Jalandhara to Shiva

"How can you live on alms and yet keep the beautiful Parvati ? Give her to me, and wander from house to house with your alms bowl. You have fallen from your vow. . . .You are a yogi ;what need have you for the gem of wives? You live in the woods attended by goblins and ghosts; being a nakedyogi, you should give your wife to one who will appreciate her better than you do."^[1]

Sunlight on a Broken Column - Opening

Chapter One

The day my aunt Abida moved from the zenana into the guest-room off the corridor that led to the men's wing of the house, within call of her father's room, we knew Baba Jan had not much longer to live.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear :

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus 1961

Published with a new introduction by Virago Press 1988

Published in Penguin Books India 1992

Copyright Attia Hosain, 1961, 1988

Introduction copyright Anita Desai 1988

All rights reserved

For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only

Printed at Rashtrya Printers

Twelfth Night - Closing

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you every day.

Twelfth Night - V: 350

ANTONIO
Let me speak a little. This youth that you see here

I snatched one half out of the jaws of death,

Relieved him with such sanctity of love,

And to his image, which methought did promise

Most venerable worth, did I devotion.

FIRST OFFICER

What's that to us? The time goes by, away.

ANTONIO
But O, how vile an idol proves his god!

Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.

In nature there's no blemish but the mind.

None can be called deformed but the unkind.

Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil

Are empty trunks o'er-flourished by the devil.

Twelfth Night - V:155

VIOLA

By innocence I swear, and by my youth,

I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,

And that no woman has, nor never none

Shall mistress be of it save I alone

And so adieu, good madam, never more

Will I my master's tears to you deplore.

Twelfth Night - Opening

ORSINO

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall.

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

India Wins Freedom - Opening

CHAPTER 1

Background

MY forefathers came to India from Herat [a city in Afghanistan]in Babar's days. They first settled in Agra and later moved to Delhi. It was a scholarly family and, in Akbar's time, Maulana [or Moslem scholar] Jamaluddin became famous as a religious divine. After him, the family became more inclined to worldly affairs and several members occupied important civil positions. In Shahjehan's days, Mohammad Hadi was appointed Governor of the Agra Fort.

For

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Friend and Comrade

INDIA WINS FREEDOM

COPYRIGHT 1959

BY ORIENT LONGMANS PRIVATE LTD.

COPYRIGHT 1960

BY LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Printed in the United States of America

Legacy of a Divided Nation - pg. 9

Consider Kashmir. In the valley, where most muslims live, Islam absorbed many social and cultural practices of pre-Islamic origin, which are today attacked by the Ahl-i Hadith and the Jamaat-i Islami. And in the neighboring Punjab, a territory divided into two unequal halves in 1947, it provided a repertoire of concepts and styles of authority which served to encompass potentially competing values, including the values of tribal kinship, within a common Islamic idiom. In Bengal, an area far removed from the centre of imperial power, Islam took many forms and assimilated values and symbols which were not always in conformity with the Quranic ideals and precepts. The religio-cultural idioms underwent a rapid change, giving birth to a set of popular beliefs and practices which in essence represented the popular culture of rural Bengal rooted in the pre-Islamic past. The local syncretic beliefs and practices, predating the advent of Islam in the region, thus formed the popular culture in Bengali Islam from the beginning.

Voss - pg. 151

The comforts, both material and spiritual, so conveniently confused in comfortable minds, inspired the merchant's residence. Of solid stone, this had stood unshaken hitherto.

Voss - pg. 144

Circles expanding on the precious water made it seem possible that this was the centre of the earth.

Voss - pg. 138

Already the evening of his arrival, upon scenes of splendour such as he had known to exist, but never met, Frank Le Mersurier had begun to change. The sun's sinking had dissolved all hardnesses. Darkness, however, had not fallen; it seemed, rather, to well forth, like the beating and throbbing of heart and pulse in the young man's body, to possess the expectant hills. Only the admirable house resisted. Later that night he had gone outside to watch the light from the lamps and candles, with which every window appeared to be filled. Isolation made that rather humble light both moving and desirable. So the days began to explain. Grasses were melting and murmuring. A child laid its cheek against him. The sun, magnificently imperious, was yet a simple circle that allowed him to enter, with the result that he was both blinded and illuminated.

Voss - pg. 133

Voss who was looking down all the time upon the man's massive, grizzled head, could not feel superior, only uneasy at times. It was necessary for him to enjoy complete freedom, whereas this weight had begun to threaten him. So he was chewing his moustache, nervously, his mouth quite bitter from a determination to resist, his head spinning, as he entered in advance that vast, expectant country, whether of stone deserts, veiled mountains, or voluptuous, fleshy forests. But his. His soul must experience first, as by some spiritual droit de seigneur, the excruciating passage into its interior. Nobody here, he suspected, looking round, had explored his own mind to the extent that would enable him to bear such experience. Except perhaps the convict, whose mind he could not read. The convict had been tempered in hell, and as he had said, survived.

