“…he lifted the latch off the top and pushed the recently painted black gate, solid metal, no chinks, he felt the warmth of elaichi-flavoured tea in his mouth, he tasted the tea-soaked butter biscuit melt on his tongue, he heard voices of all timbres and pitches bouncing off the high ceilings and plastered walls, and he smelled eggplant roasting on an open flame. This last memory made him gag – burnt eggplant smelt like singed hair.”
“He opened his eyes, then closed them again. For a moment, he had felt like the whole thing had been a dream, the house on fire, the cement walls untouched but the wood window and door frames on fire, the curtains inside curling up and transforming into feathery embers, the outer brick walls turning black from the heat within but still standing. The fire had remained inside; he hadn’t waited for it to shatter the glass windows and envelop the house from the outside – neither had they, the arsonists, the murderers. They had left and so had he.”
“‘Paaji, you are nothing. You are a refugee in their land, you will be nothing for generations, mark my words. Fifty years from now, your children will still be referred to as refugees, lacking class, crass, foreign and loud – all those things. You will work hard and make money. You will throw it in the faces of these genteel people, and all they will be able to say is – Punjabi refugees, what else can you expect?'”
“She liked embroidery. It added to plain cloth beauty and depth that poetry added to simple words. She was usually working on something, cloth entrapped between two concentric wooden rings to keep it stretched, her pattern book on one side of her and her bag of coloured threads on the other.”
“Guests from Delhi in Lahore had been a common enough occurrence in the past, but now it was as though they were the divine presence – God-like creatures who had somehow broken through the barriers and come across.”
“As they approached the end, there was a single sign that said ‘Pakistan-India Border Approaching.’
On the other side, there was no checkpost, no gate, no wall, no fence, only a shiny Dodge DeSoto, with its lights off, engine off parked one hundred metres away. They all got out, looked around, saw no one. Akbar got out too. He smiled. ‘This is how it should remain.’”
“He felt another family squabble rising up through the marble floor. It can’t have been easy for this couple, leaving their only daughter behind, struggling in this young country where they were refugees, a country that welcomed them but had little to give them but the detritus of those who had fled.”
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