Sen 4565 The faces of the Babas were radiant with their excruciation.

Sen 24081 Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation.

Sen 2307 The blue flames of his kerosene stove, eerie and claustral, provided the only light.

Sen 2566 The very name of Borsalino became a synonyme for gangsters.

Sen 3838 Her life enfolded mine within its triumph and sorrow, just as easily as her red shawl sometimes enswathed a crying child that passed the doorway of her house.

Sen 4049 The advance was so rapid that the inevasible creep of the swollen, landconsuming river moved toward the village at a slow walking pace.

Sen 4072 The river, only a few hundred metres away, was a deluge: a vast muddy concrescence that tore through the valley in heaving waves and boiling eddies.

Sen 4151 Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain.

Sen 8338 Seconds later, the song We Are Family, by Sister Sledge, thumped out of the speakers behind our heads with numbing plangency Karla whooped for joy.

Sen 11253 Then, horizon-wide, the rain clouds regrouped, and slowly sealed the splendent circle of sky, herding one against another until heaven matched the rolling sea with dark, watery waves of cloud.

Sen 12795 Squatting in the queue, I noticed with a revulsive flinch that tiny insects, lice, were crawling in the hair of the man in front of me.

Sen 18009 His dead eyes were half open, and his lips were pulled back slightly from his teeth in a rictal smile.

Sen 18691 Then suddenly they stamped their feet three times, and the musicians struck up a wild, enravishing rendition of that month’s most popular movie song.

Sen 18801 I sipped at a drink and smoked cigarettes in a silence so profound that I could hear the susurrus of the blindfold’s soft fabric rustle and slip between my fingers.

Sen 20493 The faloodha was an indecently sweet concoction of white noodles, milk, rose flavours, and other melliferous syrups.

Sen 24148 Sirf rupia.’ Not dollars.

Sen 25385 Somehow, Salman’s casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.

Sen 25404 The heartgrief had already begun.

Sen 26262 The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eyewateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned.

Sen 27371 Seeing our little procession as an opportunity to practise their music on the march, they swung in behind us and struck up a rousing, if not particularly canorous, version of a popular devotional song.

Sen 2390 His hair was very short, exposing ears as large and nubbled as a boxer’s practice mitts.

Sen 11615 A sprinkling shower of rain rappled on the canvas awning overhead.

Sen 17418 Abdul Ghani, propelled by the purest amoral spirit of market forces, serviced the needs of generals, mercenaries, misappropriators of public funds, and murderous interrogators without a hint of censure or dismay.

Sen 25018 And he was generous: it was almost impossible to pay a bill in his company—not, as some thought, because he aggrandised himself with the gesture, but rather because it was his instinct to give and to share.

Sen 17352 Some of the passports were flagged because international arrestwarrants had been issued for the original owners.

Sen 25876 I heard his voice passing from his chest to mine like ocean sonancies, sounding and resounding, wave on wave through shores of tight-wet sand at night.

Sen 10681 And as we stared at one another in that yearning silence, tears began to fill the redrimmed cups of his eyes.

Sen 14551 What emerged was a tone of voice that resonated with the hypnotic piety of a sermoner, reading from the Koran, even as he talked of his most profitable crimes.

Sen 2467 Some were Arabs, dressed in loose, cotton robes and kaffiyehs.

Sen 20620 Those longbeards were out of their minds at the way the Russians were changing the country—letting women work, and go to university, and get around in public without the full burkha covering.

Sen 21075 The tracks wound through deep gorges and crossed riverscapes of astounding beauty.

Sen 24588 And in the stiff, enwrapping arms of a throne-like chair, her face twisted in a manic stare, was Madame Zhou.

Sen 2767 So many Indian guys are chutias, yaar.

Sen 19388 Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish in the distant, grey somnolency, unperceived and indeterminable.

Sen 14345 If there’s morchas or riots, it might not be so easy to get around.’

Sen 23127 We tried many times to slip away from the camp and reach one of the neighbouring khels to secure some extra food.

Sen 18090 By his own account, repeated to Ulla whenever he was drunk, he was raised with indifferent duteousness by distant relatives who’d tolerated him reluctantly in the loveless shelter of their home.

Sen 10656 ‘Yes,’ he answered equably.

Sen 10354 There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads.

