Best 37 quotes of Kiran Manral on MyQuotes

And it showed on her, the uncertainty with which she reached out to touch him, the uncertainty of someone who doesn’t know how a simple reaching out will be received.

Applying nail polish is an art. You need non-shaky hands. And a calm and Zen-like nature. I am not calm and have but a nodding acquaintance with Zen. At the best of times, I’m not great at applying nail polish, and if anyone has attempted to apply nail polish when they are in a rush, they will understand the difficulties involved. Your hands will shake. Your hands will take the nail polish beyond the boundaries of your nail and onto the surrounding skin, you will carefully loop it off your skin with a handy ear bud, only to realise you have now got it onto your fingernails, which were also pale pink to begin with, but will now have to be made post-box red—you could never live down the indignity of mottled red and pink nail polish that looks like the visage of a rabid dog, and will spend the entire evening holding your hand petulantly behind your back and refusing to extend it even when you are being introduced to folk you cannot air-kiss and must shake hands with, aka senior corporate types.

Daylight always had that ability to make things less fearful, whether it was cuts and bruises or the monsters in the dark corners of the mind.

Every heart needed to contain stories that were too overwhelming to reveal to another human being, for fear that sharing them would diminish their enormity.

Every heart needed to contain stories that were too overwhelming to reveal to another human being.

Hadn't he taught her that monogamy was a social construct that held no relevance with the reality of the human heart? That the heart could love, over and over again and unshackle itself from the bondage of loyalty it owed one person without a smidgeon of guilt.

Heer laughed, a deep, unguarded laugh that rolled over hills, and mountains and skimmed through valleys, as Aisha’s once had. A laugh she had long since forgotten she ever had.

Heer laughed again, wave upon wave of laughter that hit the eardrums and broke into a scatter of happiness around the room.

Heer’s eyes, flicker into something vaguely hostile before dying down into embers. The eyes they had both inherited from their father, copper when annoyed, bronze when emotional, honey when overflowing with happiness that would not be contained.

If you leave assumptions lying around unchallenged and uncorrected, it isn’t long before they morph into facts.

Infidelity, he now realised, had nothing to do with the lack of love, and everything to do with the lack of respect.

In the distance, the Himalayan range flared into fluorescence, as its snowy peaks reflected the moonlight back at the velvet sky, split into half by the shimmering strip of the Milky Way.

It felt like whatever the issue was, it was being repeated by spectral beings who were taking sides.

It was a good thing that when it came to married men, she was a girl with a firm moral compass, or else she would have been tempted to make him break his marital promises.

It was strange, this feral creature, the body. It would stay denied for months, for years, and then, at one touch, a moment’s trembling indiscretion, it would raise itself and reach out without a moment’s hesitation for what it wanted, in complete contravention of all previously held notions of honour, propriety and morality.

It was the stretch and give of the lycra. And the deep blue, invitingly deep, the deep blue of sleep she longed for, blank and intense, and dissolving everything that would make her toss and turn endlessly through the night.

Love is a country where you leave the passports of rationality at the customs when you enter, to be collected when you exit.

Love, now that was dangerous. It plucks your heart out of your chest cavity and throws it into the skies where all you can do is watch it freefall towards the object of your love, and hope he or she would catch it. And very often your heart would land with a sordid, painful thud on the ground, or worse, a ditch, and lie there forlorn, neglected and pitiful until you found it, picked it up, glued the various parts back together and put it back into your chest where it would continue to beat on, stolidly, with only you knowing that there was a beat missing. A beat audible to no discerning ear, but your own, a slight sense of being out of tune with yourself, a heart that beat reluctantly, for the sake of keeping up appearances, in the forlorn hope that some day it would get back in rhythm, that some day it would have something to beat for. And then, over the years of missing a beat, you would grown irretrievably out of beat with yourself, and end up discordant.

Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.

Outside, a brisk wind churned the wind chimes on the porch into a forbidding cacophony of discontent.

Religion stays with you long after you have lost faith, buried somewhere in your subconscious, waiting to rise and take over your need to turn over your cares to a higher power who could bring forward resolution.

Running away from home. Or running away from myself within my home.

She had not realised it at that time, but when she had stated she would follow this man to the ends of the earth, he’d made her follow through on the statement.

She was overwhelmed, not merely by the house. It was the freedom of the moment, where she was no longer playing her roles of a mother, a wife. Now, at this moment, in the middle of nowhere, she was just an ordinary woman.

