“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.”

“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.”

“I'm so sorry,' Stone said. I don't know whether he was speaking to me, or Ghosh, or the universe. It wasn't enough, but it was about time.”

“According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

“Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"..."Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"..."And pray, why would this number interest us?""It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.”

“You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work, my classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife...I want my days to be that way.”

“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.”