Nadeem Aslam

“All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.”

“It is possible to think of fragrance existing before a flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy.Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in possession of her full mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago - long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth - she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for a repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn, she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains.What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient.”

“She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance...The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it.”

“The scent of the tree's flowers can stop conversation. Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy.”

“Wounds are said to emit light under certain conditions - touch them and the brightness will stay on the hands - and as candles burn Rohan thinks of each flame as an injury somewhere in his house.”

“History is the third parent.”

“If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were ten years old.... This almost-brother. This blood-love in everything but name.”

“Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.”

“Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war-how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown.”

“To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.”

“The young everywhere…would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors.”

“But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.”

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”

“The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.”

“How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence. It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.”

“All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.”

“Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war.”

“On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step.”

“Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.”

“He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.”

“A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilization of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.”

“The neighbourhood is a place of...intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street, their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds.”

“There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.”

“A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.”

“Nothing is an accident: it's always someone's fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.”

“There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn't want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.”

“He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for the fear that his undisturbed shadow would leave a stain on the wall.”

“Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.”

“Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself.”

“Her mind is a haunted house.”