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, ‘Mother, I’m cold.’ Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There was a sudden click, the red light of the heater lit up, the bed and blanket warmer began radiating life-giving heat again and I felt myself thaw out, emerge from the scary limbo which marks one’s descent into another dimension, and the shadow faded out from the rocking chair right in front of me into complete transparency and the icy presence in the bed faded away to nothingness.

That’s what she was, broken pottery, patched up with gold, the gold shimmering through the places where she had been cracked open, and left bleeding.

The most difficult thing to do after a life well lived is to sit down and type it all out. To start with, your fingers are old and gnarled. You can see the skin crinkled up like paper, the knobby knuckles, the veins standing up blue and aggressive and you wonder, when did your hands change, when did they stop being young and firm and definite, when did the hesitancy creep in, when did the trembling begin. Your mind sieves through memories as thick as molasses and as bitterly sweet. The words trip on your tongue but hesitate to make their way onto the page because you debate endlessly in your head about which of them you should put down in print, terrified of the permanency of the written word. Memories are the kind of elusiveness that shift, change form, and remodel themselves by the second. It is a challenge to wrestle with them, to get them to agree to be analysed, to be put down in words and encapsulated into sentences, moulded into paragraphs. As long as they are shifting, morphing into different things as the moment suits them, they aren’t bound by one person’s recollection of how things were, of how they happened. These are my memories. And this was my life. And so I try to write this. I am already half way through what I am trying to put down. I have no idea who would want to read the story of my life. But I write it out, more for myself, than for anyone else who would care to read.

The newly minted maternal heart, it completely melted into mush, the oxytocin I know now, had kicked in, and how. I would fight tigers barehanded, climb down cliffs, throw myself in the path of a speeding car, and even do calculus again if I needed to, for this child.

There is a charm to letters and cards that emails and smses can’t ever replicate, you cannot inhale them, drawing the fragrance of the place they have been mailed from, the feel of paper in your hand bearing the weight of the words contained within. You cannot rub your fingers over the paper and visualise the sender, seated at a table, writing, perhaps with a smile on their lips or a frown splitting the brow. You can’t see the pressure of the pen on the reverse of the page and imagine the mood the person might have been in when he or she was writing it. Smiley face icons cannot hope to replace words thought out carefully in order to put a smile on the other person’s face, the pressure of the pen, the sharpness or the laxity of the handwriting telling stories about the frame of mind of the writer, the smudges on the sheets of paper telling their own stories, blotches where tears might have fallen, hastily scratched out words where another would have been more appropriate, stories that the writer of the letter might not have intended to communicate. I have letters wrapped up in a soft muslin cloth, letters that are unsigned, tied up with a ribbon which I had once used to hold my soft, brown hair in place, and which had been gently untied by the writer of those letters. Occasionally, I unwrap them and breathe them in, knowing that the molecules from the hand that wrote them might still be scattered on the surface of the paper, a hand that is long dead.

There was an evil wind howling through the undulating hills that night, rattling the loose panes in the windows of the cottage, keeping me up all night. Unbidden, the Lord’s prayer came to my lips, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… I said it moving my lips silently, as I had all those years ago, on my cold hard bed in the convent back in Calcutta. Praying didn’t come easily to me anymore, I had to hack out the words from deep within myself, but it brought me solace. It warmed a part of the soul that I long thought had shrivelled up and died. I grew up with prayer, it was difficult not to when one was growing up in a convent, surrounded by threats of hell and brimstone and the overwhelming guilt that one was inherently evil being drilled into our brains by the nuns. They might have been well meaning in order to keep a bunch of unruly children in line, but ended up scarring us with a concept of a vindictive God one could never really love.

The same open face, the same skin that was poised delicately between tawny and olive, the same eyes that could go from melting caramel to piercing copper shards in a split second.

The two half sisters, strangers to each other, sat at the breakfast counter looking out at the unhindered view of the hills.

Vanity seemed meaningless, in this outpost in the back of the beyond, when the only person looking back at her was the reflection in the mirror.

Wasn't hate merely love flipped over onto its back, kicking and squealing for attention, the angst of unrequited emotion that would not be denied?

...what dystopian forces in the universe had conspired to get the two of them, with their destroyed souls, together, in this dance of despair.

What stung were the tears that dripped unbidden into the ruptured skin. They were salty, a familiar taste of distilled sorrow. When they mixed with blood, they created a potion for grief, that when swallowed, could drown her in a morass of darkness from which it would take her days to emerge.

...with the nonchalance that came from the belief of youth that nothing could go wrong, and whatever could already had.