Jesal

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“That afternoon, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the remaining British men and women in the subcontinent sensed their time in the land rapidly slipping away. They weren’t alone and many Anglo-Indian, Armenian, Chinese, Jewish, Irish and Burmese communities who had flourished in India under colonial rule were also leaving. ‘It seems so tempting to stay on,’ wrote Keenan. “One is only 45 and there may be many years to come. However, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, I have decided not to serve on with India or Pakistan. We must think of our home in some very nice place in England and make a quick break with the East … India is no place for us now.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“At least this mountain world, to which I owed so much of life and happiness, would stand above the ruin of human hopes, the heritage of a saner generation of men.”
― Eric Shipton, Nanda Devi

“Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea