Nabila Chowdhury’s Reviews > Study for Obedience > Status Update

"Nevertheless, something had transpired, I had at the very least encountered the concept of habit and understood that custom too had its point of origin."

"One tried and failed to retain one’s integrity through a bad education, I reflected; one had been trained in certain ways which, with some distance and hindsight, one might come to see as unhealthy, if not utterly depraved."

"Perhaps after all I was beginning to let go of this inhuman fixing, the freezing into expression. My senses had been dulled by the abiding nature of the world’s provocations, and I knew that my habits and usual practices would be difficult to break. What remained of me, after a life of service?"

"How ineluctable the paths one treaded! And yet if something could happen, was indeed ever happening, did it not then follow that nothing, too, could happen?"

"Here I was, sitting in my brother’s garden, after all that effort, all those years, nothing any different, the underlying ideology adapting again and again to each liberation as it presented itself. The faces changed, sure they did, but ways of doing just persist, all one’s born days. What else is there to say?"

"But as for myself, I recognised in the end something behind the brand-newness of the world, a shadow just visible beneath its seams."

"One’s very ashes would be sifted for the gold tooth, the wedding ring."

"One always seemed to fall into the hands of a judge who was also one’s enemy. No plunder too low, no picking too slim."

"I became more interested in the sound of my colleagues’ sentences, the shape of their words, the occasional and probably unintended sibilance, the repetitions and elisions, the hesitations or pauses where the grammar did not mandate them. I found new ways to mark these idiosyncrasies, making use of space on the page. It seemed to me a truer notation of the language than how I had proceeded up to that point."

"It was the late twentieth century. What did we have left? A prayer book, some scraps of song, a history lesson beginning with devastation."