Ibis Quotes

It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Heart lesson #4: the unrequited heart. You can't make anyone love you back.

Are you scared?’ asked Mr. Ibis. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.

Ubi amo, ibi patria. Where I love. there is my home.

Pride is a wonderful terrible thing a seed that bears two vines life and death.

The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.

How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love's twin was not hate but cowardice?

We’re not gonna throw away the past as if it meant nothing. See? That’s what happens to whole neighborhoods. We built something, it was messy, but we’re not gonna throw it away.

If hot red is for anger and rage, pink is the color of a soft burning – hot enough to light up the dark corners of sadness and grief, but cool enough to be tender, innocent, open.

Don't ever stop dreaming big But for now, put that dream on paper It's easier to carry around

She sang, as requested. There was much about love in the ballad: faithful love that refused to abandon its object; love that disaster could not shake; love that, in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer. The words were set to a fine old air -- in themselves they were simple and sweet: perhaps, when read, they wanted force; when well sung, they wanted nothing. Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness, she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one. On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat -- semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her -- none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality -- so unlike a school girl? Decidedly not: it was strange, it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.

We were a mob a gang ghetto a pack of wolves animals thugs hoodlums men They were kids having fun home loved supported protected full of potential boys

Love is not popular. Not noble. . . not love, no reward. Trust love. Is not love. Trust yourself.

There is within me a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction ...

So trying to come to America from the wrong country is a crime?

Heart lesson #3: post-heartbreak survival. The heart is resilient, I mean literally. When a body is burned, the heart is the last organ to oxidize. While the rest of the body can catch flame like a polyester sheet on campfire, it takes hours to burn the heart to ash. My dear sister, a near-perfect organ! Solid, inflammable.

Because the thing about sharp corners is, the right turns can bring you back home.

Seperti manusia, kelak berakhir sendiri dalam maut yang sangat pribadi. Kesendirian tak pernah menakutkanmu, kau lebih takut pada ketiadaan kata berpisah.

The only way to survive hell is to walk through

IT’S A TRUTH universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up. But it’s not just the junky stuff they’ll get rid of. People can be thrown away too, like last night’s trash left out on sidewalks or pushed to the edge of wherever all broken things go. What those rich people don’t always know is that broken and forgotten neighborhoods were first built out of love.

You can never get to a person's mind. You cannot know the different deeds and missions of happiness; you can't tell a screm of pleasure from one of pain. Sometimes, we can barely read pain. Neither a barometer nor a guide, pain can mislead us. Even in the body, the laws of chain reactions can be false. This is why people always want a second opinion.

never let the streets know when you’re upset. Don’t let any strangers see you cry. Hold your head up and look as if you’re ready to destroy the world if you have to.

school teaches you what to think not how to think and nobody raises their hands except to give the right answer

Dunia tengah berangkat gila, dan di zaman ini hanya orang gila yang berkeinginan mengubah atau menyelamatkan dunia. Seandainya tiap manusia cukup rendah hati untuk menyelamatkan sebuah dunianya terlebih dulu (Cala Ibi, h.151)

Sometimes love is not enough to keep a community together. There needs to be something more tangible, like fair housing, opportunities, and access to resources. Lifeboats and lifelines are not supposed to just be a way for us to get out. They should be ways to let us stay in and survive. And thrive.

Ada ruang kosong di sela-sela sebuah kata. Ada banyak omong kosong di sela-sela bicara--tapi perlu. Adalah percakapan dengan teman yang selalu bisa menjaga kewarasan, menyelamatkanku dari jemu sempurna. Di tengah carut-marut fungsi mekanistik otomatik hampir robotik sebuah industri yang menyelubungi diri dengan judul keramah-tamahan manusia, ada teman-teman--manusia yang hidup dan dekat.

