14 Quotes by Meghna Pant

Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves.

I have learnt that a good marriage is healing for the soul, something to relish. But a bad marriage is long-suffering, a thing to be endured. The only good thing about marriage is that it’s perishable like human life.

She stood above the sink and broke the Swarovski glass frame – a wedding gift – with her hands. Her thumb got cut. As blood drops fell into the sink, like mercury balls she thought, she lit the photo on fire. Ashes fell into the sink. Fire and vermilion. Ashes and blood. Her marriage from start to finish.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence.

Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us.

Yet, despite their many surgeries and jobs, most of them looked like old girls – girls who had suffered some wasting disease. These same things, breasts and botox, like independence and immodesty, had been powerful and shameful a few short years back, put in the same category as an extra toe or a stutter; they were quaint now.

Their marriage hadn’t died dramatically. There were no adulterous truants or burst spleens or freakish lightning strikes or splattered brains over the highway. Their marriage had died of neglect and errors and abrasiveness. It died under a long protracted illness for which there was a diagnosis but no remedy. The disease had no name. So how could she explain it to others?

Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.