“There it was, Hema must have thought; it was both the sorry and the thank-you that was so long overdue, and the funny thing was that at this moment, she didn't care. It no longer mattered. She didn't even look his way.”

“Your tits are bigger," Shiva said."SHIVA!" Hema and Ghosh said at the same time."Sorry," he said, surprised by their reaction. "I meant her breasts are bigger," he said."SHIVA! That isn't the sort of thing you say to a woman," Hema said."I can't say it to a man," Shiva said, looking impatient.”

“I felt sorry that he had suffered so long in the hospital, sorry that even in his last minutes our mindless technology had so rudely interrupted his transition”

“As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn't that the adage of Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema's second thought was that she, deliverer of countless babies, she who'd rejected the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that lived on the bodies of men. If, as Matron and Sister Mary Joseph Praise believed, there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened. Provided, of course, the child didn't die with you in a plane crash.”

“Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.”

“How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108”

“It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.”