Bharati Mukherjee, Darkness: A Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 1985, 1986) (From "The Imaginary Assassin": "But Gandhi, the spiritual leader, what did he understand about evil and sin? A man with his head in the clouds does not see the shit pile at his feet." Id. at 177, 191, 185.).
Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters: A Novel (New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2002) ("Why should we believe you when it is well known that all lawyers prevaricate?" "You can deceive judges, but you cannot fool goddesses." "The goddess exacts payment in mysterious ways." Id. at 13. "'Zen's a bummer, babe,' he said. 'That's how it always is. The big facts are never learned. What you see is what's invisible.'" Id. at 49. "'What is the value of a passing moment?' he asked. 'What is the value of groups marked for extinction?' 'Their beauty,' I answered without hesitation." Id, at 280. "Goddess Kali, the Destroyer of Time, the Dissipater, the Scourge of Sinfulness, I too beg you to free me from earthly terrors and longings." Id. at 292.).
Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive." Id. at 70."'Look around you! Hannah shouted. 'There is no golden world. It's a dream, all a dream!'" Id. at 266.).
Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine: A Novel (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989) ("There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams." Id. at 29. "Enlightenment meant seeing through the third eye and sensing designs in history's muddles." Id. at 60. "Learn to read the world and everyone in it like a photographic negative of reality." Id. at 192.).
Bharati Mukherjee, Leave It To Me: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1997) ("'Your no is not a personal disappointment,' he'd lectured, 'because it is evidently not my karma to see you outside this eatery. So, what to do? Overdose on Sominex like my roommate...? No! The concept of karma is that fate is very dynamic. Not too many people are understanding that part of it. True concept of karma is: when on a dead-end street, jump into alternate paths.'" Id. at 80. "Zen masters have it too easy, answering disciples' questions with questions of their own. What I've learned--am still learning...--is that for each question there are a zillion correct answers. Mother's milk; cobra's venom. Since both are right, and of equal value, pick the one that feels good." Id. at 211-212.).
Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (New York: Grove Press 1988) (From "The Middleman": "But what can I say--is there deeper pleasure, a darker thrill than prejudice squarely faced, suppressed, fought against, and then slowly, secretively surrendered to?" Id. at 1-21, 6. From :Fighting For the Rebound": "The world's a vale of tears only if you keep peering six weeks into the future." Id. at 77-94, 93.).
Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) ("Peter would be appalled if he could see how she had expanded on his networking theory. His provocative critiques of Indian business models would have been hard for any student to ignore or forget. Peter didn't pull punches: historically, Indian society wasn't structured around networking and contacts, but rather around family and hometown and religion and language group and even caste counts more than competence...." "So what was the secret of Mumbai's and Bangalore's great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person working next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from." Id. at 125-126. "Look me in the eye, Anjali. Customer support is a very demanding and very specialized profession. One of the things it demands is the ability to submerge your personality. No one is interested in you, or your feelings. You are here to serve our client, and the client is the corporation, not the caller. I think you have a great deal of difficulty erasing yourself from the call." Id. at 241.).
Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger's Daughter: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) ("That evening, while the Kinchen Janga Band played 'Around the World in Eighty Days,' Arati would say of Antonia Whitehead" 'How can you trust that girl? She looks like a boy. How an you trust a girl without hips? But now she was more guarded." Id. at 170.).
Bharati Mukherjee, The Tree Bride: A Novel (New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2004) ("Information feels like the glue of the universe, one of those unimaginable calculations of time and distance, but one that restores a bit of human scale to the ungraspable proportions of space. But there are days, and this is one of them, when the trillion-trillion random particles actually seem reducible to a simple formula. Why not? A drop of blood reveals all of human history." Id. at 234-235.).
