“She had lovers and, if the secret must be out, she drank. What else accounts for the naughtiness of her eyes? Like so many tawaifs (geishas, courtesans) there were ups and downs in her childhood, the father leaving the mother and so on, but she was blessed with the divine gift and her art transcended the various accidents of her life. In the end all else was forgotten. Only the legend and the accomplishment survive.”
Begum Akhtar the Undisputed Malika of Ghazals
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Begum Akhtar 7
Indian musician 1914–1974Related quotes
Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 139
"Chosen One" - Live performance at The Tin Angel, Philadelphia PA (29 January 2005) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt4PTtcVh5s
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Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 7 (p. 66).
“She became whoever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.”
Source: The Storyteller
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.
Source: Following the Equator (1897), Ch. I
