“Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lig...”

“In those hours when the night is still dark and cold, we see Alokananda waking up to the faint sound of stifled sobs. The sheets besides her are creaseless, sleepless. She gets up silently, her bod...”

“I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'('Left from Dhakeshwari')”

“At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fath...”

“Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-c...”

“She had been hesitant the first night, right before she had launched into him like a wild animal. The imprint of her violence had lasted on him well until the morning and while he had been hurt, he...”

“Why werent you beautiful? That wouldve solved everything.('Left from Dhakeshwari')”

“To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.”

“Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and pu the f...”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”