Shobha Rao Quotes

What fools we all are. We girls. Afraid of the wrong things, at the wrong times. Afraid of a burdened face, when outside, outside waiting for you are fires you cannot imagine. Men, holding matches up to your gasoline eyes. Flames, flames all around you, licking at your just-born breasts, your just-bled body. And infernos. Infernos as wide as the world. Waiting to impoverish you, make you ash, and even the wind, even the wind. Even the wind, my dear, she thought, watching you burn, willing it, passing over you, and through you. Scattering you, because you are a girl, and because you are ash.

Understand this Poornima: that it's better to be swallowed whole than in pieces.

There is no way to explain a thing that is perfect.

There was nothing for many, many kilometers surrounding the train...and that what she had thought while traveling on the train: that to journey through such emptiness was to invite it inside.

Forget what I said about a woman who won't listen. The worst thing is a woman who knows what she wants.

It was stillness, she learned, that at the time was the greatest movement.

My wife comes into the room, shutting out the sun as she closes the door, and lays the wad of bills on the table in front of me. I can't look at her. I want to feel shame but I only feel a thin pleasure, like a fine layer of skin, puckered and white and soulless, floating on cooling milk. On another shore, perhaps, the desert has an ashen end; and forests are merely silent folded wings. On that shore poverty doesn't have an animal stink. And when we touch the face of another, we draw onto their skin a moonlit path, and not the metallic rust of our weakness and our fear.

Fear was no good, but neither was the monotony of fear.

But then Lalita did something odd. Well, not odd, but beautiful. She shifted the clay pot of water from her right hip to her left. She pushed it up against the curve of her waist, wrapped her arm around the neck of the pot, and disappeared around the bend. Mohan knelt to the ground; he could taste the earthen dampness clinging to her waist. He knew then that he'd been wrong: she wasn't simply happy; happiness could not possibly explain the strange loveliness, the utter seductiveness, of that gesture. No, what Lalita had was something even more audacious than happiness. What was it? Mohan trembled....

Sitting on his bed that afternoon, after lunch, Mohan decided that the clay of the pot and the bronze of Lalita's skin were the only true substances. They were why the rains fell, why the sun rose. His fingers traced them all his life. Then he knew. He knew what Lalita had that the others didn't, that he didn't; she had sex. In fact, he realized, what she had was the opposite of what he had. But what was it that he had? What was the opposite of sex? It seemed like a question without an answer. Like where does reality stop and unreality begin? Or, what goes deeper, the human soul or the human imagination? But this one had an answer. That much Mohan knew. He knew that the opposite of sex was fear. And fear was something he had an abundance of.

Every moment in a woman's life was a deal, a deal for her body: first for its blooming and then for its wilting; first for her bleeding and then for her virginity and then for her bearing (counting only the sons) and for her widowing.