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creauture. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free

English requires two mouths to speak and four ears to understand

My lips are sealed but my words have a life of their own Even if they're locked up they'll bounce off three walls and slip between metal bars

Ah, mija! There you go! Rivers flow. A body of water that remains stagnant is just a cesspool, mi amor! It’s time to move, flow, grow. That is the nature of rivers. That is the nature of love!

Say it just like that. Let the words slide out and don’t be so uptight about it. It’s just English, not too complicated.

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. LATIN PROVERB

Cui Pyrrhus:  'Referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis Pelidae genitori; illi mea tristia facta degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento. Nunc morere.

Every book is a different hood, a different country, a different world. Reading is how I visit places and people and ideas. And when something rings true or if I still have a question, I outline it with a bright yellow highlighter so that it’s lit up in my mind, like a lightbulb or a torch leading the way to somewhere new.

Lalu bapakmu akan berkata, bintang tak pernah secantik tampakannya, tak sedekat yang kita duga. Ia cuma penghias panas malam para pemimpi. Tapi aku mau terbang. Aku mau menyentuh bintang. Jika ujung jariku melepuh, akan kubelah lima. Dan pulang dengan sepasang tangan berjari lima puluh.

We have more space and less time. And the love we had for our whole neighborhood now only fits into this wood-frame house in the middle of a quiet block. We don't know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.

I killed chivalry myself with a pocketknife

Death comes when memories are lost.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself.

My life, my whole damn life before that courtroom before that trial before that night was like Africa And this door leads to a slave ship And maybe jail maybe jail is is America

When I wake, a piece of sharp green glass on the floor is cutting into my hand and I know it's a sign. I etch a letter on my hand; put it on top so I can see the jagged edges bleeding out; S. S is for sorrow, for all I don't say. S is for sick now, my punishing ways.

We were too heavy. Not with our bags. Not with our bodies. But with our burdens.

Umi told me to wear a gray suit because optics But that gray didn’t make me any less black

Blind Justice II All because we were in the wrong place we were in the wrong skins we were in the wrong time we were in the wrong bodies we were in the wrong country we were in the wrong were in the wrong in the wrong the wrong wrong All because they were in the right place they were in the right skins they were in the right time they were in the right bodies they were

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded, peeking through slits because that rag is so fucking old worn-out, stretched thin, barely even there

because where I come from jail or death were the two options she handed to us because where he came from the American Dream was the one option she handed to them So here we are, blind Lady Justice I see you, too

I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

If you could fuck a book, you would." "You know what?" Chantal comes over and shoves Pri's head. "I would fuck a book before I fuck some dude who doesn't respect me. I'd fuck a degree, a paycheck, and a damn career!

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I'm glad I don't have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste.

...as long as you have a bougie heart, you can aim for the finer things in life.

Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis: where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing

But then I realize that everyone is climbing their own mountain here in America. They are tall and mighty and they live in the hearts and everyday lives of the people.

They believed those lies about me and made themselves a whole other boy in their minds and replaced me with him

The bookshelves here are not walls They're closed windows and all I have to do is pull out one book to make these windows wide open

Ini cuma sebuah laku bacalah, bukan bacakanlah. Bacalah adalah serupa bisikan, serupa gerimis hujan, desir angin, desir lokan, atau gemerisik dedaunan. Bacakanlah bagai teriakan, berpengeras suara bergema kemana-mana. Sebab bisikan lebih menggoda lebih menjamah lebih menggugah daripada teriakan. Sebab bisikan selalu jatuh lembut di telinga, tak seperti teriak yang menghantam pekak. Hanya membaca. Sebuah laku pribadi, hening sendiri, hanya dalam hati, sunyi tanpa bunyi. Ketika hanya ada satu benak yang menari dengan benak lain (malaikat jatuh, malaikat patuh, betapa tipisnya, keduanya hanya membuat manusia teramat manusia). Aku tak peduli, benak mana yang akan berbisik. Aku tak peduli, ada atau tiada makna, terserah saja.

