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"Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover’s spine."

"This island was a paradise to be sacked. Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe: cardamons, pepper, silk, ginger, sandalwood, mustard oil, palmyra root, tamarind, wild indigo, deers’ horns, elephant tusks, hog lard, calamander, coral, seven kinds of cinnamon, pearl and cochineal. A perfumed sea. And if this was paradise, it had a darker side."

"When ships were still approaching, ten miles out at sea, captains would spill cinnamon onto the deck and invite passengers on board *to smell Ceylon* before the island even came into view."

"Heat walks across the house as an animal hugging everybody."

"It is delicious heat. Sweat runs with its own tangible life down a body as if a giant egg has been broken onto our shoulders."

"my watch collecting sea under the glass and gleaming with underwater phosphorus by my bed at night."

"Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons."

"Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stones of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence."

"Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity."

"The waves on the beach collected champagne corks."

"There were racetracks all over the island. If you sat in the grandstand all bets were five rupees. Then there was the two-rupee enclosure and finally, in the middle of the track, the “gandhi enclosure” where the poorest stood. 'From the grandstand you could watch them leaving like ants a good hour before the last race, having lost all their money.'"

"The rulers of the country genuinely believed that betting eliminated strikes; men had to work in order to gamble."

"[...] singing both male and female parts from Italian operas which the others had never heard of—so they all thought at first that he was singing a Sinhalese baila."

similar to the remark of the pigin aquisition in the Diamond Grill of "high muckamuck"!

"When he got into a fight he would remove his false teeth and put them in his back pocket."

"And poor Wilfred Batholomeusz who had large teeth was killed while out hunting when one of his companions mistook him for a wild boar.”

"In America, women were still trying to steal the body of Valentino from his grave, and a woman from Kansas divorced her husband because he would not let her live near the Valentino mausoleum."

"He bought Doris Gratiaen a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually it was paid for by the family."

"The twin to this bedroom, in another part of the house, is dark and supposedly haunted. Walking into that room’s dampness, I saw the mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses, and retreated from the room without ever turning my back on it."

"Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled."

"But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realized I would be travelling back to the family I had grown from—those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words. A perverse and solitary desire."

"Half a page—and the morning is already ancient."

this is kind of giving Treasure Island if Jim were a 20-something year old.

"This is no furniture for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near."

"The mayor's toast to the shy Chinese cooks who stand just outside the swinging kitchen door in their dirty aprons faces glazes with sweat"

"He's a boss's son and I'm a boss's son. His pure Chineseness and my impure Chineseness don't make any difference to us in the cafe. But I've assumed a dull and ambiguous edge of difference in myself; the hyphen always seems to demand negotiation."

"I am an obstacle. I can't get out of the way now that I've stepped into the frame."

"...now that you got a head tax will you collect a heart tax too?"