Sister of My Heart

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.

Everytime i have turned the page he re-enters my life as awkward as postscript

I guess there's a lot we hope for that never happens.

Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength --or else we die.

Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now.

the darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world

I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life?

...the bird began to carry them to a new life in a new land. We'll be happy ever after, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other's strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready.

...each person is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone

Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable.

Every person has a heart, but we're not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters.

I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.

But when I see Sudha, her face bright with a simple, generous joy, the walls I'd set up so carefully collapse around me like a house of cards. Inside my heart it feels like a wet, new rain. In spite of all my insecurities, in spite of the oceans that'll be between us soon and the men that are between us already, I can never stop loving Sudha. It's my habit, and it's my fate.

They say in the old tales that when a man and a woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. Their gaze is a rope of gold binding each to the other. Even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. They can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again.

Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults.

No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.

Who am I to say that small joys are less valuable than a passion which shatters your life?

Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person - even Anjali and Basudha - is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone.