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Amrita Mahale QUOTES

Amrita Mahale QUOTES

1 " Salt makes grey, salt makes red. Salt heals, slowly. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

2 " This city was our common ground, I want to tell Kaiz. Not simply its soil, nor its salt or tides, not lines on any map, nor buildings and streets. Something else entirely. An image, a dream, an idea that beguiled both of us: a magical place with chaos in its code, where our stories collided briefly. That romance with the city he carries with him wherever he goes. What it means to me, though, goes beyond what we had in common, it can’t be packed up and transported tidily. Mumbai for me is two people who moved from small coastal towns to this metropolis by the sea and made it their home. My home. And that is how the city is different for the two of us: for him both Mumbai and home were abstractions. Abstractions are at once more fragile and more hardy than reality. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

3 " You could put all the French or Italian you wanted in their names, but you couldn't take Mumbai out of the buildings: the clothes drying outside the windows would remain, and so would the mud streaks from flowerpots on windowsills. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

4 " There was plenty of anger on offer in Mumbai and it was easy to look away. But every once in a while, someone with imagination crafted their fury like origami into something delightful. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

5 " It will be okay, you will be okay. They call this the spirit of Bombay. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

6 " It was easy to believe that a mother’s love was unconditional, which made it alright to challenge her, correct her, laugh at her. Fathers were more complicated. Their love, once earned, had to be sustained. It had to be sheltered from the glare of truth. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

7 " It would make sense to her much later, that you needed some distance from a city to be able to worship it the way he did. It had also been his way of belonging: learning its mythology was one of many paths to calling a city home. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

8 " She had believed that the heart was like a house and when you let someone in, they were only a guest. You could entertain them in the living room while keeping the bedrooms shut. You could limit their footprint to a minimum. But she had not suspected that Kaiz was a shameless, over-familiar guest who took a tour of the house on his own, opening doors and walking in unescorted, uninvited. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

9 " So for most practical purposes, the communal violence that started after the Babri Masjid fell came to an end after the blasts, but the spell of peace that followed felt like hate was only shedding its milk teeth. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

10 " But once you were taught to reduce a person to just one piece of their identity, it took a long time to learn to fill in the other details, to make them whole again and see them as fully human. Once you sow this mystery seed, who knows what you will harvest centuries, years, or even months later? "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

11 " It was a gentle assault that chiselled at your will, and chip by chip, your resistance fell away, sculpting a new you. When you acquiesced, you were left wondering why you had ever resisted. In some moments you were even convinced that it was your decision, that you were acting of your own free will—that mirage of a notion—because after all, any pressure on you had only been mild, albeit persistent. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

12 " Stories are the flesh and blood, the link between past and present. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

13 " Learning its mythology was one of many paths to calling a city home. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

14 " But middle-class in this country was a state of mind, as one of Kaiz’s unbearable friends had once declared. Not the filthy-rich of masala movies, not the dirt-poor of arthouse films, but everything in between. For some it was shorthand for middle-access, a separation from the corridors of power. For others it was middle-culture, a separation from the world of ideas. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

15 " Passion was the opposite of power. Passion was the forsaking of power. In passion, she had offered herself as a canvas for somebody else's pen, mutely receiving his designs on her skin. In passion, she had allowed herself to dream of a new name, adding his name to her own, chopping off a part of herself as an offering. In passion, she had cut herself up, lost herself, lost days, lost months. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

16 " These scams enraged them, and from the crucible of their fury, they themselves emerged pure. They wanted corruption removed from the root, so that honest people could prosper for a change, as if they had no role to play in the shape of their lives, in the fate of their cities and their country, as if these stories of graft unfolded in black vacuum. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

17 " When you looked at yourself, you saw a tangle of fiction and feeling. You only began to make sense under the lingering gaze of another. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

18 " It’s a city of refugees, one that is still hurting from the wounds of Partition. We take time to trust people, to let them in. As for this friendly city of yours, Bombay is a place of pleasant aloofness, full of small talk and token kindness, but selfish and closed when it really matters. But Delhi, it lives on abrasive warmth. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

19 " Perhaps she had got it all wrong, perhaps no new love could mend what an old love had torn apart, that passion was an unstable force and perhaps her life did not have to be a constant state of flux. These pages had weathered love and loss. Now, she said to herself, it was in her hands to write here a new story. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth

20 " A lack of imagination could be as crippling for the spirit as any poverty. "

― Amrita Mahale , Milk Teeth