Faimina’s Reviews > The Book of Everlasting Things > Status Update

“Firdaus had this habit of collecting and pressing leaves. It was never flowers, always leaves, and I never asked why that was. But for a long time after I arrived in France, I wished to have perished in the fire with my family, mixing in with the soil of Lahore, so that maybe one day I could have been reborn as a stem or a root or a leaf to be picked up and cared for by her.”

“ No, it seems rather pathetic even for me to be talking this way, all these years later, as an old man. To want to be remembered by someone. To want to matter. To want to know, to need to know, that no matter how long it’s been—days or months or years—someone could still be thinking of you. It makes me sad.”
“But this is love”

“One can leave a place completely, and yet the place can refuse to leave you. For so many years after Partition, everything real seemed to slip so easily out of my fingers; I had no grasp on the ground beneath my feet or the sky above my head…”

“But he had realized that history was never just about the events that had once transpired. It was also about who narrated the events and who heard them; who wielded time, fashioned the years, lived, or resisted them; and who ultimately was bequeathed the archive.”

“But if we remain alive beyond the war, how will we remember this land? What stories will we tell?”

“How much solace could be found within things that no longer existed, that could not be seen or touched? Then he’d be reminded of perfume, and how he found pleasure in things that seeped into the skin, lingering in sight only for moments before they, too, turned invisible.”

The second family introduced. The calligraphers ,khattati.
“Just a cold metal plaque, immortal yet devoid of all the warmth of mortality.”

Aftermath of being a soldier in a war. Finding a new purpose in life after such a difficult time and being passionate about it

So far so good. Almost feels like this might be a new fav book already.