Amit Chaudhuri: Trending quotes (page 3)

“The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.”

“On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer.”

“When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes … hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming.”

“The city was still …. Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret.”

“Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.”

“All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.”

“… the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving.”

“And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils …”

“Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look.”

“Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling.”

“This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.”

“Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. … In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion – both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried – a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.”

“This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour.”

“There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims.”

“It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains”

“… the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt.”

“… invisibility was one of Bengali modernity’s prerequisites and cardinal achievements.”

“Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.”

“Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.”