By Gregory David Roberts
This book is full of allegory, metaphor, wismic quips. It is an autobiography novel, as I understand
it. Hence with it’s absolute wild and
crazy story, the reader wonders how much is story and how much is history. Not that it matters. The book takes place in Bombay, India and it
captures a lesson I’ve come to incorporate into my lesson. When one looks at things, events, people as
themselves and by themselves; you see them with so much more clarity. They are not distorted by your expectations
or projections.
Gregory David Roberts paints a portrait of India, its
people, its poverty, its crime and corruption in a way that brings out its
absolute beauty. Underneath all outward
impressions exists the soul of the people as a people and as individuals. The first page sets the tone and one that
captures the reader in an adventure that involves mystery, page turning action,
personal drama, and intrigue. Most of
all upon turning the last page the reader settles on the meaning of the first
page. All people are who they are by
themselves. Accepting them as they are
is what love is. There is very little
one can do to change them to fit an expectation. So the key to love is forgiveness.
Shantaram, the main character examines this lesson through
dialogue with many different characters he interacts with including his own conscience, along the way. First there is Probaker who becomes his
portal to the soul of India. Here Lin,
his Australian name, ventures to a remote village in India. The villagers give him a name that identifies
with his soul, but does not bare out in his life. From the book:
Rukhmabai concluded, the women had
agreed with her choice for my fist name.
It was Shantaram, which means man of peace, or man of God’s peace.
This becomes the crux of the storyline and at the same time
the moral of the story that can only be told in India. Does Shantaram, or Linbaba ever find
peace? It is Hindi creed that souls come into many
bodies. There are lessons to be learned
while in each body. Yet in the egoic
body of the present, one bent on survival first, changing the spots on a leopard or stripes on
a tiger only comes through transcendence. This is Hindi Creed, Christ’s message. Where
the storyline is only filled with the want for transcendence, it never occurs. Not with India. Not with Shantaram. Is it possible for the reader? If there
is a parallel between the storyline and the author’s: it is the author’s transcendence
occurs in writing the book.
In the other main characters, there is his lover, Karla, who
simply cannot fall in love but can love.
She uses the term like. Karla
though she has taken on lovers she never deviates from her short coming. Shantaram/Linbaba's mentor, KadarKahn, is a Bombay mafia
don. Kadar takes on a father role as he teaches Linbaba the meaning of life. KadarKhan speaks to the complexity theory esppousing the idea that man moves his expression to the universe through to higher levels of complexity
of the from one generation to the next. That which move
towards complexity is good. The
highest level of complexity is found in Love, and the forgiveness that gets you
there. Kaderkahn
falls just short of the goal. Kadabahi's love like Karla's was intellectual. The reader comes to realize (for me that was two weeks after I finished the book) that the only character in the book that finds that higher level is Probaker, He is the portal to and the DNA of the soul of India. The author makes the point many times about the character of Indians. Probakers love came from the heart and once he 'feels' his way into love for a person, he is one hundred percent dedicated to that person despite any flaws along the way. If you accept my assessment of characters, Probaker's death is the climax of the book. All other main characters, coincidentally not Indian, remain flawed. Who are we to judge? Ironic haugh?
Yes it is the allegory, the whole novel is a metaphor with quips of wisdom that
the author expresses through the inner thoughts if Shantaram, that puts this
book on the very top of my list of favorite books. Yes, finally a modern day author has dethroned
Victor Hugo. He has yet to replace Hugo
as the best author ever as you cannot do that in one book. So I look forward to more from Gregory David
Roberts.
Below is a bibliography of the passages and quips of
wisdom. On their own I am sure you would
take a few notes. In the context of the
story, their reality takes on an exponential proportion. Each quip could stand alone. Everything as itself by itself) Each quip could be incorporated into the
fabric of your being. In the end is the
singularity and the oneness the same? I leave that up to you.
Opening paragraph: It
took me a long time and most of the world to learn about love and fate and the
choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was
chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized through the screaming in my
mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free to hate
the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when
it’s all you got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and
forgiving, can become the story of your life.
Page 4: I know now
that it’s (Bombay) sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of
hate; and it’s the sour smell of greed which is the opposite of love
Page 5: [metaphor]
and my heart was as clean and hungry for promises as a monsoon morning in the
gardens of Maklabar.
Page: 6: [metaphor] clutched at my heart with talons of
shame
Page 9: [metaphor] the street kids here have more ways to take
your money than hell’s casino
Page 11: [metaphor] it was the work of a second, the eye
contact between us
Page 20: Above all else, Bombay was free- exhilaratingly
free. I saw that liberated,
unconstrained spirit wherever I looked, and I found myself responding to it
with the whole of my heart.
Page 21: the carnival
of needs and greeds, … Everyfree minute is a short story with a
happy ending
Page 23 [metaphor] The touch was exactly what the touch of a
lover’s hand should be; familiar, yet exciting as a whispered promise.
Page 24: The voice,
Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.
Page 28: Fate needs
accomplices, and the stones of destiny’s walls are mortared with small and
heedless complexities such as those.
Page 33: Prabaker had
just then decided to like me, and for him that meant he was bound to a
scrupulous and literal honesty in everything he said or did.
Page 35: The simple
and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there,
and deal with them, your heart always guides more wisely than your head..
Page 36: The past
reflects eternally between two mirrors – the bright mirror of words and deed,
and the dark one, full of things that we didn’t say or do.
Page 39: Says Didier;
and what about love? A lot of people say
that lve is the best thing in the world, not power. Says Karla, “they’re wrong. Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear so much.
Page 43: [metaphor] to cope with shame and it first cousin,
despair.
Page 52:
Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we
permit.
Page 54: He left the
words to swirl for a moment in the eye contact between us.
Page 60: the truth is a bully we all pretend to like.
Page 83: It is the
mark of the agein which we live that the style becomes the attitude, instead of
the attitude becoming the style.
The test of a real Borsalino hat is to roll it into a
cylinder, roll it up into a very tight tube, and pass it through a wedding
ring. If it emerges from this test
without permanent creases, and if it springs back to its original shape, and if
is not damaged in the experience, it is a genuine Boraslino..
Page 84. They also
knoew that the line wann’t drawn in the soft sand of his own life or beliefs or
feelings. Didier’s line was drawn
through the hearts of the people he loved.
Page 85: You must be
carefull, here, with the real affection of those you meet. This is not like any other place. This India.
Everyone who comes here falls in love- most of us fall in love many
times over. And the Indians, they love
most of all. Your little friend may be
beginning to love you. There is nothing
strange in this. I say it from long
experience in this country, and especially this city. It happens often, and easily for the
Indians. That is how they manage to live
together., a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each
other and all the things that all of us do.
But more than any other people in the world, Indians know how to love
one another.
Page 86:
‘Fanatics,’ Didier mused,
ignoring the rebuke, ‘always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look
about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who
thinkabout it all the time.
Page 87: There is a
dark feeling – less than hatred, but more than loathing – that ugly men feel
for handsome men. It’s inreasonable and
unjustified, of course, but it’s always there, hiding in the long shadow thrown
by envy. It creeps out into the light of
your eyes, when you are falling in love with a beautiful woman.
Page 89: [metaphor]
Vikram is the kind of man who wears his sleeve on his heart, Karla once
said. It was an affectionate joke.
Page 90: Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s
exactly like love in three ways: It’s pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and
it turns up where you least expect it.
Page 91: It think the
future is like anything else that’s important.
It has to be earned. I think that is what love is – a way of
earning the future.
Page 95: When I
started to dream in Hindi, I knew that I was at home here. Everything has fallen in to place since then.
Page 96: [of India]
It’s really a paradigm shift, I said trying to make a point I’d been
making as we walked. A completely
different way of looking at things, and thinking about things.
Page 97: ‘Its good to
know about what’s wrong with the world,’
Karla said, after a while. B’But
its just as important to know that sometimes, no matter how wrong it is, you can’t
change it. A lot of bad stuff in the
world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.
Page 98 Then he told me to watch the men while they got
themselves ready to run through the city again, pushing their water wagon. And I think I knew what he meant, what he wanted me to see. They were strong, those guys. They were strong and proud and healthy. They weren’t begging or stealing.
Page 99: [metaphor]
Sometimes, in India you have to surrender before you win.
Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of
it.
Page 100: The great
station – those who used it every day knew it as VT – was justly famous for the
splendor of the intricately detailed facades, towers, and exterior ornaments. But is most sublime beauty, it seemed to me,
was found in the cathedral interiors..
There limitations of function met the ambitions of art, as the time
table and timeless commanded equal respect.
Page 100 [metaphor] You’ve had me sitting here like a brass
Buddha.
Page 101: [metaphor} the porter rumbled in a voice that he’d
found in a ber’s cave, and cured in the barrel of a rusted cannon.
Page 105: I know that
the scrambled fighting and courteous were both the expressions of the one philosophy:
the doctrine of necessity. The amount of
fource and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and
no more than the poiliteness and consideration necessary to ensure that the
cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and
unavoidable question everywhere in India.
Page 106: I realized that
the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried a disarming message I’m
a peaceful man. I don’t mean any harm.
Page 112: [metaphor] the thought, half submerged, troubled
me for the best part of an hour before it swam in to the field of vision of my
mind’s eye.
Page 119: There’s a
kind of luck that’s not much more than being in the right place at the right
time, a kind inspiration that’s not much more than doing the right thing in the
right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of
ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely to the golden
fat-filled moment.
Page 124: But I
couldn’t respond. My culture had taught
me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely
still, and gave no reaction at all. Bit
the soul has no culture. The soul has no
nations. The soul has no color or accent
way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth
and sorrow, the soul can be stilled.
One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so
desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, shame, and
sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep
in to the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful
only shame can help you live with them.
And some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for
you.
Page 126: She knew, Justas
I’d known when I saw Probaker for the first time, that no man who smiled with
so much of his heart would knowingly hurt or harm another.
Page 129: In that
poor and simple village, no-one doubted or forgot that its treasures were its people.
Page 129: And her
forehead was always slightly creased in the center, between the brows, as if
she was gasping, in the soft folds of skin, the monstrous and pitable
understanding that no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its
cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrow and
death.
Page 132:And there was no sense of certainty, in the
village, that no city I’ve ever known provides: the certainty that emerges when
the soil, and the generations who work it, become interchangeable; when identities
of the human beings and the nature of the place are one and the same.
What changes in nature is restored with one wheel of the
seasons. What comes from the earth
always returns. What flourishes, dies
away to bloom again.
Page 136 : And I
think I did laugh like that then. I was
given the chance to reinvent myself, to follow the river within. And become the
man I’d always wanted to be. … Rukhmabai
concluded, the women had agreed with her choice for my fist name. It was Shantaram, which means man of peace,
or man of God’s peace.
Page 146: Did people
ever love music, Iwondered more than Indians?
But it wasn’t possible fro me to return to Sunder village. Not then.
Am man can make his way in the city with his heart and his sould crushed
within a clenched fist; but to live in a village, he has to unfurl his heart
and soul in his eyes. I carried crime
and punishment with me in every hour of my life. The same fate tha helped me to escape from
prison had clamped its claws on my future.
Sooner or later, if they looked hard enough and long enough, the people
would see those claws in my eyes
Page 147: [metaphor]
Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at leasta
little larceny in every act of love.
Page 150: Didier once
told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where
a wish and fear meet. When the wish and
the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.
Page 153: [metaphor]
the rapid outward rushes of air sounded like wavelets on a steep shore. …For a
tiny moment in the infinity of his suffering I almost felt it, what the human
will can drive the human body to endure and achieve. … And I tried to tell him, with my eyes alone,
that I could almost sense it, almost feel it.
Page 155:
[metaphor] His eyes were the
color of sand, in the palm of oyur hand, a few minutes before the sun
sinks below the sea.
Page 165: In India we can see everybody sleeping, at some
time. And we say that the face, when it
is sleeping, is a friend of the world.
Page 166: Waiting for
nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it? Now people are waiting for you, they
are. And really you are something, Lin
Shantaram.
Page 167: But I knew
there was something – some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and
that job, at exactly that time. And the
force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition
tried to warn me away.
Page 168: [metaphor] as gently and completely as a swollen
tide closes over a stone that stands upon the shore.
Page 176: [metaphor]
My heart, like a trapped bird, hurled itself against thecage of my chest
Page 178: I walked on
through the lane into a haunted life that cost me everything I’d ever loved.
When I committed the armed robberies, I put fear into
people. From that time even as I did the
crimes- and on through prison and life on the run, fate put fear in to me. The nights were steeped in it, and sometimes
I felt as if the blood and the breath in my body were clotted with fright. The fear I’d put into others became ten
terrors, fifty, a thousand, filling the loneliest ours of every night with dread.
Page 181: And I
stayed on there, in those squalid acres, even after I’d made enough money to
leave. I stayed on in the cramped little
hut when I could’ve moved to a comfortable apartment. I allowed my life to be swept up in the broiling,
dancing struggle of their twenty-five thousand lives. I bound myself to Probaker and Johnny Cigar
Quasim Ali Hussein.
[metephor]And although I tried not to think of Karla, my
love put claws in the sky. I kissed the
wind. I spoke her name, when I was alone.
And for all that I tried to belong, to heal myself with work
in the clinic, to save myself with the fool notion of being in love with Karla,
the truth was that I was alone in that shame, and lost.
Page 185: I reflected
on that particularly Indian custom of amiable abduction. For months, in the slum, I’d succumbed to the
vague amd mysterious invitations of friends to accompany them to unsuspected
places, for unknown purposes. You come,
people said with smiling urgency, never feeling the need to tell me where we
are going, or why. You come now!
Page 190: [metaphor] that we swallowed our laughter in
smiles
Page 193: “There is
no believing in God,” he declared, smiling again. “We either know God, or we do not.”
Page 194: “Let me get this straight – you’re saying that
because something is impossible, it exists?”
I asked [metaphor] pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water
of ideas.
“I will explain.
Nothing exists as we see it.
Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of
the illusion. Nothing exists, as we
think it does. Not you. Not me not this
room. Nothing.”
“Let me put this another way. The agents of creation, the energy that
actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us,
cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form that energy is photons of
light. The smallest object is a universe
of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea- and
not a very good one, yet. From the point
of view of light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we
know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?”
Page 195: But fate-
you know fate? Kismet is the word, in
Urdu language- fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate
cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more
than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?
Page 195: [metaphor] prairie longing… as hungry for a father’s love as a cell block
full of sentenced men in the last hour of New Year’s Eve.
“What I am saying is that reality- as you see it, and as
most people see it – is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see
with our eyes. You have to feel your way
into that reality with your heart. There
is no other way.”
“It is strange, at first, to think in the right way. But there are a few things we can knoe, a few
things to be sure of, and it is relatively easy. Let me
show you. To know the truth, all you
have to do is close your eyes.”
Page 199: Men are
just men- it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good or
evil. The truth is that an instant of
real love, in the heart of anyone- the noblest man alive or the most wicked-
has the whole purpose an process and meaning of life with the lotus-folds of
its passion. The truth is that we are
all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in
the universe, moving toward God.”
Page 207: [metaphor]
I fell fearlessly into my fate, that
afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman’s best smile.
Page 213: Suffering
Kaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for
God.
Page 215: [metaphor]
Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are
sometimes black.
Page 229: “because
justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is
satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these
two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is the way we try to save them.
Page 230: [metaphor]
Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably,
kills the other.
Page 239: The ghetto
was a living organism: to counter external threats, it responded with the
antibodies of courage, solidarity, and that desperate, magnificent love we
usually call the survival instinct. If
the slum failed, there would be nowhere and nothing else.
Page 242: [metaphor]
She was almost too beautiful: as beautiful as aa blush summer sunset on a
sky-wide stream cloud.
Page 243: [metaphor} Fear and guilt are the dark angels that
haunt rich men, Kader said to me once. I
wasn’t sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did
know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.
Page 249: To workers
and squatter alike, the company fence was like all fences; arbitrary and
irrelevant.
Page 252: [of a sky
scraper being built] A lot of the people
who work these upper floors stay up here most the time. The live up here. Eat, work , and sleep. They’ve got farm animals and kitchens and
everything. Goats for milk, and chicken
for eggs, everything they need is sent up to them. It’s sort of like a base camp that
mountaineers use when they climb Everst.
Page 255: [metaphor]
It was the beauty of a desert at dawn
Page 258: [metaphor]
The spiteful cat of wounded pride arched behind my eyes.
Page 262: “I don’t know what scares me more,” she declared,
“the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.”
Page 266: Karla said
she’d heard so many different stories, from such a wide variety of people, she
began to think the truth, whatever it might’ve been, wasn’t really important to
them. Madame Zhou had become a kind of
portmanteau figure; people packed the details of their own obsessions into her
life.
Page 273: [metaphor] It was my turn to withdraw. I wrapped the silence around myself like a
scarf, and stared past her softly sculptured to the haphazard beauty of the
street.
Page 274: We smoked,
and sang along, and drove past a thousand years o street, from barefoot peasant
boys on bullock carts to businessmen buying computers.
Page 274: But an
Indian will be so pleased that if he likes something else about you – your
eyes, or your smile, or the way you react to a beggar at the window of his cab
– he’ll feel bonded to you, instantly.
He’ll be prepared to do things for you, go out of his way, put himself
at risk, and even do dangerous or illegal things. If you’ve given him an address he doesn’t
like, suchas the Palace, he’ll be prepared to wait for you, just to be sure
that you were safe. Youo could come out
an hour later, and ignore him completely, and he would smile and drive away,
happy to know that no harm had come to you.
It happened to me many times in Bombay, but never in any other
city. It’s one of the five hundred
things I love about Indians. If they
like you, they do it quickly, and not by half.
Page 277: “Happiness is a myth.” Karla snapped back angrily.
“it was invented to make us buy things.”
My comment: the author adds this not a advice, but warning that such a phrase
should be examined for a tragedy that one is at the effect of.
Page 290: I
didn’t say Sapna is a Christian- just
that whoever wrote this stuff is using Christian words and phrases. See, here, in the first phrase, where he says
I am come…and..Do this in memory of me- those words can be found in the
Bible. And here, in the third paragraph
…I am the truth in their world of lies, I am the light in their darkness of
greed, my way of blood is your freedom – he’s paraphrasing something …I am the
Way and the Truth and the Light … and it’s also in the Bible. Then in the last lines, he says …Blessed are
the killers, for they shall steal lives in my name – that’s from the Sermon on
the Mount. It’s all been taken from the
Bible, and there’s probably more in here I don’t recognize. But it’s all been changed around, it’s as
though the guy, whoever wrote this stuff, has taken bits of the Bible, and
written it upside down.
My comment: How many times has this been done in the
history of Christianity?
Page 292: [metaphor]I
knew that I was as much a refugee, a displaced and stateless person, as the
thousands of Afghans, Iranians, and others who’d come to Bombay across the
burning bridge; who’s exiles who’d taken shovels of hope, and set about burying
the past in the earth of their own lives.
Page 295 [metaphor] The burden of happiness can only be
relieved by the balm of suffering
Page 296: I look back
on that time now- at my readiness to serve him as a son might serve a father, at my willingness to
love him, in fact, at how quickly and unquestioningly it happened in my life-
and I wonder how much of it came from the great power that he wielded in the
city, this city. I’d never felt so safe,
anywhere in the world, as I did in his company.
And I did hope that in the river of his life I might wash away the
scent, and shake off the hounds. I’ve
asked myself a thousand times, and through the years, if I would’ve loved him
so swiftly and so well if he’d been powerless and poor.
Sitting there,then, in that doomed room, feeling the twinge
of jealousy when he smiled at Farid abd praised him, I knew that although Khaderbhai
had spoke of adopting me as his son, on our first meeting, it was really I who’d
adopted him. And while the discussion
continued around me, I spoke the words, quite clearly, in the secret voice of
prayer and incantation …Father …father …my father …
Page 297: Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonizingly
great, is a test of love in some way.
Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God.
Page 298: The
difference between them is this, I think is this, I think: that we learn from pain-
for example, that fire burns and is dangerous – is always individual, for
ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one
human people. If we do not suffer with
our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory
without struggle. We do not learn from
it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.
Page 300: When we’re
young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older – when the steel door slams
shut, in one way or another – we know that real suffering is measured by what
is take away from us.
My comment: The law of scarcity that drives the egoic mind
to survive. Survival of the body: if there are souls, then
can we transcend our thinking and know that the survival of our body is not the
end but really a new beginning.
Page 304:
Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under
Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to
physical molestation. “We warned them to
stop it. Our ladies were not walking
safely. For that reason only we did
fight them.”
Page 308: [metaphor]
Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the
locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.
Page 315: [metaphor] I
walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake
Page 316: In a sense,
the ghetto existed on a foundation of those anonymous, unthinkable deeds;
insignificant and almost trivial in themselves,
but collectively essential to the survival of the slum. We soothed out neighbor’s children as if they
were our own when they cried. We
tightened a loose rope on someone else’s hut when we noticed it sagging, and
adjusted the lay of plastic roof as we passed by. We helped one another, without being asked,
as if we were all members of one huge tribe, or family, and one thousand huts
were simply rooms in our mansion home.
Page 320: “I am aware
of your situation, Mr Lin, he replied sharply.
“It is precisely this, your life in the zhopadatti, that I want him to
know. Tell me your honest opinion, do
you think that there are lessons to be learned in the slum? Do you think he will benefit from spending
some time with the city’s poorest people?
I did think that, of course.
It seemed to me that every child, beginning with the sons and daughters of
the rich, would benefit from the experience of slum life.
Page 321: [metaphor] The third was drawn by the desperate,
pugnacious unhappiness of his mouth, the upside down horseshoe of bad luck that
fate had nailed to the doorpost of his life.
Page 322: [metaphor}Then
a grave expression passed across them like a cloud-shadow slinking over smooth
hills, on a sunny day.
Page 323: Nothing
ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much
protective instinct as the hand of a child.
Page 340: I’d grown
accustomed to it, and had even come to think of it with a kind of
affection, as the slum-dwellers
did. The smell meant we were home, safe,
protected by our collective wretchedness from the dangers that haunted poor
people in the cleaner, grander city streets.
Page 345: [metaphor]
and I sifted the events of the last few days through a sieve of doubt and
suspicion.
The smell of the sun was in his hair.
They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. Non of us was born here. All of us refugees, survivors, pitched up on the
shores of the island city. If there was
a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, and the
dispossessed.
I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the
ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with
nothing more than hope. Smoetimes we cry
with everything except tears. In the end
that’s all there is” love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have – to hold on
tight until the dawn.
Page 352: “Yes,” he
answered equably. “Where did we come
from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Those are the three big questions. And if you love him, Lin, my younf friend, if
you love him, he will tell you these secrets, as well.
He will tell you the meaning of life! He will solve the mystery for you.”
Tears began to fill the redrimmed cups of his eyes
Page 353: “you know, Lin,” he said softly, “we have a
saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man
until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the
love, truly and freely, of a child in return.”
Page 353: [metaphor] Memories from the last three months
skipped across the fluid surface of the moment.
Page 364: [metaphor] Her
thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven.
Page 365: [metaphor]
I didn’t want Didier to see the serpent of spite rising in me
Your … new interest .. is one string short of the full
marionette, or so I am told.
Page 367: Are ever
justified in what we do? That question
ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of
intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that
mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said,
were caused by people who tried to change things.
Page 369: [metaphor] Husband
and wife pressed against one another tightly, step for step, all four hands
balled into a bouquet of clenched fingers.
Page 369: He couldn’t know it, of course; but that simple
nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as
a dull ache of doubt, since prison.
Joeseph was saved. That was the
look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the feve of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined
shame and exultation because both are essential – shame gives exultation its
purpose, and exultayion gives shame its reward.
We’ saved him as much by joining in is exultation as we had by
witnessing his shame. And all depended
upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without
love.
Its forgiveness that makes us who we are. Outwith forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions.
Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for
every work of art is in some way an acto of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love,
fore every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live because we can love, and we love
because we can forgive.
Page 370: [metaphor]
their swating heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves
of wind.
Page 371: Seen from
the distant slum, the white shirts of men and the colorful saris of the women
were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of
asphalt.
Page 373: “our life,
it probably began inside of the ocean,” Johnny said quietly. “after four thousand million years before
now. Probably near hot places, like
volcanoes, under the sea.”
When a woman makes a baby she gives it water, insider her
body, to grown in. That water inside her
body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both
salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans in side of us, in our blood
and our sweat. And we are crying the
oceans, in out tears.”
Page 379: It’s a
characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a
crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by
adversity.
Page 380: [metaphor]She
wore a salwar kameez – the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari
– two shades of green. The long tunic
was a deeper green, and the pants beneath, tight as the ankle, were paler. There was also a long yellow scarf, worn
backwards, Indian style, with the plumes of color trailing out behind her. Her black hair was pulled back tightly and
fastened at the nape of her neck. The
hairstyle threw attention at her large green eyes – the green lagoons, where
shallow water laps at golden sand – and at her black eyebrows and perfect
mouth. He lips were like the soft ridges
of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crest of waves meeting the frothy
rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds. The movements of her
body, as she walked towards me on the broken land, were like storm-wind
stirring in a stand of willow trees.
Page 381: We prize it
so highly,is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for
ourselves alone.
Page 387: I’d learned
more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months
before it. Lovers find their way by such
insights and confidences: they’re starts we use to navigate the ocean of
desire. And the brightest of those stars
are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The
most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.
My comment: In the context of this book, the author is
NOT advising the reader to be a complainer.
There are ways that you bring your suffering. For example suffering is the twin to desire,
the wish to overcome adversity.
Page 388: [metaphor] her eyes followed him slowly and
stealthily as a walking leopard’s shadow
Page 393: and any
Indian man will tell you that although love may not have been in invented in
India, it was certainly perfected there.
Page 398: Fate’s way
of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear butnever
heed.
Page 399: [metaphor] Our breathing was like the whole world
chanting prayers.
Her body was the river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moon that drove our lips
together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from
lovers as it floods their souls with bliss.
Page 401: [metaphor] My footsteps running made scattered echoes,
as if ghosts were running with me.
Page 404: There was a
taste, a thick and boitter, at the back of my mouth. I struggled to swallow it down and then I
knew, I remembered. It was the taste of
hatred – my hatred, theirs, the guards;, and the world’s. [metaphor] Prisons are the temples where
devils learn to prey. Every time we turn
the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close
him with hate.
Page 412: [metaphor]
They are afraid, like mice in a bag full of cobras.
Page 414: Fear dries
a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him.
That’s why hate has no great literature:
real fear and real hate have no words.
Page 421: Cruelty is
a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is
the way cowards cry when they are not alone, and causing pain is how they
grieve.
Page 425: [metaphor] Guilt
is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade;
but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the
end.
Page 439: None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing,
and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn
to when crying just isn’t enough.
Page 443: Being in Arthur
Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line.
Page 443: Khaled, my
first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of
his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart.
Page 444: They’re
angry because they can’t forget the past or forgive it. And they’re lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser
success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert
island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always
alone.
Page 445: When greed
meets control, you get a black market
Page 451: There’s a
little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save
my neighbor’s life – failed even to know that she was ill. And there’s an innocence, essential and un
blinking, in the heart of every determination ot serve. That innocence faltered when I stumbled from
the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memeory
of the leg-irons. Moving out of the slum
has as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds
of my body.
Page 454: It isn’t a
secret, unless keeping it hurts.
Page 455: This is not
England, or New Zeland, or Australia….This is India. This is the land of the heart. This is where heart is king…That’s how we
keep crazy places together – with the heart. ….There’s no heart like the Indian
heart.
Page 458: early
evening blushed our skin with rose-gold
Page 461: Every time
you call her she winces like you just strangled a baby rabbit
Page 461: Evening is
an indigo tent for the circus of the city.
And evening brings family to the entertainments that inspire every
corner and crossroad. And evening is a
chaperone for young lovers: the last
hour of light before the night comes to steal the innocence from their slow
promenades. And no light loves the human
face as much as the evening light in Mumbai
Page 462: [metaphor] all
the while a black shark slowly circled the sea of my thoughts
Page 465: [metaphor] If you make your heart into a weapon,
you always end up using it on yourself.
Page 467: [while
being tortured} There was a minute, right in the middle of it, that was … so weird…
it was like I was floating, outside myself, looking down at my own body, and at
them, and watching everything that was going on. And … I got this weird feeling … this really
strange kind of understanding … of everything that was happening. I knew who they were, and what they were
about, and why they were doing it. I
knew it all really clearly, and then I knew that I had two choices – to hate
them or to forgive them. And … I don’t
know why, or how, but it was absolutely clear to me that I had to forgive
them. I had to, if I wanted to
survive. I know that sounds crazy…
Page 472: We
concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishment on how much
crime is a sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.
Page 476: I think in
this example, that it is possible to do the wrong things for the right reasons
My comment: This is never acceptable. But often is only met with the need to be
forgiven. This is part of the story line
and not the message being advocated by the author.
Page 486: men reveal
what they think when they look away, and what the feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around.
Page 501: He saw my
quest to find Karla as very romantic – very Indian, he said –and he wanted me
to stay nearby, as his guest.
Page 502: [metaphor] The moon, almost full, was pinned like
a medal to the chest of the sky. A medal
for what? I thought. Wounded in action, maybe. A purple heart. Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to
shore, as if light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver
light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it
to shore, wave by wave.
Page 506: the pattern
on the moon surface, that in some cultures is called the rabbit, suddenly
looked to both of us like a kneeling figure raising his arms in prayer.
Page 507: we made
love while the praying moon seduced the sea, luring the waves to crash and
crumble on the charmed un failing shore.
Page 525: But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that
haunt the empty house at midnight. And
although I had pushed Annad and the slum from my mind, I felt the breath of
that ghosted lie on my face as I walked through the long, thronging Causeway on
that hot afternoon.
Page 529: {metaphor The train stopped with a wheezy creak of
metal triumph.
Page 531: Millions of
dreams were born there, around us, every day.
Millions of dreams die there, and were born again. The humid air was thick with dreams,
everywhere, in my Mumbai. My city was a steaming,
sweltering hothouse garden of dreams.
Page 540: [metaphor] And a vision, the kind of postcard that
fate sends you, flashed before my eyes.
Page 546: Instead, my
head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride …. Love goes on forever because love is born in
the part of us that does not die.
Page 549: Ah…sure. You were saying that the whole universe is
moving toward some ultimate complexity.
This has been going on since the universe began, and physics call it the
tendency toward complexity. And…
anything that kicks this along and helps it is good, and anything that hinders
it is evil.
Page 550: In order to
know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two
questions. One, what would happen if
everyone did this thing? Two, would this
help or hinder the movement of complexity?
Page 552: [metaphor] I know that the words were like a
mantra, and that my instincts – fate’s whisper in the dark –was trying to warn
me of something by repeating them. The
wrong thing … for the right reasons.
Page 553: [metaphor] my mind was clear as the broad horizon
clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.
Page 562:
[metaphor] Khader’s words floated
on the swift, shallow stream of my thoughts once again: Khaderbhai once that every virtuous act is
inspired by a dark secret …The little
good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark
inspiration. … Redemptions climb is
steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.
Page 563: [metaphor}
I washed my hands in the cold, uncaring sea, and my conscience was
silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.
Page 573: The memory
sliced into my dead heart. It’s said
that you can never go home again, and it’s true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and
you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.
Page 580: [metaphor] My
heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones.
Page 581: We can deny
the past, but we can’t escape it’s tourment because the past is a speaking
shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we
die.
Page 581: [metaphor] The robe of sunset slipped from the
shoulders of the city.
Page 584: In my first
knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly
conflict: those who kill to live, and
those who live to kill.
Page 587: I remember,
reflected in the fright-filled domes of his eyes, fate’s mirror, the sight of
the twisted, hating thing that I became in the fight
Page 594: Even if we
never pity that at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the
dead when we look at them, and touch them.
Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and,
because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. …Each dead man
is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should
pray.
Page 597: I never
admitted anything. I held he love in the
vault of my heart while they tried to reach it through my skin and bones.
Page 598: [metaphor]
They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us
un screamed. That’s where loves, like
elephants, drag themselves to die. It’s
the place where pride allows itself to cry.
Page 600: [metaphor] He
paused. Watching the aquarium of the swirling street through the windscreen of
the cab.
Page 604: ‘No Lin,
please! If you take this punishment
away, then there will be no meaning for what I did. There will be no honor. Not for me, not for them. Can’t you see it? I have earned this punishment. I have become my fate.
