“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
“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
“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