“Mother today had displayed that rustic courage of the country; the free unshackled unrestrained energy that so characterised the earthy Sikh people. A mooring was coming undone in his heart. He was secretly proud of his mother. He might have felt embarrassed at her lack of restraint but he desperately wanted to get some of that raw courage. He could only dream of it. He had a spontaneous vision of an expansive green field stretching acre after acre under a blazing sun. That is where his people got it from.” CouragePunjabSikhJind KaurMaharaja Ranjit SinghDuleep Singh Book:Fourteen Springs of Separation Source: Fourteen Springs of Separation
“Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter’s clothes. Or it’ll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don’t want to be here and they don’t want to be there. They can’t be here and I can’t be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood.” ViolenceBloodMigrantsDislocationPunjabPartition Of Subcontinent 1947 Book:In The Land of The Lovers Source: In The Land of The Lovers
“Yes good one- hold on tight- to ideas. At times, since we are talking so much about birds and all things avian, these flighty things do have a tendency to spread their gossamer wings and take flight. So you haven’t even begun to see it and it disappears from your view. At times you don’t even know how many of these frisky things you thought of and they instantly frolicked their way into some wonderland. There they remain latent. Sometimes for mere moments, sometimes days, sometimes months and years. And then in a flash. They come back without warning, at times stealthily, in our most unguarded moments- in bed, polishing shoes, rolling out a roti, driving or pooping and you are not prepared. They settle tentatively on your sleepy eyes for a second and before you know it, fly past you in a flash again, good for you if you hold them then and there, for if you think you will sit yourself down one day with the wrong end of the pen in your mouth, or the laptop loaded with the works, or the dream paints on the palette, to capture what you saw in your mind’s stratosphere- you just blink and find it’s just a blankness you see, no matter how hard you try, a blankness that stares with a baffling obduracy. At times you even forget that you forgot. The thought had yet not entered your conscious mind- it was just hovering between the sleeping world and the awake, and just falls off the edge. Never makes it. Yes they are flighty things.” She rounded it with a peal of laughter, amused with the little story she had concocted.” IdeasInspirationPower Of IdeasPunjab Book:In The Land of The Lovers Source: In The Land of The Lovers