The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness Quotes
"She lived in the graveyard like a tree."
"Between shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches."
"When she first moved in, she endured months of casual cruelty like a tree would – without flinching."
"She let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain."
"It was only after Ziauddin, the blind imam who had once led the prayers in the Fatehpuri Masjid, befriended her and began to visit her that the neighbourhood decided it was time to leave her in peace."
"Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all."
"I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing."
"No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it."
"Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby?"
"He was not, medically speaking, a Hijra – a female trapped in a male body – although for practical purposes that word could be used."
"I’m a Hijra. I don’t fit here. Not in the family, not in the factory, not anywhere."
"In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated."
"She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be."
"For one struck down by Cupid’s bow, life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?"
"A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future."
"To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether."
"In her imagination he became Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed."
"And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself."
"Patient formerly of outgoing, obedient, jolly-type nature now exhibits disobedient, revolting-type of personality."
"Arre, Doctor Sahib, which Poor would want to be helped by us?"
"She added Dr Bhagat’s prescription to the things she had piled up in the courtyard, things she had once treasured, and lit a match."
"Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan!"
"Each caste must do the work it has been born to do, but all work must be respected."
"I’ve just arrived, I don’t know the details yet. So hey! Whaddya want me to say?"
"Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom …"
"Warren Anderson has killed more people than Osama bin Laden."
"You’ve snatched poor folks’ daily bread and slapped a fee on their shit instead."
"The Story of Kashmir - DEAD = 68,000, DISAPPEARED = 10,000. Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?"
"Lathi goli khaayenge! Batons and bullets we will bear! Andolan chalaayenge! With our struggle we’ll persevere!"
"Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein, Keh gayee sayyaad se, Apni sunehri gaand mein, Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar."
"She died in her cage, the little bird, These words she left for her captor – Please take the spring harvest and shove it up your gilded arse."
"This is how we treat the memory of our greatest poet."
"She’s a gift from God. Give her to me. I can give her the love she needs."
"Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions is not going to feed our starving masses."
"Yes. I wanted to kill the murderers of my people. Is that wrong? You can write that."
"This modern approach of yours doesn’t always work. At the end of the day we’re all animals. We need to be shown our pee ell a see ee."
"Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught, Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought."
"The truth was that given the condition of the body she saw, had she not known who it was, it would have been impossible to tell. But she did know who it was. She knew very well that it wasn’t Musa."
"She grew tired of living a life that wasn’t really hers at an address she oughtn’t to be at."
"Looking back now, Naga realized that for years he had lived with the subconscious dread that Tilo was just passing through his life, like a camel crossing a desert."
"Dark to light and light to dark, Three black carriages, three"
"In our Kashmir the dead will live forever; and the living are only dead people, pretending."
"You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away."
"As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on."
"In Kashmir, throwing a man’s own bio-data at him was sometimes enough to change the course of his life."
"Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself."
"You don’t know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken."
"I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people."
"This earth, she weeps! The heavens too ..."
"In some countries, some soldiers die twice."
"The rhythmic sound of oars in the water might well have been the uneasy heartbeat of the Valley."
"HB, the boatman told Tilo when she asked, stood for House Boat."
"He greeted her as though he knew her well, as though she had lived there all her life and had just returned from buying provisions in the market."
"The cramped room was only slightly larger than the double bed covered with an embroidered counterpane."
"The snow on the mountains glowed for a while, like phosphorus, even after darkness had fallen."
"Bang! Bang! Here’s the army band. A wedding in the house of the lord of the land. Elephant dung rice! Fried millipedes, nice! Minced hen-shit for spice!"
"Perhaps it was raining inside her head."
"In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies."
"The silence between them swelled and subsided like the bellows of an accordion playing a tune that only they could hear."
"Even if we lose. Even if we die. But for that we as a people – as an ordinary people – have to become a fighting force … an army."
"In the years that followed, poetry would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past."
"She waited on the boat the whole of the next day, watching Gulrez dust the undusty furniture and talk to purple brinjals and big-leaved haakh in his vegetable garden on the bank just behind the boat."
"The house with ‘hardly anybody’ in it took its place at the dinner table, a third guest, with the ravenous appetite of a slave."
"Musa looked at Tilo’s hand resting on the table. He knew it better than he knew his own."
"For a fleeting moment, they were able to pool them like accumulated gambling debts and share the pain equally, without naming the injuries or asking which was whose."
"She lay stretched out on top of him, as though he were a mattress, her chin resting on her intertwined fingers, her distinctly un-Kashmiri bottom vulnerable to the Srinagar night."
"She slept fitfully. Before dawn, still half asleep, Tilo heard Musa splashing in the bathroom again, washing, brushing his teeth."
"The graveyard turned into a zoo – a Noah’s Ark of injured animals."
"He watched the boat row away with its beloved cargo. Not across the lake to the boulevard, but along the endless line of houseboats, into the distance."
"But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying."
"When I die, I want this to be my epitaph."
"Everything has suddenly fallen quiet. All the construction has stopped. The labourers have disappeared. Where are the whores and the homosexuals and the dogs with fancy coats?"
"He would die the way he wanted to, with his Asal boot on. He would be buried the way he wanted to be – a faceless man in a nameless grave."
"You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us."
"The whole village talked. My father’s family came to know how black I was. They had that caste and color feeling."
"My Party is my Mother and Father. Many times it does many wrong things. Kills wrong people. Women join because they are revolutionaries but also because they cannot bear their sufferings at home."
"I could create a political storm if I ‘came out’, so to speak, because I see from the news that Kashmir, after a few years of deceptive calm, has exploded once again."
"I think the opposite, he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won."
"By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything."