Quotes from Bharati Mukherjee

The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.

How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence.

Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.

For girls of our class, only a convent-school education would do. This meant that until we reached the age of marital consent, we could be certified (of course) as virgins, but also as never having occupied unchaperoned confined space of any kind with a boy of our own age who was not a close relative.

Watch me re-position the stars.

His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the "Zentoos," meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity.

He understood something about firangi arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn't think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.

English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism.

But only men destroy and give back nothing.

In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he's allowed to play a note. It's not just the reaction that says How dare you know? It's something deeper: How dare you presume to say you know?

She finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling.

The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.

She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory.

Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work: Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over.

The blame lies with anyone who confuses protection with power.

Duty! Duty, judgement! I have heard enough of duty. And of judgement. You cloak your lust for vengeance and for gold and diamonds in the noble words of duty and judgement and protection and sacrifice. But it is the weakest and the poorest and the most innocent who suffer, who sacrifice, whose every minute of every day is obedience to duty.

If all is equal in the eye of Brahma as the Hindus say, if Allah is all-seeing and all merciful as you say, then who has committed atrocities on the children, the women, the old people? Who has poisoned the hearts of men?

Time will become as famous as place. There will be time-tourists sitting around saying, "Yeah, but have you ever been to April fourth? Man!" My life has gotten just a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just discontinuous overload.

Whose victory? What led to battle? But Mr. Abraham forecloses on questions. "These people used to build them all the time only." These people? Meaning Muslims and Hindus. Meaning heathens. Mr. Abraham, Christian child of a different intrusion, draws me with a new alacrity toward the cemetery crammed with sunken tombstones.

Self-pity, unaccountability and hypocrisy were recast as virtues and renamed forgiveness, solidarity and tolerance.

The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment.

My life has gotten just a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just discontinuous overload.

Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.