Short Story Writers From India

"For children, father is a luxurious item, - just like beans for the horse....but mother is everything for the child. The child cannot bear separation from his mother even for a minute."

"What greatness do I have that I have to tell anyone about? I live just like millions of people in this country; I am ordinary. My life is also ordinary. I am a poor school teacher suffering family travails. During my whole lifetime, I have been grinding away with the hope that I could become free of my sufferings. But I have not been able to free myself from suffering. What is so special about this life that needs to be told to anybody?"

"My ideal of a woman is a combination of sacrifice, care and purity at one place. Sacrifice without a hope for reward, without showing any dissatisfaction and purity like Ceaser's wife, which does not bring any regret."

"Beauty doesn't need ornaments. Softness can't bear the weight of ornaments."

"The feeling of motherhood in a woman becomes stronger as she grows older. In fact a time comes when every man is like a son in the eyes of a woman. There is not an ounce of sexual desire left in her heart. But this stage never comes in a man…he can never free himself from sexual desires."

"There is something very arch and elusive about Narayan’s treatment of India and Indians. The key to the Malgudi cycle appears to me to lie in the complicated nature of Narayan’s conservatism. He is typically (and orthodox) Hindu in his celebration of the static. Yet Narayan is ready to admit extreme scepticism about the genuineness of Indian ‘Godmen’ and their disciples and to see comedy rather than tragedy as an appropriate fictional reflection of India’s long and frequently catastrophic history."

"Few Indians have been more truly Indian."

"R. K Narayan is delightfully conscious of the disappearance of the caste system."

"We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts."

""Paved the ways". Yes, Narayan did that by writing about ordinary men and women, by translating the Indian experience into English, by doing it so easily, comfortably and without any affectation whatsoever, that it seemed enormously simple.But it's never simple. Only a writer knows how difficult this is. And it's because of what he did that it was possible for all the writers who followed to travel more comfortably; the road had been paved to a certain extent. As a writer I admire this almost invisible achievement. As a writer I admire him too for the fact that while his contemporaries seem dated, that while they have been relegated to the back shelves, he is still read and enjoyed. I envy him for his large and dedicated readership all over the world -- a readership that consists of ordinary readers as well as academics, critics and writers of acclaim."

"Significantly, it’s the western penetration of Indian life to level from which the character and events draw their sustenance that has been portrayed by R.K. Narayan in his novels. However, the ironical attitude itself, so characteristics of R.K. Narayan, is largely western; it has few parallels, if any, in pre-modern Indian authors."

"Past is gone , present is going and tomorrow is day after tomorrow's yesterday . So why worry about anything ? God is in all this ."

"Life is about making right things and going on ."

"Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well."

"You become writer by writing . It is a yoga ."

"This is my child . I planted it . I saw it grow . I loved it . Don't cut it down ."

"As a storyteller, he was a natural, picking at the bedrock of everyday existence to uncover the barest truths and tease out the bald facts of life. Not surprisingly, comparisons have been drawn between Narayan and William Faulkner, whose novels were grounded in a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of ordinary life."

"I have no idea of the extent of this zoo. I know only my corner and whatever passes before me."

"The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned."

"Certain things acquired an evil complexion if phrased , but remained harmless in the mind"

"Unflinchingly traditional outlook"

"Death and it's associates, after the initial shock produce callousness."

"When you face your fear, you become familiar with it, and familiarity makes it lose its meaning, loosen its grip - fear ceases to be fear."

"Words do not have teeth, still they bite; and once they bite, the wounds never heal."

"Lata was beyond words. She was a miracle that will happen never again."

"Music has a natural place in our lives. Right from the shloka you recite in your morning puja and the milkman who comes whistling on his cycle, to the fakir singing as he begs for alms and your mother humming around the kitchen...Music fills our spaces naturally. It will always be dear to us."

"A good storyteller is the conscience-keeper."

"If he says that I am the voice of the century, then I would say that he is the writer of the century."

"Maula Bakhsh, a peasant, lives in Tamil Nadu and speaks Tamil. In Andhra Pradesh he speaks Telugu. In Bengal, his language is Bengali. Do we think of such a Muslim for whom I have invented the name Maula Bakhsh. Jinnah, Khaliquz Zaman, Maulana Azad, the Aga Khan, M.C. Chagla and the Raja of Mehmudabad... were Muslims. So was Hakku, the elderly grandmother of our locality. She prays 5 times a day. She was so deeply moved by one of Gandhi's speeches that she would repeat his name after Allah and His Prophet. At the age of 70, she stitched her own khadi kafan, because she did not want her body to be wrapped and then buried in a foreign cloth. So when people discuss India's Muslims, I wonder who are they talking about. Maula Bakhsh? Jinnah and Co.? Or Hakku?"

"In battle...enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can. (p273)"

"Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires. (p261)"

"She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time."

"Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us. (p260)"

"It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock. (p235)"

"Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world."

"Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan."

"People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. (p198)"

""...India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures—peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears…" (p172)"

"Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightest feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat."

"Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles (p165)"

"The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains. (p156)"

"Kochu Maria watched with her cake-crumbs. The Fond Smiles watched Fondly. Little Girls Playing. Sweet. One beach-coloured. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less."

"The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place."

"Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel’s streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies’ suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic."

"maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. (p155)"

"Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view. (p154-5)"

"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."

"I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings... (p153)"

"The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair. (p103)"

"Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with."