Status Updates From Der brennende Garten

“The pages were true, and they did not belong in the book that we had written together. Had she been there, she would not have faulted me. She would have taken my hand in hers and held it, as she had so many times before. But the fingers on the armrest next to me belonged to a stranger. All I had were her words, the stories she had collected and that had been entrusted to me.”

“At the end of a long day, when I permitted myself to think about him, I opened the notebook I had saved for myself, took out my pen, and tried again to take my own history, as I had taken the histories of others. Have you ever been haunted by propaganda? It can be a kind of ghost. I longed for the real and imperfect person I had known. […] I wanted the life on the other side of the war's looking-glass…”

“Trying to answer those questions stopped me cold. It was easier to sort out others' blurriness than my own, easier to probe their wounds than mine. [..] What did people say about the brutality of the Sri Lankan Army and the presence of the newly arrived Indian peacekeepers? [..] We were trying to return our history to its place, to call it by its name, to see the mistakes of others, and to reckon with our own.”

“I was not K's doctor, and I was not his lover, but I could have put my thumbs into his elbows and cupped my hands around their edges, which were sharper than his bones as I had previously known them. I could have drawn the last outline of his body. I had always suspected that my head would fit into a perfect place his joints made for me. […] Tall as I was, there was almost no difference between us.”