Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

Each day has a color, a smell.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Truth, like diamond, has many facets.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India.'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked.'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
But Krishna was a chameleon.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess's glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti--no fancy modern clothes for him. That's one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
What is the nature of life?Life is lines of dominoes falling.One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again."I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won’t get you what you want.” His words perplexed me. Wasn’t power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
What did I learn that day in the sabha?All this time I'd believed in my power over my husbands. I'd believed that because they loved me they would do anything for me. But now I saw that though they did love me—as much perhaps as any man can love—there were other things they loved more. Their notions of honor, of loyalty toward each other, of reputation were more important to them than my suffering. They would avenge me later, yes, but only when they felt the circumstances would bring them heroic fame. A woman doesn't think that way. I would have thrown myself forward to save them if it had been in my power that day. I wouldn't have cared what anyone thought. The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni