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Kiran Manral Books

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“This wasn’t just lust or infatuation, this was intoxication, a craven’s craving I could not explain. But then, what was love but a want of the flesh, or a want of the soul. I wanted this man. I couldn’t not want him. I couldn’t not breathe. I wanted him in a way that was so absolute I couldn’t care if he didn’t want me back the same way.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“All I had was a wary belief that there were more things in heaven and earth, as the Bard said, that one could explain. And perhaps we were not meant to explain these, perhaps we were only meant to experience these, live through them, and emerge, bearing on our bodies and our souls the carbuncles of the lived experience, now fastened onto our selves.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“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.”

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Book:The Face At the Window
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“Was this what I wanted, the rest of my days being laid out for me? A life not of my choosing. Would I be able to live it out here, in this isolation, six months on an island, the days unfolding one into another, a series of Russian dolls, diminishing in their intensity and diminishing me as well. Would I be diminished? Or was this what I needed, to live here undisturbed for the rest of my life and never have to interact with the fractiousness of city living ever again?”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“Home was perhaps just this body I inhabited and this too was alien to me at times, its folds and creases, its pains and needs. Home was everywhere and nowhere. Home, I realised now, was anywhere the heart slept in peace. Home was where one unpacked one’s cares and settled them into the wardrobe with one’s clothes. It was where one was complete.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“Miss was a word that couldn’t quite express the hollow pit of my stomach filled with nothing but cold gusts of air where the intestines should have been, walking around with a gaping hole in my chest where my heart had been pulled out from, feeling hollow within and without. It was a missing that filled me up, an absence that was a presence, a bereavement that wasn’t a release.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and glue them back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelming in a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had been playing when….”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“Grief is grey and damp, a marshland of emotions that suck you in, tendrils of mist that caress you, asphyxiate you. Grieving is the journey you do alone, a penitence, a pilgrimage, an affirmation of being alive in the face of death that shadows us, every waking moment. Grief was the country I was on a pilgrimage within, searching for redemption from my grieving.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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“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.”

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Book:The Face At the Window
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“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.”

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Book:The Reluctant Detective
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