What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.” “And if I had a double-headed quarter?” “You don’t. They only belong to fools, and gods.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

Don't give me no 'but you're beautiful on the inside' bullshit." "No, you are beautiful on the outside," I say. "Don't give me that bullshit either. I'm beautiful when I say I'm beautiful. Let me own that shit," she says. Her eyes have not left the computer screen this whole time, but I know she's paying attention to everything I say. "Okay, then you are ugly." "Thanks for being honest." "Seriously. That's what we say in Haiti. 'Nou led, men nou la.' We are ugly, but we are here." "We are ugly, but we are here," she says, almost whispering. "I hear that.

We have to become everything that we want. Consume it. Like our lwas.

I became the color red boiling-hot lava rising to the surface I became a dragon and the planet Mars I became war I became rage and revenge

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded, peeking through slits because that rag is so fucking old worn-out, stretched thin, barely even there

They got married at a very, very young age. And thank los espíritus, as Madrina would say, that they at least liked each other. They more than liked each other, though. They are actually still in love. I know this because as we’re all yapping in the living room, Papi washes the dishes, cleans the kitchen, and comes back to offer Mama a glass of water while he takes her empty plate.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.

Where did this baseless fear that robots would attack humans come from? Why were there so many stories about robots and humans fighting? Did they only exist because that was how mankind had always lived? Did we simply see ourselves in these humanoid machines? Were we not simply afraid of our own reflections?

El señor Ibis le había contado que en algunos hospitales trasladan a los muertos en la parte inferior de una camilla cubierta con una sábana y aparentemente vacía, y los muertos siguen su camino de forma clandestina.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting. That is the tale; the rest is detail. There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply.

Sometimes it sucks, being good, because if you make a mistake then everybody makes a mistake and if something goes wrong it's your fault, it falls on your shoulders.

You don't ever want to ask after the health of anyone if you're a funeral director. They think maybe you're scouting for business.

PERFER ET OBDURA; DOLOR HIC IBI PRODERIT OLIM —Ovid “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

Even as you kept telling me that I'm becoming a woman, you never let me go out into the world to be free.

All of us must have something or someone to be proud of.

My first meal in America is one that I make for myself and eat by myself. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come.

When you remember all the ways you been killed, and how that shit hurt your fucking soul, ain’t no way in hell you could shake that off. So I didn’t give a fuck about nothing.

You believe that some people have dementia and some people do not, but that is not correct. All people have dementia—some are simply in worse condition than others. After all, most people with dementia are unaware that anything is wrong with them.

Blackness is indeed a social construct. Within the context of American racial politics, there can be no Black without white. No racism without race. But the prevalence of culture is undeniable.

A greater subject fitteth Faustus' wit: Bid Economy10 farewell, and11 Galen come, Seeing, Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus: Be a physician, Faustus; heap up gold, And be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure: Summum bonum medicinae sanitas, The end of physic is our body's health.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting. That is the tale; the rest is detail. There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to. Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat. There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests. Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.

If Madrina’s basement is where the tamboras, los espíritus, and old ancestral memories live, then the roof is where wind chimes, dreams, and possibilities float with the stars, where Janae and I share our secrets and plan to travel all over the world, Haiti and the Dominican Republic being our first stop.

falling in love, getting married, having kids… it works for some people. But there’s no reason you have to live like that. Choosing one life means abandoning the possibility of living another way. If I were to give up on this adventure and get married and raise a family instead, I could still be reasonably happy. But I also think I would reflect back on the road not taken, and cry about it too.

Creole and Haiti stick to my insides like glue—it’s like my bones and muscles. But America is my skin, my eyes, and my breath. According to my papers, I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m not a citizen. I’m a “resident alien.” The borders don’t care if we’re all human and my heart pumps blood the same as everyone else’s.

warm summer breeze blows, and tiny bumps form on my arms. This is what Madrina calls grains of sugar adding sweetness to my soul; the first sparks of love and attraction, of something so new and tender that if I’m too firm with it, it will burst.