Page 604: [metaphor] ‘Okay, okay’ I answered him, struggling
to let the words escape from the little prison of my throat.
Page 606: But in the
black room, deep in my mind, another image added itself to the secret gallery –
an image of Anand, hold the palms of his hands together, as his radiant smile
became a blessing and a prayer.
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or
even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like
the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening,
or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally
small effect that you can’t detect them.
Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the
image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach
themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever.
Page 607: Kanderbhai
once said that if we envy someone for the right reasons, we’re half way to
wisdom … a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy
Anand’s calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and
striving heart.
Page 608: [metaphor] Eyes like the sword of Perseus, like the
wings of hawks in flight, like the rolled lips of seashells, like eucalyptus
leaves in summer – Indian eyes, dancer’s eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the
world stared with honest, un beguiling concentration
Page 609: [metaphor] Their arms moved with the grace of
a swan’s neck. Their hands and fingers
rolled and swirled like silk scarves sailing in the wind. … And with the
cheering in every throat around them, the girls danced into a million dreams.
Page 610: [metaphor] and danced until my short clung to me
like seaweed in a shallow wave
Page 614: [metaphor] Now
the only thing I’m sure of is that you guys haven’t got the brains of two fleas
on a pariah dog’s balls.
Page 616: [metaphor] ‘The hotel,’ the driver said, sliding
his glasses over the dartboards of his eyes.
Page 618: All I’m saying
you have to see it from their side if you want to understand why they are
feeling all this.
Page 619: [metaphor] They lived in the kind of poverty where
every meal cost them a crown of thorns in worry, and slaving work. I think it must break their hearts to see
people from other parts of India living in fine homes while they wash in the gutters
of their own capital city.
Page 620: Winston
Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who wont change his mind and can’t
change the subject.
Page 622: [metaphor]
I stared at the dark carpet, and tried fo find sense or direction in the sandstorm
of my thoughts.
Page 623: [metaphor] His
pale blue eyes looked into mine as if he was looking for something at the bottom
of a pond.
Page 628: [metaphor]
Her black hair was night’s waterfall. …
and the long hair fell like a shadow dying
Page 631: [metaphor] disappeared
– as completely as a flared, exhausted star.
Page 631: Personality
and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map
drawn by our intersecting relationships.
Page 639: We lived
out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and
we died. Then out lips parted, and that
life we might’ve had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always
recognize in one another’s eyes.
Page 640: Tears begin
in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, that when it speaks we
hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak
Page 649: [metaphor] The sneer rippled his lip like the
opening ridges of a clamshell.
Page 655: There are
three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song,
and an invitation to dance.
Page 657: we didn’t
make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky
Page 659:
[metaphor] But the cold sorrow in
our eyes drove the downward curves of his life into willow-wreaths of disappointment
Page 660: [metaphor] the trail of connections back to Bombay
would be as cols as a mountain climbers axe.
It was a long journey … but friendship for him, was measures
by what men do and endure for one another, not by what they share and enjoy.
Page 666: Ahmed Zadeh
wore an expression that made him look as if he was searching for a friend in a
crowd of strangers. It was a disarming
expression, and it endeared him to me at once.
Page 672 - 674:
[metaphor] The wheel has moved through one full turn … I surrendered to the
fate filled moment and felt myself, my whole
life, turning with the wheel.
Page 675:
[metaphor] I closed my mind
around that thought as a man might close his hand around the hilt of a knife.
Page 686: [metaphor]
my eyes met those of a man who stared back at me from the heart of darkness … Theatrically eyebrows
like wings of a black bat spiked above his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves
that caught and held me.
Page 689: [metaphor]
I dragged my eyes from the sight of them, as boatmen drag a lake with
starry hooks. … My heart was a prisoner
pounding on the walls inside my head. My
legs felt leaden, fixed to the earth with roots of shame and dread.
Page 700: Asalaam
aleikum, I said holding my hand over my heart as a gesture of respect.
Believing me as and infidel, the leader didn’t respond to my greeting. The Prophet Mohammaed adjured his followers
to return the peaceful greeting of a believer with an even more polite
greeting. Thus the greeting Asalaam
aleikum, Peace be with you, should’ve been answered, at very least with Wa
aliekum salam Wa rahmatullah, And with you be peace and compassion of Allah.
Page 703: [metaphor]
for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the
long, cold night that they would’ve frightened a pride of ravenous lions
scattering like startled mice.
Page 705: Here goes.
The universe began about fifteen billion years ago, in almost absolute
simplicity, and it’s been getting more complex ever since. The movement from simple to the complex is
built into the web and weave of the universe, and it’s called the tendency
toward complexity. We’re the products of
this complexification, ans so are the birds, trees, and the bees and the stars,
and even the galaxies of stars. And if
we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or
something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge,
because that’s what the universe does.
And this is likely going on all over the universe … Ok for the final or ultimate complexity –
the place where all this complexity is going – is what or who, we might call
God. And anything that promotes,
enhances, or accelerates this movement toward God is good. Anything than inhibits, impedes, or prevents
it is evil. And if we want to know if
something is good or evil – something like war and killing and smuggling guns
to mujahedinn guerrillas, foe example –
then we ask the question: What if everyone
did this thing? Would that help us, in
this bit of universe, to get there, or would it hold us back? And then we have a pretty good idea whether
it’s good or evil. What’s more
important, we know why it’s good or evil.
Page 707: The Big
Bang expansion happened from a point
called the singularity – another of my favorite five- syllable English words –
that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies
no space and no time, as we know those things.
The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy.
Page 708: There is a
saying – When a student is ready, the teacher appears.