Bharati Mukherjee, Wife: A Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 1975, 1987) ("Happy people did not talk to themselves and happy people did not pretend that they had not been talking to themselves. 'Dimple Basu,' she repeated. 'Dimple Basu is a happy woman.'" Id. at 21. "She wanted to dream of Amit but she knew she would not. Amit did not feed her fantasy life; he was merely the provider of small material comforts. In bitter moments she ranked her husband, blender, color TV, cassette tape recorder, stereo, in their order of convenience." Id. at 113. "A woman in an evening dress on a talk show said, 'I always go for the groin. I find that a fail-safe method.' Dimple went to bed. She did not want to watch television; it was becoming the voice of madness." Id. at176. "It was only the pre-infidelity stage that was difficult, she'd learned, because there were no rules for that phase. Individual initiative, that's what it came down to, and her life had been devoted only to pleasing others, not herself. Amit had no idea how close she had come to betraying him completely and not just paying the price for too much fear and loneliness". Id. at 211.).
Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Night in Calcutta (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997) ("Life is flow in India, everything moves, through it moves at its own pace. In the true center of Bombay,the streets cannot be cleared." "This is where I began to love it. It was because I learned quickly that in India commerce ad community are the same thing, and both are of the street. Where commerce disappears urban India becomes pale and hideous. India alerted me again to the basic social value, buying and selling--knowing goods and providing goods--the original reason that people came together." Id. at 17. "It is that Ballygunge which has not changed. It is still possible for my parents' separate families to continue renting the flats they have lived in since I was born, to conduct discreet and fairly stable middle-class lives, although each year the periphery of violence draws a little closer to the center." "I cannot claim tat same stability in Montreal. In the last ten years I have moved at least five times, perhaps more. The few women I claim to know have undergone several image changes. They seem to have tired of drugs, or radical politics, of women's movements. Two have taken lesbian lovers. Two others have discarded their lesbian lovers. One rents a high school boy. To me they seem marvelously flamboyant. I envy them their nervous breakdowns, their violent self-absorption, their confident attempts to remake themselves. Having been born in pre-Independence India, and having watched my homeland change shape and color on schoolroom maps, then having discarded that homeland for another, I know excess of passion leads only to trouble. I am, I insist, well mannered, discreet, secretive, and above all, pliable." Id. at 175.).
Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) (I had forgotten about this event which, now, in light of the events of--and since--September 11, 2001, seems more of a mere foreshock to a major earthquake. As I read this book, I realized the individuals making up the student population of the law school where I am employed were, with a few exceptions, not even alive when the events captured in this book occurred. These events are not even part of their distant memory. Time rushing on, but not always for the better. "On June 23, 1985, at 2:19 A.M. (EDT), a suitcase belonging to a certain Mr. L. Singh explode during baggage transfer at Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan. CP Air Flight 003 had arrived at Narita fifteen minute ahead of schedule. Two baggage handlers were killed, four injured. Mr. L. Singh did not board the flight." "Fifty-five minutes later (3:14 A.M. EDT), 110 miles of the southwest coast of Ireland, a bomb exploded in the forward baggage hold of Air India Flight 182, bound from New Delhi and Bombay, from Toronto and Montreal. The flight was approximately an hour and a half behind schedule at the moment of its destruction. A certain Mr. M. Singh had persuaded officials to put his bag on board the flight in Vancouver, for transfer to the Air India flight leaving Toronto. He did not board the flight." "Three hundred and seven passengers and twenty-two crew members were killed, Over ninety percent of the passengers, most of them holiday-bound women and children, were Canadian citizens. The death toll of 328 stands as the worst at-sea air crash of all times. As a terrorist act, it is the bloodiest of the modern era." Id. at vii. Cannot say that any longer, no longer even close to being the bloodiest. "For a South Asian, Toronto in the late seventies was a heartless city. It was a time when even decent men and women forgot ordinary decencies. It was a time of not being served in stores, of being bounced out of mid-town hotels, of being sent to the end of the line by Voyageur bus drivers and being churlishly treated by Air Canada flight attendants, of being threatened by bullies in subway stations." Id. at 122.).
