever help you need, I will give it. Anything your men require to solve this case, to give this grieving man here the chance of revenge on the scum who killed his daughter, ask me. I am here to help.'

The SSP says quietly, 'Justice. What we promise is justice.'

Jolly says, 'Yes, yes. I agree. But what does Chand want?"

Chand appears not to have heard the question. None of them speak as the father stares out towards the carp pond, the light, playful splash of water from the fountain the only sound in the room.

The SSP rises, hands folded, to take his leave, and Chand says, I want him dead. The man who took Munia from me, he should die.'

Jolly looks away, smiles at Ombir and Bhim Sain. "These policemen are good men,' he says to Chand. I've seen them at work. Early morning, late at night, in summer, in the monsoons, they are out in our village, doing their jobs. I promise you, Chand, this murder will be solved. You will have your vengeance."

Ombir notes that, this time, Pilania does not correct him or speak of justice.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“The first of the pre-monsoon winds stirs the dust in the courtyard outside the police station. The women have gathered in front of the door. Sarita Devi sits in front, the pradhan's formidable wife by her side. The wind picks up speed. The drapes of the women's saris and lehengas flutter like a battalion's flags, screaming pinks and yellows, burnt orange and incendiary blues, deep-dyed ominous reds. Their silence worries Ombir, far more than if they were raising slogans or shouting.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“Anger is good, anger is better than the heaviness he has been carrying.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“City people are smart. They are as cruel and small- minded as anyone in a village, but they have more sense than to advertise these facts on a public sign.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“I look at the plaque, commemorating a man who stepped accidentally into history with his one published book, and I say: ‘But some day, I’ll write my own.’ And”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“Many people have a patchy, moth-eaten sense of how Indian writing in English developed: Dean Mahomet begat Raja Rao who begat Mulk Raj Anand, then there came G.V. Desani who begat Salman Rushdie, who begat Arundhati Roy and (each age gets the writers it deserves) so on, to the best-selling pulp fiction novelist Chetan Bhagat. But”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“I was staring at the end result. The Holy Grail of bookshelves, the ultimate shrine, the sanctum sanctorum, the point where every booklover and hoarder’s pilgrimage ends: an empty shelf. Two of them.”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“Beginnings are the sweetest. Rabia distrusts the films and TV serials that end on a blaring note of happiness. Life has a way of dealing with happy endings, adding a few snakes turning up unexpected nests of scorpions.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“Munia's eighth birthday falls on the hottest day in June, with the smell of burning cane scenting the air. She forgets the heat in her excitement over the slice of cassata her father has brought all the way from Teetar Bani, the main town. Chand had ordered the precious gift from the only shop in the town that possessed a freezer, and carefully packed it in a tin pail filled with jute sacking and ice purchased from Raju Golasharbatwala's cart.

The cassata melts, a puddle of bright colours. She eats it slowly, bending her head to the dented tin plate and lapping up the last delicious drops of strawberry. It is a rare taste, a flavour she has not encountered before. Her father asks, 'One more slice?'

She nods, but halfway through, she holds out her plate to Chand, presses the spoon into his hand. 'You also eat. One spoon for you, one for me.' He takes tiny bites.”
― Nilanjana Roy, Black River

“In Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s reworking of the noble savage theme, the tribes—freely exoticized—rise up against the British after a Slavery Act is passed in 1916. They are goaded into final action by the imprisonment of publishers, printers and the suppression of a free press. (Present-day governments might want to take note of Dutt’s assumption that the curbing of free expression would bring on rebellion faster than a Slavery Act, in his vision of India.)”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading