All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > Brotherless Night > Status Update

“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.”

“Things have to develop, it takes time, you can't expect change overnight, they have to educate themselves, we are sympathetic, but — ! This was, I suddenly understood, a very patient, middle-class way to talk about change.
[…]
"If you only work to improve things within the existing framework, then you can't question the existing framework. That seems obvious enough."”

“Things have to develop, it takes time, you can't expect change overnight, they have to educate themselves, we are sympathetic, but — ! This was, I suddenly understood, a very patient, middle-class way to talk about change.
"The general patterns of subordination," Bhavani repeated, dragging out each word. "That's very accurate.”

"I grew up idolising him [Gandhi], because my father did," I said. "But I didn't know the nuances of some of his views. Jayawardena's critiques of Gandhi seem very persuasive. I hate the idea that women are better suited for nonviolent action because they are better at withstanding suffering. I don't want to suffer. Why should that be my role?"

“Before the war, we had no frequent cause to mourn the young. Hindu Saivite rituals for the dead are for the old. […] When the war began, and the young began to die, we had no words for it. Our customs did not give us a way to say their names. You must understand: our children light their parents' funeral pyres. What, then, for those who have no children? What, then, for the parents who outlive their sons?”

“…we stood under the streetlamps outside the Jaffna Teaching Hospital to study. The area around there had been designated a safety zone to preserve it from aerial attack, and the lamps had tube bulbs that faced the sky and emanated a precious and unnatural brightness. Every night, a hundred or so people would cycle with their books to crowd under those lamps until they went out.”

“You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the gathering crowd of those who would kill you.”