Culture Commentary and Miscellaneous Musings
A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to. Like a nun in a porno, it didn’t make sense, but also, by God: it worked. My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
page 4
Kavitha’s words come back to her: She and her aunt are so similar, both unable to move past their own sorrow. Grief is a type of myopia, a way of seeing the world in negatives, the empty spaces sharp and clear, the full ones blurry and overlooked. Simran couldn’t see how much she hurt the people around her because it felt like her wound was the biggest. It was so large, it swallowed her whole. And the same thing had happened with Veena perima.
page 274
The perfect cup of chai takes at least twenty minutes to brew, which was why Kausar usually stuck to the quick method of a tea bag and boiled water.
page 15
The accusation of failure isn’t one we should level against the Bund, or any other Jewish group of that place and time. It’s for the Western world of which they were such a precarious part. It was the West, after all, that hypocritically paid lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might. The true failures were the democracies who played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable. The failures were the British and American diplomats who hobnobbed in Bermuda while the ghetto burned.
page 381, Postscript
I cup his face in my hands wanting to hold on to this moment. On to him. His laughter slows but his smile stays, settling into something heartbreakingly tender while his head drops back in the snow. I rub my thumbs over his cheeks and feel the rush of it. The magic. Snow and sky and us smack-dab in the middle of it, cold slipping through the tops of my boots and prickling at my skin. Jackson looking at me like maybe it feels like magic for him too.
page 222, Delilah