Legacy of a Divided Nation - Opening

INTRODUCTION

At a party held during the United Nations session in 1949, the Turkish representative looked at the name card of Mohammad Mujeeb, the vice chancellor of Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia, saw he was a Muslim, and at once asked: 'Are there still any Muslims in India?'

To the memory of Anwar Jamal Kidwai

and for Ravinder Kumar

Published in the United State of America by

Westview Press, Inc.,

5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877

Copyright 1987 by Mushirul Hasan

Typeset by Print Line, New Delhi

Printed in India by Thomson Press (India) Ltd.

Late Air

From a magician's midnight sleeve

the radio-singers

distribute all their love-songs

over the dew-wet lawns.

And like a fortune-teller's

their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.

But on the Navy Yard aerial I find

better witnesses

for love on summer nights.

Five remote red lights

keep their nests there; Phoenixes

burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.

Bloom's Day

... another bloom's day - not much to talk about.

Book Cycle

• Euripides
• Shakuntala
• Plato
• India Wins Freedom
• Mushir ul Hasan

Gandhi on Islam

Islam enjoins upon us tolerance towards others’ religions. It doesn’t say that other religions are false. He alone who does good to others is a true man. This is the principle of the [Qu’ran] as also the teaching of other religions. The students of the Jamia, I hope, will spread the message of unity and freedom throughout the country.

-- Letter to Jamia Millia in 1930

Voss - pg. 122

Sanderson was a man of a certain culture, which his passionate search for truth had rid of intellectual ostentation. In another age the landowner might have become a monk, and from there gone on to be a hermit. In the mid-nineteenth century, an English gentleman and devoted husband did not behave in such a manner, so he renounced Belgravia for New South Wales, and learned to mortify himself in other ways. Because he was rich and among the first to arrive, he had acquired a goodish slice of land. After this victory of worldly pride, almost unavoidable, perhaps, in anyone of his class, humility had set in. He did live most simply, together with his modest wife. They were seldom idle, unless the readings of books, after the candles were lit, be considered idleness. This was the one thing people held against the Sandersons, and it certainly did seem vain and peculiar. They had whole rows of books, bound in leather, and were forever devouring them. They would pick out passages for each other as if they had been titbits of tender meat, and afterwards shine with almost physical pleasure. Beyond this, there was nothing to which a man might take exception. Sanderson tended his flocks and hers like any other Christian. If he was more prosperous than most, one did not notice it unduly, and both he and his wife would wash their servants' feet in many thoughtful and imperceptible ways.

Voss - pg. 121

At places, in clearings, little, wild, rosy children would approach the track, and stand with their noses running, and lips curled in natural wonder. Their homespun frocks made them look stiffer. An aura of timelessness enveloped their rooted bodies. They would not speak, of course, to destroy any such illusion. They stood, and looked, out of their relentless blue or hot-chocolate eyes, till the rump of the last horse had all but disappeared. Then these children would run along the track in the wake of the riders, jumping the mounds of yellow dung, shouting and sniffing, as if they had known the horsemen all along, and always been brave.

Voss - pg. 117

Wind and sea were tossing the slow ship. Gusts of that same wind, now fresh, now warm, troubled the garden, and carried the scents of pine and jasmine into the long balcony. The two young women could not have told whether they were quickened or drugged, until a kind of feverish melancholy began to take possession of them. Their bodies shivered in their thin gowns; their minds were exposed to the keenest barbs of thought; and the whole scene that their vision embraced became distinct, and dancing, beautiful, but sad.

The City & The City - pg. 41

Read the travelogues of the last-but-one century and those older, and the strange and beautiful right-to-left Illitan calligraphy -- and its jarring phonetics -- is constantly remarked on. At some point everyone has heard Sterne, from his travelogue: "In the Land of Alphabets Arabic caught Dame Sanskrit's eye (drunk he was despite Muhamed's injunctions, else her age would have dissuaded). Nine months later a disowned child was put out. The feral babe is Illitan, Hermes-Aphrodite not without beauty. He has something of both his parents in his form, but the voice of those who raised him -- the birds."

The City & The City - pg. 25

In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages -- they were quite that close -- and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.

The City & The City - Opening

Chapter One

I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course -- a child's mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

The City & The City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2010 Del Rey Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2009 by China Mieville.

Excerpt from Kraken copyright 2010 by China Mieville

Random House reading group guide copyright 2010 Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.