Memorable Quotes from The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri -3

Mangoes. So full, so sweet, so scented, the oranges and yellows of sunlight.

For I am the one who decides where our campaign will take us. A rider can only journey where his horse conveys him.

You do not kill, I remind him. You just send them to a less ignoble birth. sweep down your sword, and let them be born away.

As he watched the grime from his body swirl across the tile and vanish into the drain, he tried to think of a day when water would flow just as freely for the residents of Dharavi.

Wasn't medicine, ultimately a matter of faith? Faith that the doctor knew what they were diagnosing, faith that their prescriptions would make you whole, faith that the tablet dissolving in your mouth would cure you, not kill you.

Memorable Quotes from "The Death of Vishnu" by Manil Suri - 2

The eyes. Surdas's eyes.
The two fountains of sight.

He said, with these eyes have I sinned, and with these eyes shall I cleanse myself.
these eyes shall be my freedom. These eyes shall be my penance. With these eyes shall I attain salvation.

And that one moonlit starry night - when she crushed that first golgappa in her mouth, felt the crisp papdi shards and the soft yielding chickpeas between her teeth, tasted the sweet and fiery chutneys on her tongue, closed he eyes as the gush of tamarind water exploded down her throat.

That he would scrape and scrub away at her Dongriness, until she emerged polished and precious, like a multifaceted jewel, able to hold her own with razor wit and glittering personality.

Why, then, did he not understand the mechanism of faith? What did religion do to people, to provoke such obstinacy, such hysteria - how did it push people to the stage of torturing themselves and killing each other?

Religion existed to control society, to monitor those without the capacity to think things through for themselves, to provide promises and shimmering images in the sky, so that the urges of the masses could be calmed and regulated.

What after all, did the word 'Faith' connote, except a willing blindness to the lack of actual proof? It was only natural that Arifa, with her untended intellect, had to lean on this crutch of faith to negotiate the inscrutability of life.

After all wasn't he constantly amazed at the number of very smart people who were believers- hadn't even Einstein professed the existence of God?

He supposed this was the essence of faith. There was no science that governed it, no calculus that propelled it, just the raw strength of his own conviction. Whether he succeeded or not depended on how well he could combat doubt, both his own and in others.

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Memorable Quotes from "The Death of Vishnu" by Manil Suri - 1

Mr.Asrani shook his head at this awe-inspiring compounding of in auspiciousness.

He hated venturing out on amavas. He wished someone would invent an umbrella that would ward off the rays of misfortune he could feel raining down upon him such days. His baldness made him feel extra vulnerable.

He realizes he has to escape the noise.The noise that has tormented him for so long. Born at the moment of his own birth, it has swelled insidiously over the years.

"Thought control," he would call it, "something to keep busy the teeming masses."

An image from the Koran kept coming to her - that of Abu Lahab being consumed by flames, his wife bringing the firewood, a rope tied around her neck.

"How does the boy look?" Mr. Asrani asked.
"Look? Is that the only thing that occurs to you? What is she going to do - lick his good looks when they have nothing to eat?"

She would cook to kill tonight, she would scent the gulab jamuns with the perfume of her own youth, sweeten them with the syrup of her own beauty.

That's what Kavita decided. She would run away. Elope, they called it - the English word had such a voluptuous feel. All those movies, all those stories. She would be Laila, she would be Heer, she would be Juliet.

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