Aastha

“Sometime I wonder if I’m impersonating him all the time. The day he died I took over. I sat in his chair, I wore his slippers, I fell into his favoured mannerisms. I lay curled up on his side as he did. I began believing everything he believed. I even took on his style of failure. It was though I wished his responsibility for all his omissions and pay the price he would, imagining that this might subtract the from the sum of his failure.”
― Neelum Saran Gour, Winter Companions and Other Stories

“But there are times when lie copies art. And middle class life copies middle-brow art. And what subsequently occurred may effectively dispel the unfounded belief that middle-class colony is no place for the high jinks of the screen, that dramtic longings have no place in the stout hearts of staid men.”
― Neelum Saran Gour, Winter Companions and Other Stories

“If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance...perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I am like that poet, Veeran, who still prefers the power to gift away cities in his raggedness than to make a gift of himself to cities though they dress him in gold.

Lucknow is dear to me, though now an altered city. Partition has emptied my chamber of poets but I stay on in an unaltered space.”
― Neelum Saran Gour, Winter Companions and Other Stories