Author: Mistry, Cyrus
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Besides, how else, I ask you this, how else are the best of us to keep up this carrion work, this constant consanguinity with corpses, without taking a drop or two?
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Though death is its precise reason for existence, in this garden, life—overwhelmingly—is the victor.
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the mourners, present and waiting—were crowded with women of various ages draped in freshly laundered white saris: swans, elegant in their grief.
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People never give a thought to death while there’s still time, I reflected, as the priests droned on. And when it comes upon you unannounced, there’s shock and disbelief, and a great gnashing of teeth.
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and didn’t want to be huddled among a rabble
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(Which only goes to show, I suppose, that parents should exercise greater discretion when they speak in front of their children. For mere tangential references, snatches of invective or exaggeration as I surely must have overheard in later years, became fodder for my seemingly disinterested but actually heightened child’s receptivity, lodging deep in the recesses of my subconscious mind, and acquiring entity.)
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Hope, that palliative of every human suffering: in desperation, we cling to the flimsiest of straws.
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When I moved out of home some twenty-six years ago I brought along a half-dozen, half-used school notebooks. Now
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But this job makes you aware that all that self-importance is nothing but illusion. What is a man in the end, Phiroze, but the powder of a few dried bones.
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The end of World War II saw a spurt in building activity in Bombay.
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and her tears wouldn’t cease until they were snuffed out by sheer exhaustion, or crushed under masses of accumulated sleep.
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Excuses are made for every frustration or impediment that doesn’t quite merge into the perfect blueprint of miraculous resolution already etched into one’s hopes and prayers: