“His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.” LoveRomanceFictionHistoryHistoricalInsightFamily LifeFiction NovelStrugglesHerritage Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“Lathis rattle against steel railings. Drenched half-naked men, some with torn shirts, jump up and down waving their fists. Some chant ‘Bande Mataram,’ others ‘Mazdur ki jai,’ whatever is their preference, the motherland or the brotherhood of workers. The hammer and sickle, red but limp, flaps like a half-dead fish against the trunk of a banyan tree. The sky cries monsoon tears; it has been crying all night.” LoveRomanceHistoryHistoricalInsightFamily LifeFiction NovelStrugglesHerritage Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“Secrets,’ she replied, casting my trousers aside, ‘are difficult things. Not precise. Not always the same for the one who tells as for the one who receives. They make demands. They may cause you to ask yourself, “Am I worthy?”’ At which, as if to illustrate the point, she removed her bra and watched me follow the lines of her magnificent form with my eyes.” CultureFictionFamilyIndiaHistoricalHuman HistoryFiction WritingCalcuttaDundeePeriod Drama Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“Ranjana finds Stephen lying on an old string bed staring up at the ceiling and seeing in its myriad cracks the soothing drift of clouds. She puts what she’s brought to his lips, brushes them with her fingertips, and watches as he works the sweet onto his teeth. She feels a light touch on her arm encouraging her to lie next to him. She rests on her back, the pair of them laid out like two corpses waiting for the first shower of moist earth. After a while, she rolls over, nuzzles into his shoulder, and lets her hand fall limp and sweet across his chest. She drifts off to sleep, sweating in the arms of her lover.” LoveCultureFamilyLoversIndiaHuman HistoryFiction WritingCalcuttaDundeePeriod Drama Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“When the bell of my flat rings at four o’clock in the afternoon, I don’t expect a policeman to be standing outside. “Sorry to disturb you sir,” he says. “Detective sergeant McCorquodale. It’s about your mother.” Detective sergeant McCorquodale is an enormous lighthouse of a man with the untroubled skin of a baby and not a trace of facial hair; a sort of man-boy who’s overdosed on growth hormones.” CultureFictionFamilyIndiaHistoricalHuman HistoryFiction WritingCalcuttaDundeePeriod Drama Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“The coolies pull them across Howrah bridge, which they share with cars, trucks, bullock carts, a party of young women in saris strolling in no hurry wearing bangles on their ankles, an elephant also in no hurry, and a cow that is lying down in the middle of the road chewing lazily a booklet entitled Dr W C Roy’s SPECIFIC FOR INSANITY. The camera pauses on a portion of the half-eaten text: “Dr Roy’s insanity medicine acted a charm. I am completely cured,” says Srinath Ghosh of Bundelkund. 5 rupees per phial.” LovePastUnderstandingFamilyHistoryFutureInsightHeritageCalcuttaDundee Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“The gingko tree leans lazily against the facing wall or perhaps it supports it; Stephen cannot be sure. The dense ridges of its bark now appear like rippled sand with, here and there, pools left behind by the tide. The bark is pocked with white spots, holed and crinkled with age, seemingly dead but for the life sprouting in its leaves, so smooth, so green, so deep. How remarkable this tree is, how changeable, how mysterious its leaves and branches and trunk … how infinite. Stephen reaches for another pipe. The smoke rubs out his yesterdays and tomorrows. There is only now, this tree, this pipe. Another pipe, ah, another pipe.” LovePastUnderstandingFamilyHistoryFutureInsightHeritageCulturalMulti Layered Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel
“Séamus’s eyebrows, like the antennae of the potato beetle but with a greater sense of grievance, poke forward as he delivers his first utterance of the morning.” FictionSurvivalHistoricalSecretsWomen EmpowermentScandalsWomen S Saga Book:Karna's Wheel Source: Karna's Wheel