amaan

read up until the last story, but it took me months to get through the book; not because the writing is difficult or the subject matter is uniquely disturbing, but just because of the irritation I felt every time I read it. the only positive thought I have on this book is that I liked how the stories were loosely interconnected. theoretically, also, the idea of these stories as brief windows into various people's lives is interesting, but I'm sure it's been done before, and much better.

this book felt... not pretentious, but something along those lines. it's one of those things you read not particularly for your interest in its contents but for the impression it gives other people. I found myself barely invested in most stories, and my enjoyment of those I found interesting was dampened by unimpactful and unsatisfying endings that I feel contributed nothing good.

Chris: Ann, I love you. I love you a great deal. [Finally] I love you. [Pause. She waits.] I have no imagination... that's all I know to tell you.

Chris: I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you've got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, and you've got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you really have is loot, and there's blood on it.

Mother: I told you to marry that girl and stay out of the war!
George: [laughs at himself] She used to laugh too much.
Mother: And you didn't laugh enough. While you were getting mad about Fascism, Frank was getting into her bed.

Mother: Your brother's alive, darling, because if he's dead, your father killed him. Do you understand me now? As long as you live, that boy is alive. God does not let a son be killed by his father.

Chris: Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world—the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?

Jim: Oh, no, he'll come back. We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made.

Keller: There's nothin' in this world he could do that I wouldn't forgive. Because he's my son. Because I'm his father and he's my son.Mother: Joe, I tell you...Keller: Nothin's bigger than that. And you're goin' to tell him, you understand? I'm his father and he's my son, and if there's something bigger than that I'll put a bullet in my head!

Chris: Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honour was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

Chris: I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

Chris: Then what was Larry to you? A stone that fell into the water? It's not enough for him to be sorry. Larry didn't kill himself to make you and Dad sorry.Mother: What more can we be!Chris: You can be better!

This book was admittedly hard to read through, and the first serious challenge I've faced while reading in a while, but getting through it was so worth it. There are definitely sections of the book that even repeated re-reading does not help me to comprehend better (or at all) but other parts are so profound, and poetic and hard-hitting that the difficult writing style doesn't matter to me. I have too many favourite quotes from the book to list them all, but I'll list some choice favourites below.

But we had lost something, a certain protective aura, some unspoken myth asserting that love between sisters at least was sexually innocent. Now we had to fold that vain belief away and stand in more naked relation to our affection. Till then we had associated such violence with all that was outside us, as though somehow the more history fractured, the more whole we could be. But we began to lose that sense of the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and became guiltily aware that we had known it all along, our part in the construction of unreality.

In an unspoken way, though, I think we dimly knew we were about to witness Islam's departure from the land of Pakistan. The men would take it to the streets and make it a vociferate, but the great romance between religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was done. So Papa prayed, with the desperate ardor of a lover trying to converse life back into a finished love. 

By the time I reached Lahore, a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave-space where my father had hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife. Children take over everything.

‘What you would love most,' she wrote to me some months later, ‘are the rooftops. They have a slant that would ravish you.' For, as an oblique reparation for her inability to look at me again, Mustakor had slipped into the habit of looking at the world as if through my eyes.

He must have known some of the same exigencies: once in a while he would still wish to pull me back into the familiarity of his day, calling me with the terrible hesitance of someone who no longer trusts his license to intrude. [...] Some chemicals of tenderness of course would always wake up with a start to the sound of his voice, but listening to that sequence was a terrifying thing, as though I were being methodically slapped by the inevitability of my own irrelevance.

What a strange occasion it must have been: crowds of hundreds of thousands gathering in the open field next to the Badshahi Mosque, of which how many understood the two-hour speech that Jinnah rose to give, prefaced with the calm disclaimer, ‘The world is watching us, so let me have your permission to have my say in English'?

‘I am not talking about the two-nation theory,' I wept to my father, ‘I am talking about blood!' He would not reply, and so we went our separate ways, he mourning for the mutilation of a theory and I – more literal – for a limb, or a child, or a voice.

Then I realised what I must have known all along: of course, Ifat's story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with the price a mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.

Ifat watched my face; ‘It doesn't matter, Sara,' she once told me ruefully. ‘Men live in homes, and women live in bodies.'

But we have managed to live with ourselves, it seems, making a habit of loss. ‘The thought most killing to me,' I told Tillat, ‘is – if Ifat could be asked – how firmly she would swear that we would never let the children go.' Tillat winced.