Sen 21451 There were silks in peacock blue and green, with rich interweavings of gold thread.

Sen 26840 That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzygies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money.

Sen 14558 They began with bribery, in a schedule of venalities ranging from insider trading to the securing of profitable tenders.

Sen 2582 Didier had been eating and drinking and expostulating at Leopold’s for nine years.

Sen 8394 We climbed the wide stairs to the second floor, our footsteps swallowed by thick carpet and heavy teakwood newels and handrails.

Sen 23805 The black-and-white photograph showed almost all the men of Khader’s mujaheddin unit assembled for the kind of formal portrait that makes the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India seem more stiff and gloweringly self-conscious than they really are.

Sen 27584 ‘I should?’ he asked, thrusting his face forward pugnaciously.

Sen 15494 After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century.

Sen 23700 I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on.

Sen 2286 And skeined over all the buildings like metal cobwebs were complicated traceries of electrical conduits and wires, as if even that symbol and source of the modern age and its power was no more than a fragile, temporary net that might be swept away by a rough gesture.

Sen 7626 The food was much more piquantly spiced with chillies and curries than any available in restaurants in the city, and much more delicious.

Sen 17135 Some foreigners I’d dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuates, and brawling villains.

Sen 4003 Fields flooded, or succumbed to the predations of insects and crop diseases.

Sen 19436 Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

Sen 18663 EYES CURVED like the sword of Perseus, like the wings of hawks in flight, like the rolled lips of seashells, like eucalyptus leaves in summer—Indian eyes, dancers’ eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the world stared with honest, unbeguiling concentration into mirrors held for them by their servants.

Sen 17511 Johnny and a dozen or so of his neighbours were erecting the frame for a shamiana, or great tent, where the wedding ceremonies would take place.

Sen 22008 A canvas shamiana in camouflage colours provided shelter for our wounded men.

Sen 22087 When Khader completed his prayers, we carried Siddiqi’s body back to the canvas shamiana, and wrapped it in cloth until the rituals of burial could be performed on the following day.

Sen 25441 We climbed the white marble steps at the Taj, and walked through to the Shamiana Restaurant on the ground floor.

Sen 21493 The latter was emphasised with spectacular effect by the antique, long-barrelled jezail that he held upright, balanced on his hip.

Sen 24017 They were Afghans, veteran fighters; hard men, with eyes that stared at me as if they were looking along the decorated barrel of a jezail rifle.

Sen 24151 ‘Do-do-teen hazaar,’ I answered, using the slang phrase two-two-three thousand, which always means three.

Sen 24152 ‘Teen hazaar!’ he huffed, more from habit than any real concern.

Sen 1675 But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamique for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousands of people?

Sen 2034 What is phul gobhi and bhindi?’

Sen 2736 ‘You’re such a chudd, Vikkie,’ she said, taking a place opposite him and on my right side.

Sen 3267 When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own.

Sen 6377 ‘Bahut hoshiyaar,’ he replied.

Sen 7072 ‘Oh, pleeeeeeese,’ Prabaker wheedled.

Sen 8330 ‘Ha, munta!’ he said, laughing and accepting it happily.

Sen 10308 I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to see that she, too, had remembered the phrase, and that she’d copied it down there—even improving it, with more aphoristic roundness than the impromptu remark had possessed.

Sen 15281 After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquantainces, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rental.

Sen 21443 Inalillahey wa ina illai hi rajiaon

Sen 26475 I led the way back through the converted lane and into a chai shop where workers from a local flourmill and bakery were resting between shifts.

Sen 20637 Side streets and lateral avenues revealed that the duplication of those crude, resemblant structures extended all the way to the horizon of sight, on either side of the main road.

Sen 24056 When we fell, Massoud’s men pursued the fleeing enemy all the way around the mountain and into the returning company of minelayers.

Sen 27233 Unadorned and decolourised, the blue men seemed spiritless, and much smaller and slighter than the fantastic beings I’d first encountered in the slum.

Sen 4830 Slums are planless, organic dispersements.

Sen 20119 And in the temporary insanity of that skinned, excruciated world, we commit crimes.

Sen 4564 The Babas moved from man to man and group to group, preparing hashish in funnel-shaped clay chillums for the customers, and smoking with them.

