The Bandit Queens

Wasn't sanity like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

Women were built to endure the rules men make.

This was the version of her who had survived and there was no sense in apologizing for being a survivor.

Well, I don't have the joys of motherhood," Geeta said after the women were emptied of excuses. Her voice was patient, but her smile was feral. "But I do have the joys of sleep and money.

The amount of bullshit that fell from that fucker’s mouth could fertilize half of India.

But you also can’t be a doormat. So you must exercise kindness and judgment. Not everyone will deserve your kindness. When they show you they’re not worthy, believe them.

Men like him would always look at her and see the things they were glad they weren't: weak, small, timid, powerless. Let them. She'd expended so much energy vying for a broken seat at an uneven table.

The unfortunate status quo is that it is tough for women everywhere, and female friendships are what will carry us through the darkness and absurdity of life. Such connections, however, are not always easily forged in a world keen to divide, mark, and label as “other.

For me, fiction is when research meets compassion; I believe this is often why facts don't change people's minds, but stories do.

Why was I so busy protecting the copper I had with you, that I destroyed the gold I had with her?

She resented being put in a position where those were her choices: violence or violation. She didn’t want to be built to endure, a long-suffering saint tossed by the whims of men. She wanted, for once, not to be handed the short end of the stick by a system that expected gratitude in return.

Wounds from one battle prepare you for the other

She wasn't respected here, but she was feared, and fear had been very kind to Geeta.

Exactly, we’re a bunch of housewives. We make your food, we watch your children, we hear your business. We know your lives well enough to ruin them. So I’d be careful.

But from the get-go, they trained boys not to apologize and women to not expect it of them, to instead mutate pain into an art form.

forgiveness doesn’t mean I’m right back where I started.

never send a god to do a goddess’s job.

But I think that she was capable of anything because everything had already happened to her. She was fearless because she'd already suffered what the rest of us live in fear of.

Well, hindsight is almost a bigger bitch than you.

Yeah, sure, parental love is primitive, but the love that commits to the sacrifices, that puts their happiness and needs over mine, that does it daily on repeat—that’s a choice.” He squinted in the way Geeta now knew he did while thinking. Words came faster to him when he closed his eyes. “It’s a choice I make. It’s important, for me at least, to recognize that, because when you don’t, resentment creeps in.

If the natural world afforded them no protection, then a supernatural story might. A way of terrifying men into considering a woman's well-being from time to time.

Anyone could sympathize with that scenario—a woman who couldn’t be, in their view, a woman. It was easier to throw pity than to wrap their minds around a woman who preferred it that way. But to Geeta, the actual saddest thing, the real waste, was a woman with children she didn’t want.

If you stay in this village, I will make sure you die.” Khushi nodded. “We all will.” “We’re happy to be accessories. Like jewelry, but way more dangerous,

She loved him no longer, it was true, but often the memory of love was more powerful than the love itself. For a short while that had felt like a long while, he'd been her world. But her world was bigger now.

He broke the contract first. When someone threatens your body, you have every right to protect yourself.

It wasn't, Geeta mused while walking, so much that women loved their husbands and couldn't live without them. It was that the outside world made life without them utter shit; you needed a man in the house in order to be left in peace.

The woman ran a business, she alone fed her kids and paid for her daughter's dowry and the wedding to which she'd been denied entry. It was, Geeta felt, just another example of women living within the spaces that others defined.

If Phoolan Devi didn’t feel regret for her crimes, perhaps it was because, to her, they weren’t crimes at all, simply justice.

Geeta suddenly wanted to tell her to retain some pride. To withhold parts of herself because there were plenty of people like her husband waiting to pilfer what they could. It was unlike Geeta, not only to intrude in others’ affairs, but also to offer advice. Advice was a cousin of caring; apathy was Geeta’s mantra.

There was a Geeta before Ramesh’s hands had found her, and that Geeta was still alive, and even if no one else was interested in knowing her, Geeta was.