“Forty feet long sixty feet high hotelCovered with old gray for buzzing fliesEye like mango flowing orange pusEars Durga people vomiting in their sleepGot huge legs a dozen buses move inside CalcuttaSwallowing mouthfuls of dead ratsMangy dogs bark out of a thousand breastsGarbage pouring from its ass behind alleysAlways pissing yellow Hooghly waterBellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddlesCoughing lungs Sound going down the sewerNose smell a big gray BidiHeart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracksCovered with a hat of cloudy ironSuffering water buffalo head loweredTo pull the huge cart of year uphill”

“You shine like the sun and you move like water. Your eyes are the perfect mix of gray and brown, like fog in the woods, and you smell like lilacs in the summer. I think if you laughed, it would sound like music.”

“Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.”

“A man could shoot a squirrel out of a tree from a distance of sixty feet. But he couldn't vomit into a bucket or pee into a pot only two feet away. It was one of the great mysteries of life.”

“They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw a long time ago.Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.”

“This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, musn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of seawater.”