“When the windowpanes start to turn from black to gray, my sisters cradle themselves around me, rocking me like the sea until I can taste the salt of our tears”

“The salt of his tears tastes like the sea and I don't see the shore.”

“I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'('Left from Dhakeshwari')”

“There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of starts fardly showed through the scrim of high clouds. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea's breath. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crepe myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says 'ocean' to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.”

“We are certainly descendents of the sea for our tears are salted and when we shed them on the jowl of time, the sea that has always been within us flows on our face. ”

“I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.”