Page 708: [metaphor] Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has
no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single
spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of
his name.
Page 709: Sometimes
it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our
reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong – that we do not lie to
ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.
I tried to unwind the wreath of thorns that Kader had coiled
around my heart with his words. The
wrong thing for the right reasons …
…I remembered Anand’s face smiling at me through the
metal grille of the visitor’s room at
Aurther Road Prison: that gentile,
handsome face, so serene, and softened with peace that had suffused his
heart. He’d done the wrong thing for the
right reasons, as he saw it. He’d calmly
accepted the punishment that he’d earned, as he said to m, as if it was a
privilege or a right. And at last, after
too many thinking days and night, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind
because a voice kept telling me – my own voice, or maybe it was my father’s –
that I would never know that peace. I
would never come to Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and
acknowledgment of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones
in the barren field of an exiled heart
Page 731: I do not
think that light is God. I think I is
possible, and reasonable to say, that light is the language of God. Light may be the way God speaks to the
universe, and to us.
Page 731: [metaphor] Beached there in the tangle of flicker
Page 737: And if you
prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the
bright part of him that wants to beloved.
Page 740: You cant
kill love. You can’t even kill it with
hate. You can kill in-love, and loving,
and even loveliness. You can kill them
all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love
itself. Love is the passionate search
for truth other than your own: and once you feel it, honestly and completely,
love is forever. Every act of love,
every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and
it can never die.
Page 741: Men wage
wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. … The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman and a city.
Page 749: Amed Shah
Massoud, the unofficial leader of the nation-wide was to expel the Russians, had personally appointed
Sueliman to set up the southern command near Kandahar. … They were the eyes of an unutterable sadness,
a sadness withered and emptied of tears.
Page 758:
[metaphor] the words of the
hunters echoed in the sheer, stone canyons like the howl of prowling wolves
The knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until
all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms
around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive.
Page 759: Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s
something you give.
Page 760: We watched
him leave, watched his thin, retreating shadow sweep the sundial of the snowy
slopes beneath us.
Page 765: I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled
in my empty belly, and leaped up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of
ribs.
Page 766: Genius is
vain, and cleverness is hallow, at the end.
The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marble
mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.
Page 771: stars shine because they are full with secrets
Page 776: But hunger
has a will of its own, a will that’s much older than the other will we praise
and flatter in the place of mind. … [metaphor]
as shape as a belly full of fishhooks.
Page 777: [metaphor]
Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind driven
clouds streaming across the far plain aflame, crimsoned with the first burning
kisses of the morning sun.
Page 792: [metaphor]
the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distand,
foggy shore.
Page 795: Every door
is a portal leading through time as well as space.
Page 796: Our eyes
met and held for a second, each of us reading the other’s shifting expressions
like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones
Page 802: [metaphor] his hands we revisable, stapled together like
sausages in a butcher’s window.
Page 804: It’s the
only thing all civilized men have in common, don’t you agree? If money doesn’t mean anything, there is no
civilization. There is nothing.
Page 809: [metaphor] Her
hands. As limp and expressionless as her slack mouth, lay in her lap like
things washed up on a deserted floor.
Page 809: [metaphor]
I heard the vengeful stone fall from the hating hand that wanted to throw it.
Page 817: [metaphor] his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding
and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose,
falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.
Page 830: Yeah. It’s a biology thing - It’s about hosts, like human bodies, and
parasites, like viruses and such. I
studied it when I was running my clinic in the zhopadpatti. The hosts -
our bodies’- and viruses- any bug that makes us sick – are locked in a
competition with each other. When the
parasites attacks, the host develops a defence.
Then the virus changes to beat the defence, so the host gets a new
defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen Contest. It’s the story from Alice in Wonderland.
It’s a Red Queen contest and we all have to run real fast to
stand still.
Page 835: [metaphor] Amir was a scarred, blunt-headed man with
thick, tangled eyebrows and a mustache that rode the cresting wave of his full
upper lip like the wide prow of a Kashmiri houseboat.
Page 837: [metaphor] but
I was lonelier than a mujahidin sentry on the night before battle.
Page 837: [metaphor] a smile as big as a gamblers promise
unveiled her face as she opened her arms to hug me.
Page 844: [metaphor] I
rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves
Page 851: [metaphor]
The setting sun, shat funeral fire in the sky, seared my euyes, and I
looked away to follow the last fires of cerise and magenta streaming out
andfading in the ocean-mirrored sapphire of the evening.
Page 869: That is how
a man destroys his own soul – he loses the last limit to his evil.
Page 870: Silence can
wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote.
Page 871: [metaphor]
The cloak of the past is cut from feeling, and swen with rebus threads, Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap
it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go
on. But everything has its cause and its
meaning. Every life, every love, every
action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning,
and part it plays in the end.
Sometimes, we see so clearly, and read the legand of its
parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a
kind of message is enfolded in it.
Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than
failure or clearer than sorrow. And in
the tiny precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dreaded and hated enemies,
suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
Page 881: [metaphor]
I let my smile, like a thing made of broken stones, fall and slide from the
peak of her affection to the ground beneath her feet.
Page 883: [metaphor] I
looked around the laughing, drinking, talking friends and filled the empty
glass with wine, pouring their success and their hopes into my eyes.
Page 905: The only
kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul.
Page 909: [metaphor]
and sleep, like fog in the morning forest, moved through my sorrowing mind.
Page 911: [metaphor]
like butter on a prison guard’s sugared bun
Page 916: [metaphor] He
frowned at his sandaled feet as if they were disobedient puppies
Page 917: [metaphor] Luck
is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.
