Pragyaa Jain

“the story of Kuttimani’s death told in the seventh chapter is based on Rajan Hoole’s account in The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder; the documentary described in chapter nine is Beate Arnestad and Morten Daae’s My Daughter the Terrorist; the account in chapter nine of Buddhist women’s poetry is based on a translation from the Pali by Charles Hallisey.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“That toilets in Japan were objets d’art has already been established. But their true awesomeness lay not in their gadgetry so much as in their cleanliness and easy availability. As a woman on the move, a decent toilet was manna. We had smaller bladders than men, we had monthly periods, and those of us who had given birth had urinary tracts that were as capricious in the timing of their needs as the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. The simple fact of being able to use a toilet with confidence in public spaces – parks, metro stations, highway pit stops – enhanced the quality of life enough to make toilets my number one favourite thing about Japan.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Never before had Descartes been in greater need of an update than in the twenty-first century. Over the last two decades, between first Nokia and then Apple, cogito ergo sum had surely been pushed aside by habeo a phone, ergo sum. But if ‘I have a phone, therefore I am’ were true, what of the phoneless?”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“The country came across like an upper-class spinster from a historical novel with impeccable manners who spent her days dabbing the edges of her mouth with a linen napkin while internally tutting at the uncouth dining etiquette of today’s upstarts, id est: the Chinese.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan