Sister Of My Heart Quotes
"They say in the old tales that the first night after a child is born, the Bidhata Purush comes down to earth himself to decide what its fortune is to be."
"But she knows, as I do, that no servant in all of Calcutta would dare eat sweets meant for a god."
"Perhaps they do not have the huge teeth, the curved blood-dripping claws and bulging red eyes of our Children’s Ramayan Picture Book, but I have a feeling they exist."
"Yes, we have three mothers—perhaps to make up for the fact that we have no fathers."
"But most of all Pishi is our fount of information, the one who tells us the stories our mothers will not, the secret, delicious, forbidden tales of our past."
"I want to be noble and brave, just like her."
"Because she’s the most beautiful person I know, just like the princesses in the fairy tales Pishi tells us."
"Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable."
"What people hate is how happy Sudha and I are when we’re together. How we don’t need anyone else."
"I’d love you because you love me. I’d love you because no one else knows us as we know each other."
"I, Sudha, am nothing to Anju. Not twin, not sister, not cousin. Not anyone except the daughter of the man who with his foolish dreams led her father to his death."
"All you ever want is to get into Mother’s good books."
"I’ve been to the cinema a few times before—to educational English films with Gouri Ma and, with my mother, to the sentimental Bengali movies that always make her cry. But I’ve never felt this excitement, this tingling that starts in my toes and fingertips and rises hotly up my body to my throat, my cheeks."
"The elders in their wisdom had done it to prevent heartbreak."
"The water smells dark and musty. It presses down until my chest is about to burst open."
"How can you be so stupid? You’re acting just like one of those silly lovesick girls in the movie."
"I have felt the blue air rushing beneath Icarus’s wings, the ominous trickle of wax down his arms."
"I don’t want to break my mother’s heart, that’s all."
"We’ve got to find another way to undo the harm I’ve done."
"Promises may be fulfilled, yes, but not always in the way we imagine."
"I wish with a pang that I’d listened to Sudha."
"To think that I’ll have to go and live with a stranger. That I’m supposed to belong to some man I haven’t even met as soon as he puts a garland around my neck."
"A home which in time she would come to rule. A man to wake her with moonlight kisses."
"Dirty nappies, dripping with pee and worse, that’s what babies smell like."
"Regret welled up in my mouth, bitter as the quinine Pishi used to dose us with."
"Carried from afar by the night breeze, I hear chimes."
"The darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars."
"I know I will have to pay for my wish, for that is the way of this world on the wrong side of the sky."
"The ruby must be put back in the vault. It’s not really ours. None of us has a right to it."
"But morning, before I am plunged into responsibility, allows me time to remember the Sudha I used to be."
"But as I walk the prescribed mile around the terrace in the evenings, I cannot seem to forget that measuring look in my mother-in-law’s eyes when I couldn’t get pregnant."
"I squeeze my eyes tightly shut to keep the tears in. All this time, somewhere in that place where unreasonable hope hides, I had nursed the idea that Pishi had been wrong."
"I tear Anju’s letter into tiny bits and go straight to the kitchen. Veined with her pen strokes, the pieces gleam blue one last time on the coals before they begin to char."
"Don’t regret what you can’t change, I tell myself, shivering, my arms hugging my belly."
"Now her voice goes shrill with virtue. 'I thought to myself, Nalini, this is no time for false family pride.'"
"Watching the Adam’s apple in his throat bob up and down as he swallowed, I felt pity and despair squeeze my chest like a pair of burning hands."
"I stand in the middle of the empty room, my lungs bursting with the words I haven’t yet had a chance to say, and feel the startled sting of tears."
"I’m like one of those ghosts in Pishi’s tales who can see disaster coming to her dear ones but is unable to intervene."
"And as for not being at risk, who knows what diseases ran in the veins of my father the wastrel? What murderous genes he has planted in his grandchild?"
"Foolish, interfering woman, I think angrily. Now my mother-in-law will be all stirred up, like a nestful of hornets."
"I wonder how Sudha’s doing—she should have got her amniocentesis results yesterday."
"I shifted my date to match hers, so we’d both know around the same time if our babies were okay."
"Happiness is the best digestive tonic in the world!"
"A wonderful event is about to occur in your life."
"The tenderness with which he kisses the curves of my breasts and hips makes me cry."
"I can’t even remember what the word sorrow means."
"Something horrifying is looming over Sudha, spreading its dark, scaly wings."
"What power we women can have if we believe in ourselves!"
"Prem and Dayita, children who’ll be loved like no child has ever been loved before."
"How easy it is to trick Sunil, who for all his shortcomings isn’t the kind of man who looks through someone else’s drawers."
"I won’t let you control me like your father controls your mother."
"It’s not right that you should have so much fun when Sudha’s disgraced you all by leaving her husband."
"The queen was terrified too, but she placed her hands on her belly to gather courage from her unborn daughter."
"Happiness beyond deserving. It frightens me."
"I’m going to fight for my daughter and myself, and I’m going to win."
"I can’t wait to see you, Sudha, just like old times!"
"Oh, Gouri Ma—as though guilt were as easy to shake off as water on a lotus leaf."
"Sometimes the only way to healing is through the corridor of pain."
"But sometimes the only way to healing is through the corridor of pain."
"Denying the fact that I am going to have a child would do neither of us any good."
"The yearning that shoots up from the soles of my feet when I think of Ashok, is it love? I am not sure."
"A future built by women out of their own wits, their own hands."
"Love is never about deserving, is it? Nor is hate."
"I tell her the story—once again—of the Queen of Swords. But as I speak it changes and is no longer the story I told Anju."
"Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other’s strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready."
"Inside me, love lets itself down in a rush, uncontrollable, like the milk when your baby cries."