The smell of fish blood filled my nostrils and when I tasted it, I suddenly knew how Ma could cook according to her emotions. The taste of fish was the taste of hatred, pure and simple. I could not connect it to anything else. This was how it must have started; this is the only way Ma knew how to speak to the world. When she said anything else, nobody listened. Her stories and her feelings and her intentions had to be conveyed through spices and recipes, sauces, oils and meats.

In India, individual shame did not exist. Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family, even to distant cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. The rumormongers made sure of that. 

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy. 

The Constitution calls India a secular socialist republic. We use the word 'secular' in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world - for us, it's code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. in practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state.

What an unreliable thing is time - when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.