We fold our immigrant selves into this veneer of what we think is African American girlhood. The result is more jagged than smooth. This tension between our inherited identities and our newly adopted selves filters into our relationships with other girls and the boys we love, and how we interact with the broken places around us.

I forget every single thing in the world, every heartache, every tear, every pain as I watch that performance. The dancers, the music, the lights, the people in the theater are all so beautiful that I want to wear them on my skin for the rest of my life.

I had thought you were a better man, Mr Reid, a man of your word, but I see that you are nothing but a paltry hommelette.' 'An omelette?' 'Yes, your word is not worth a dam.

Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years.

I dreamed of going to the most remote places on this earth to dig for old bones, older than people. Before humans and their stupid ideas. Before hate. Maybe even before love, too. Dinosaurs just existed. No lectures, no books, no language. No world-conquering Europeans and no defeated everybody else. Just those powerful, unrestrained creatures roaming the planet.

The story that I thought was this life didn't start on the day I went to that park The story that I think will be my life starts today Anything that happened before today is only the prequel the backstory the story behind the story Nothing before today matters

Chantal’s English is like that of the newspeople on TV. Her voice is high and soft, and every sentence sounds like a question, even when she gives them my name and my mother’s name. It’s as if she isn’t sure of anything and this uniformed man behind the desk and the computer will have all the answers in the universe.

It was a single poppy seed...she rolled it between her fingers and raised her eyes past the straining sails, to the star-filled vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate - but tonight her eyes dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this minuscule orb - at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful. This was her Shani, her Saturn.

Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.

Death parked itself on that corner of American and Joy, some days as still as stone, other days singing cautionary songs and delivering telltale riddles, waiting for the day when one girl would ask to open the gates to the other side.

Eyes watching through filtered screens seeing every lie, reading every made-up word like a black hoodie counts as a mask like some shit I do with my fingers counts as gang signs like a few fights counts as uncontrollable rage like failing three classes counts as being dumb as fuck like everything that I am, that I've ever been counts as being guilty

We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you.” “Why?” “You were a hard worker. Why not?” “Because . . .” Shadow marshaled his thoughts. “Because I never believed in you. Because I don’t know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn’t expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates?” The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.

Bodies” by Drowning Pool “Breath of Life” by Florence & The Machine “Bullet With a Name” by Nonpoint “Corrupt” by Depeche Mode “Deathbeds” by Bring Me the Horizon “The Devil In I” by Slipknot “Devil’s Night” by Motionless in White “Dirty Diana” by Shaman’s Harvest “Feed the Fire” by Combichrist “Fire Breather” by Laurel “Getting Away with Murder” by Papa Roach “Goodbye Agony” by Black Veil Brides “Inside Yourself” by Godsmack “Jekyll and Hyde” by Five Finger Death Punch “Let the Sparks Fly” by Thousand Foot Krutch “Love the Way You Hate Me” by Like a Storm “Monster” by Skillet “Pray to God (feat. HAIM)” by Calvin Harris “Silence” by Delirium

Whatever the case, he saw now that it was a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other.

Dear Holly: Heart lesson #3: post-heartbreak survival. The heart is resilient, I mean literally. When a body is burned, the heart is the last organ to oxidize. While the rest of the body can catch flame like a polyester sheet on a campfire, it takes hours to burn the heart to ash. My dear sister, a near-perfect organ! Solid, inflammable. Heart lesson #4: the unrequited heart. You can't make anyone love you back.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

My cousins are hurting. My aunt is hurting. My mother is hurting. And there is no one here to help. How is this the good life, when even the air in this place threatens to wrap its fingers around my throat? In Haiti, with all its problems, there was always a friend or a neighbor to share in the misery. And then, after our troubles were tallied up like those points at the basketball game, we would celebrate being alive. But here, there isn’t even a slice of happiness big enough to fill up all these empty houses, and broken buildings, and wide roads that lead to nowhere and everywhere. Every bit of laughter, every joyous moment, is swallowed up by a deep, deep sadness.

In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.