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Incense and Sensibility

Book by Sonali Dev · 31 quotes · India And Yash, India Dashwood, Yash Raje

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Incense and Sensibility Quotes

“Yash had carried a lantern when he'd brought her here the night before Nisha's wedding. A camping lantern with the kind of white light that mirrored the moonlight and picked out the glitter in their clothes. It had turned the sequins on her ghaghra into a million stars that merged seamlessly with the silver threaded through his kurta, the endless universe of possibility inside them reflected around them.”

RomanticIndia And YashUnder The Stars
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“With the kind of laugh that India had never expected to hear from him again, Yash reached for the bundle of skin folds. "And who do we have here?" Every bit of deliberate enunciation was gone from his voice. Instead his pitch jumped to that strange voice people reserved for babies. "Hey, there, beautiful baby!" And, damn it, the sun chose that moment to shoot a bright ray through a tree at his face. "This is Chutney," Ashna said in a matching high pitch, presenting Yash with the pug as though she were a particularly delicious ice-cream sundae. Chutney paused in her mouth-breathing to start lapping at Yash's face. India and China gasped. India reached out to take her away, but Yash was smiling into Chutney's face. Not his politician smile, not even his you've-amused-me, peasant smile. This smile yanked her back through the years, eyes disappearing into slits, too much teeth and gums. An explosion of unadulterated joy. Tremors rippled low in her belly, high in her heart.”

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“How were you naive enough to think you and Yash had a chance?" Naina said. "Because truth has to..." "... count for something," Yash and India said together. India spun toward him. And there it was, the endless peace of her gaze. Breath whooshed out of him, weight lifted off his shoulders. "Because love has to count for something." He took a step closer, and her body sagged, mirroring all the relief he was feeling. "I breathe differently when she's around. I feel... I feel alive in ways I never have.”

True LoveConfessionIndia And Yash
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“Hey, Abdul. How's the baby?" Nisha asked. The burly giant, who could snap your neck with his bare hands and shoot you dead from five hundred feet, went as soft and fuzzy as the teddy bear Yash had brought Abdul's newborn daughter yesterday. After seeing him hold the tiny pink bundle, Yash could not for the life of him stop thinking of the man as cuddly. "She's amazing. Has quite the lungs, just like her ammi." Abdul winked.”

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“You found me a female bodyguard? And you thought that would somehow make the job of bullying me into it easier?" She had the gall to grin. "Bingo. Wait here while I text her. We've made her wait long enough." He sank into a couch off in a private corner of the hospital waiting area. "I really pity poor Neel, you know that?" he said with all the spitefulness of a sibling who'd lost an argument. Her grin widened, a damn whoop of victory if he'd ever seen one. "You're so easy." He narrowed his eyes at her, deploying one of her own favorite strategies for getting her way. "You know Ma loves me more than you, right?" "Sorry, buddy, I'm the favorite by miles. Substantiate your claim by getting her to admit it, or shut up.”

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“So you think someone is going to shoot at me twice in one campaign cycle?" Sticking out her hand, she started counting off on her fingers. "Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Carter. They've all had over fifty assassination attempts. Some over a hundred!" His sisters were the earth's most annoying creatures. "Those are all presidents. And they all survived the attempts." "William Goebel, gubernatorial candidate. George Wallace, gubernatorial candidate." "You're in the wrong century." "And you're underestimating the power of racial hatred," she snapped. "Bill Richardson, Deval Patrick, Bobby Jindal, David Paterson, Susana Martinez, Michelle Grisham-" "And listing all the minority governors from this century proves what?" she snapped again. "It proves that we can run for elections without ending up dead.”

GovernorsPresidentsBickeringSibling RivalryPolitical CandidatesAssassination Attempts
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“You think fighting for things is what makes you you, but that's only half of it. You can't make decisions that center only on your wants. You care about what everyone else wants. You care. That's what sets you apart. That's what makes you a public servant and not a politician. You want to change things for everyone. A person who puts his own gains ahead of others can never do that.”

SelflessnessPublic ServantYash Raje
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“Time stilled. The constant need to spin stilled. Yash watched the scene before him, the power of what he was witnessing overtook his body. Every bit of helplessness that had been dragging at him stilled. He'd been obsessively practicing the pranayama India had taught him every morning and meditating through the surya namaskar. He'd become addicted to the escape of centering his mind and body as one. That's how this felt, this letting go, this being fully immersed in something out of his control. It felt good. Like someone had sliced the ropes tying him up with the sharpest blade. One flick, the cut clean and quick. He was unbound.”

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“He felt like he was here to fight for everyone, but for himself most of all, because he needed to live in a world that was more equitable. A world that took care of the sick and protected the weak while it also gave free rein to those who innovated and made the world richer, more connected, more plentiful for everyone. Those things were not separate, not mutually exclusive, and they needed to be tied back together in the consciousness of our nation, and the world, not just California. But like in everything else, California was as good a place as any to start something.”

CampaigningPublic ServantFor The PeopleYash Raje
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“Yash's happiness is in being governor of California. Then moving on to even bigger things. I'm the one who will get him there. You're the one who will get in his way." Every time India thought she could walk away without answering, the woman said something that made it impossible. "And you don't care how you get there? You don't care that you're holding him to ransom when all he was doing was helping you? You don't care that you've turned him into a crutch?" Naina paled at that. India had hit a nerve. But every aha moment fought you. That's what made the journey so hard.”

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“When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn't found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She'd come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she'd adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she'd adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi. India hadn't known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren't you one of that yoga teacher's kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents? When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he'd said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent. It's how India had learned that adults, even teachers, didn't always know everything. To India, their family was how families were supposed to be. Many years later, when China was in her rebellious phase, she had asked Tara why she had felt the need to adopt children from three countries. I took a lifelong vow of celibacy. How else was I supposed to have children? That had been Tara's answer.”

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“They had named her Chutney because she smelled like a mix of too many things. None of them pleasant. It's how she had smelled from the day they had brought her home, an abandoned year-old puppy with balance issues. They had changed her diet several times, switched to feeding her homemade food, bathed her every day. Nothing worked. It was the slobber. There was just some sort of genetic thing that no vet could figure out how to mask. Tara had declared that there was something magical about having a dog with an odor problem living in a home that made incense.”

OdorSmellyPug
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“Did you want me to be grateful that you're leaving?" Among other things. At first India didn't say it. Then she did. Naina looked taken aback. "Like what? Having another woman steal what's mine?" India stopped and turned to her. Was she for real? Don't engage with her. But the look on Naina's face was too superior, too entitled. "If indeed one of us is stealing what's not theirs, it isn't me.”

Hot TakesShots FiredIndia DashwoodThe Other Woman
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“Rico wasn't just a friend, wasn't just Yash's media wiz. He was dating Yash's sister. Technically Ashna was his cousin but Yash only ever thought of her as his sister. Rico was family. Ashna was happy. It had been years since Yash had seen her happy. Just this morning Yash had teased Rico about his intentions toward his sister. I intend to let Ash use my body for her shagging pleasure for the rest of my life, mate.”

Ashna RajeAshna And RicoRico Silva
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“You can all relax. I do not need to see a therapist. I most certainly do not need to see some woo-woo yoga self-help life-coach guru person who manufactures incense in the middle of Palo Alto and travels around the world lecturing people about how to breathe." The attention of the room shifted to him like a spotlight. Every brow rose. The silence was so intense he could hear himself breathing. Not in the correct way, no doubt, but who needed training on how to breathe? What kind of scam was that? "I only know those things about her because I've heard Ashna mention them so many times." Actually, he knew because he'd read about India in the Daily Post last month. It was his job to read the local papers. Ashna frowned at him. She had never mentioned India around him until now and her narrowed eyes told him exactly how well she knew this. But she kept her mouth shut. Which meant Yash was in more trouble than if she'd said something. "Then you'll agree that I know what I'm talking about. It won't hurt to meet her once," Ashna said. Was that a threat in her eyes?”

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“The Dashwoods came here from England in the 1930s and never moved." "Then a young man from India came into their lives and lived here in the 1940s. Can you imagine what his life here might have been like? My mother tells stories of when she moved here forty years ago, and even that seems wildly brave to me sometimes. The fact that my parents chose to leave their home and come to a place where they were so different from everyone. I can't imagine leaving California ever.”

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