Alex > Recent Status Updates

The wind is picking up. I must straighten my shoulders, too.
Because:
(a) Anything Can Happen to Anyone.
(b) It’s Best to Be Prepared.
Bye- O, Mart Roy.

I’ll be seeing you.

And grateful that I hadn’t had to subject a human that I had brought into the world to the kind of anger and resentment my mother often felt for me.

‘When she was born, her birth certificate was an apology from God.’

Imagine his joy had he known that my own mother might have agreed with him. Imagine his sorrow had he known I had the equivalent of navy SEAL training on this subject and that his exertions didn’t move my needle even a micromillimetre.

Bringing up the rear was somebody carrying a large jar of jujubes. She had become obsessed with jujubes.

Arundhati you cheeky minion!! 😂

“It wasn’t nostalgia that took me back so much as the desire to exorcize some of my old ghosts by looking them in the eye, and to hang on to others, to tell them of my great escape. That, I learned, is impossible. We either house all our ghosts, as I do, or unhouse them all, as my brother does. There’s no bargaining with ghosts.”

But what we know isn’t always in line with what we feel, or what we do.

‘If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti- Hindu and anti- national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I own no terri-tory. I have no flag.’

I wasn’t Christian enough.
I wasn’t Hindu enough.
I wasn’t communist enough.
I wasn’t enough.

"At every event I could see Pradip in the audience, looking proud, tearing up when I started to read. But it was difficult for him and stressful for me. All the light shone on me. He, grand, wonderful man, my teacher, lover and best friend, was made invisible. He didn’t mind, but I did. The balance in our relationship was upended. My newfound fame crashed into our little love tent & jerked us around like puppets."

G. Isaac began to shake with silent laughter at his own joke.

But I had learned the lesson of a lifetime: how to make friends with defeat. My metaphoric room was full of broken planes, too.
G. Isaac showed me that making friends with defeat is the very opposite of accepting it. For that alone, I forgave him his past cruelty towards us and loved him till the day he died.

That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.

When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.

‘You’re a millstone around my neck. I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born.’

I used to dream of millstones stacked high in a ship’s hold & wonder how they knew how many to take when they started on a journey. How did they calculate how many people would die onboard & need to be buried at sea with millstones around their necks so that their corpses didn’t float around?

Still, he had saved me from something bad. I was shaken and felt the least I could do was to marry him. (Being unaccustomed to kindness, I was often over- grateful.)

‘You are so cute, just like a bonsai plant.’

What is double- love divided by triple- my- size multiplied by free tickets divided by careless words? A cold, furry moth on a frightened heart. That moth was my constant companion.

I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.

I know that moth. 🙂

I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. Fiction is that strange, smoky thing that writers don’t entirely own, even if they think they do.

Where does it come from? Our past, our present, our reading, our imagination – yes. But perhaps from premonitions of our future, too.

One hand is curved around her belly, which swells under her sari skirt. Her breasts are heavy. She feels full of sap, like a plant with a seedling buried deep in the intricate unknown passageways of her body. Her feet are swollen, tender. The thongs of her rubber slippers stretched painfully over her arches have made her forswear footwear.

Her prose is very rich.

The writer took almost a 1/3rd of the book to introduce the characters.

It feels like listening to a long food review. 🫠

I like Mala's character. But I'm not sure if all those things were there in the 1950's

“He was the one who taught me to talk with the world. To speak so that others could understand.”

BRB crying 😭

“Starbucks set us free…”
“Wait, from what?”
“From life’s unwritten rules. Like, suck it up, deal with it. All that. Now you can go to Bucks… Enjoy a caramel macchiato…”

Lmao this is like a food guide 🤣

Sarah's voice is amazing!

Still, I’m writing this in Japanese. It’s the best language I have for writing down my experiences (or the contents of my brain). No question. Language has its limits, but it’s all we’ve got. For understanding each other or misunderstanding each other or whatever. Besides, isn’t life all about limits?
At the end of the day, we’ve all got our limits. As living things, we’re bound to die.

Japanese language is nothing but lies. Or maybe just chaos. “What happens twice will happen again.” OK, I buy that. But how can that idea coexist with “Third time’s the charm”?
Farewell, mother tongue.

The boundary isn’t a border. But just because you don’t need a passport doesn’t mean you can up and leave whenever you like. This is where I was born, and it’s where I’m going to die.

“Really? You’re smart.”

“Nah, not that smart. But there’s loads of hard stuff in life, and maybe when we’re grown-ups, there’s going to be tons more hard stuff to deal with. And when that happens, I’m going to tell myself I can’t give in or freeze up and get discouraged and do nothing.”

“If you want to see somebody, you have to make plans to meet, or even make plans to make plans, and next thing you end up not seeing them any more. That’s what’s going to happen. If you don’t see somebody, you end up never seeing them. And then there’s going to be nothing left of them at all.”

[...] but all you notice when you see her are those eyes, then when afterwards you try to remember them, you know, what shape they are or what they looked like, you just can’t picture them exactly.