Meghna Pant

Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.

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__ perishable like human life.

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

Of all the roles she__ played _ daughter, student, employee, sister and wife _ wife was the smallest and in proportion the most difficult, as though it had run out of steam with its own scale. The word __ife_ was too small to accommodate its responsibility.

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__ no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man__ face and you__l find an old man__ mind.