Nish

“Though Diwali celebrated light banishing darkness, Ravana was not a flat villain. And Ram was not an infallible hero.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“The provenance of a churel is a woman wronged. A pregnant woman’s demise. Death at the hands of vicious in-laws or a violent husband. Dying during childbirth or within the twelve-day period of impurity afterward. Whenever a woman died grossly unfulfilled, she’d return as a churel. Those surviving her could attempt to stymie her transformation: bury rather than burn her, weigh her down with stones, dress her grave with thorns, set her in the ground facedown so as to disorient her. Were that she’d been given such healthy regard in life, rendering such measures moot. Nevertheless, if her revenge-lust was potent enough, she’d find her way home and so it would begin.

Only a man would imagine retribution wrapped in lust rather than just painful death. Only a man would morph a wounded woman into a hideous monster. Only a man would then, for the sake of phallic pride, attribute her with shape-shifting powers, so that the creature he’d lain down with over and over again was deceptively gorgeous.

the churel was a cautionary tale created by women for women? If the natural world afforded them no protection, then a supernatural story might. A way of terrifying men into considering a woman’s well-being from time to time.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Had I lost my culture? I felt like I was constantly reminded that I was Indian—at work, at a store, when talking to white friends—some part of me was always aware that I wasn’t like the other people around me. It crept into every facet of my life, whether it was someone mispronouncing my name and me grinning and acting like it didn’t bother me, or people assuming I knew every other person with the last name Desai and not understanding it was as common as Smith and in a country far more populated than America. It followed me as I moved about my day, mentally tallying whether I was positive or negative on the karma scale, because while I wasn’t sure what the afterlife entailed, in the event reincarnation was our fate, I wanted to make sure I was on the right end of it. I still understood our native language, wore the clothes when needed, and ate the food mostly without complaint. I certainly never felt like I had “lost” it, but I wondered what made my mother think I had.”
― Mansi Shah, The Taste of Ginger

“Do you know who gets justice? Only those who demand it. People like you will not get justice if you don’t demand it.”
― Banu Mushtaq, Heart Lamp: Selected Stories