Manaswini

“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things