Home > Author > Insha Juneja,
1 " It was as though the throttling nature of the cloth against her mouth wanted to sentence her to a lifetime of silence. "
― Insha Juneja, , Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories
2 " No one cares about your happiness, Udita. We’re just supposed to serve as wombs for patriarchy’s narcissistic desire for an endless line up of sons. "
3 " At exactly 11.11pm, a baby took its first breath in the Jhareja household. By 11.13 pm, the entire family’s faces bore frowns, all their hopes shattered into a million pieces. An atmosphere of gloom and melancholy settled over the entire household. The sombre and bleak looks on their faces seemed so distasteful that it seemed like they were in more agony than the time the head of the family had passed away. Udita’s daughter, Kairavi had been born. "
4 " The only question I ask myself is: did we teach each other the meaning of love for ourselves or someone else? "
5 " Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I always saw a morbidly obese reflection, while in truth I was achingly underweight. My obsession of looking good corresponded to wanting to look the way skinny models looked in television ads and fashion magazines, the personification of being attractive as described by the world around me. "
6 " As it turned out, an apple a day did not keep the doctor away, especially if that happened to be the only thing I ate for an entire day. "
7 " So Amira Kashyap, what’s your story?” he asked as he set the big display stopwatch to a designated period of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The perfectly tranquil way in which he asked me the question made me slightly nervous, even though I had spent the last few years of my life having imaginary conversations with an imaginary therapist. There were a lot of things I wished to tell him. From wanting to tell him about my first triggers to the very thought of me standing in front of a mirror haunting the living daylights out of me.These were just a couple out of the many thoughts in the archives of my brain. However, my mind went completely blank.I stammered and hesitated and managed to utter a total of seven words.“I don’t know where to start.”“Just say the first thing that crosses your mind,” he said.“I’m scared of food,” I blurted. "
8 " But although my body constantly reminded me that it was starving, the voices inside my mind never gave me permission to satisfy my hunger. At times, I would get affected when people passed statements like, “Why can’t you just eat?”However, I convinced myself that the only person who could understand anorexia was someone who had been through the eating disorder. I chose to remain quiet. "
9 " I wanted to be normal again. I wanted to be genuinely happy again and not just pretend. I didn’t want distorted mirror images to destroy and define my life any longer. I wished to breathe in the customary air, instead of the suffocating one people like me had accustomed themselves to breathe. I just wanted to break through these metal rods that I’d been caged behind for the last two years of my life. I wanted to feel plain, simple, genuine contentment again. I wanted to; I needed to. "
10 " Udita lay silently on her bed with Kairavi clenched to her heart. She looked at the bowl full of honey kept on the side table next to her. Then she looked at the unopened box of ‘pedas’ in her husband’s hands. Finally, she looked at her beautiful angel, her moon baby with a little smile on her dimpled cheek, oblivious to how she silently lay amidst her own family of misanthropes. "
11 " What you're looking for is on the other side of fear. "
