There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.

Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.

asked Paul to help him put it out on the

Did you have to try for a while? He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. Would you believe, with Maya it...

Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry, she said during one of these walks. I'm not planning on getting married any time soon, I told her, and she...

had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that...

Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he'd once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.

She asked her parents to buy him the books she'd been read by her first teachers, Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad. "What's the point of buying books for someone who can't read?" her parents asked,...

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts,...

He remembered himself sitting naked on one side of the mattress, in a room he was suddenly aware he was never again to see. He had not argued; in the wake of his shame, he became strangely efficient...

She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from...

Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not...

As he watched the couple the room went dark, and he spun around. Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together,...

And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.

It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem....

But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that...

...he wanted to relive those confused days, that life of discovery, to be bound to those round tables and lectures and exams. There were things he had always meant to understand better {...} He wanted...

No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.

He regretted his surliness when she had refused. She was the only person he'd met in his adult life who had any understanding of his past, the only woman he wanted to remain connected to. He didn't...

She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who'd embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of...

I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.

Odd things made him love her.

In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.

At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more...

And yet it felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him.

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy...

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so...

She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved.

I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste...

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.