Sen 4594 One of the Standing Babas approached us slowly with an acolyte who held a silver tray containing chillums, charras, and the paraphernalia of smoking.

Sen 20492 Vexed and gloomy with squalling emotions I entered the Faloodah House in the Bohri bazaar, and ordered one of the sweet, technicoloured drinks.

Sen 25581 Tourist ferries bound for the caves on Elephanta Island, or returning to shore, rose up the wavelets and rolled over them in proud, practised glissades.

Sen 13212 Sitting around a clean sheet on the stone floor, the overseers dipped into the many dishes that went into their meals: rice, dhals, chutneys, fresh roti, fish, meat stews, chicken, and sweet desserts.

Sen 12989 The men shrieked and yowled.

Sen 20472 Their conversations were dispiritingly calculating.

Sen 21509 The Prophet Mohammed adjured his followers to return the peaceful greeting of a believer with an even more polite greeting.

Sen 17613 Her long, curly blonde hair was pulled back from her face, and held in an elegant coiffure that complemented the decorousness of her modest, ivory-coloured pantsuit.

Sen 4268 Hindi love songs jingled beside heart-breaking gazals.

Sen 5792 ‘Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay,’ he replied.

Sen 20533 A large portable radio was playing romantic gazals in Urdu.

Sen 20292 The horses watched us with that peculiarly equine mix of white-eyed timorousness and snorting condescension.

Sen 7320 ‘Nobody’s perfect, as Didier would say,’ she drawled, with a smirk that fluttered just short of a smile.

Sen 10025 ‘Assuming you can handle it,’ I drawled, grinning in spite of myself, ‘what’s in it for me?’

Sen 11527 ‘Those charm school lessons are paying off, I see,’ she drawled, sounding very American.

Sen 27474 ‘I’m sure, Salman,’ Amir drawled, running his hand over the short, grey hair on his blunt head.

Sen 28256 ‘The second best?’ she drawled.

Sen 20959 In the lengthening silence I looked at the lean, sinewed face and I controlled even the sound of my breathing, lest it disturb him.

Sen 23649 But it wasn’t Habib’s knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed.

Sen 547 But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened the awful caricature presented by the performance of their piteousness.

Sen 6148 But after a while I realised that the demarcations, like so many other long and short lines of division in the complex, culturally polyglot city, were not as rigid as they’d seemed.

Sen 16999 The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu.

Sen 3452 There are plenty of arseholes and bastards around who will teach him the wrong sisterfucking words.

Sen 26748 Have you got a goat’s brain inside your sisterfucking head?’

Sen 5271 Wriggling like worms in the gutter of the trough, we moved forward to the castellated front wall of the prison.

Sen 18829 I sat beneath huge, fire-breathing dragons and ate Chinese broccoli with snow peas, garlic spinach, fried bean curd, and mushrooms in black bean sauce by the light of paper lanterns, while the windows gave a view of castellated battlements, gothic arches, and rosestudded topiary.

Sen 5522 In three minutes the chillum was prepared, and offered to Khaderbhai for the first dumm, or puff.

Sen 14626 Khader received the honour of lighting the pipe, and I took the second dumm.

Sen 1716 On our left was a vast segment of the world’s largest harbour, the dark water starred by the moorage lights of a hundred ships at anchor.

Sen 2045 ‘Tell me, what am I calling chehra, munh, and dil?’

Sen 2166 That dishevelment combined with his theatrical gestures and persistent shouting to present a spectacle that seemed to be more enthralling, for the crowd of onlookers, than the wreckage of the cars.

Sen 5039 I was sure those threads—the training, the nickname, the firstaid kit, the work as unofficial doctor in the slum—were all connected in some way that was more than accident or coincidence.

Sen 7699 Several young women came to clear the used banana leaves away, and lay out small dishes of sweet rabdi dessert for us.

Sen 9023 The—how do you say it, bhari vazan?’

Sen 9055 Each man had his own opinion and level of articulacy yet I had the clear impression that Khaderbhai’s contribution was usually the last word.

Sen 14592 And the first moments after that great expansion, from the first fractions of attoseconds, the universe was like a rich soup made out of simple bits of things.

Sen 20420 The irony was that we were, in fact, similarly dour and serious men, but his grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.

Sen 20862 The name of the city, Quetta, was derived from the Pashto word kwatta, meaning fort.