Boris

Boris Karloff who played original Frankenstein was also the voice of the grinch.  Life is weird.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I've been fooling around starting devilled eggs tonight.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy's new joint

Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken.   Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed and a thin stream of shit ran down her legs.  Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child.   Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed.  There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her.

He ( the dog) drank everything Anjum drank ate everything that she ate - biriani, korma, samosas, hawks, falooda, phirni, zamzam, mangoes in summer, oranges in winter.  It was terrible for his body but excellent for his soul.

" Oh we have ways of assessing the warmth of the welcome," Amrik Singh said.  "We have our own thermometers."
Maybe.  But you have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity, Musa  thought but did not say.  You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground.  Duplicity is the only weapon we have.  You don't know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken.  How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise.  You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away.  Your thermometer is quite useless here.

In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing - walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes,  shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home-they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier.  And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing - walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home - they were a legitimate target.

It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates.  Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving.

Its roof had fallen in and the moon shone through its skeleton of rafters that loomed against the night - a luminous heart in an angular ribcage.

There was more than one patient in every bed.  There were patients on the floor, most of the visitors and family members who were crowded around them looked just as ill.  Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos.  It was like a wartime ward.  Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one - the war of the rich against the poor.

The young taxi driver . . . whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. . . He would leave for Kashmir the next morning to return to a new phase in an old war from which, this time, he would not return.  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.  The younger men who would take his place would be harder, narrower, and less forgiving.  They would be more likely to win any war that they fought, because they belonged to a generation that had known nothing but war.

How to tell a shattered story?  By slowly becoming everybody?  No, by slowly becoming everything.