In Indian society every institution – prayer, education, family, beauty, chastity and career – was a rung of the ladder of life, which had to be climbed to reach the top rung, marriage.

Like a Persian carpet the weave of time pushed their lives into a pattern.

Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.

Of all the roles she’d played – daughter, student, employee, sister and wife – wife was the smallest and in proportion the most difficult, as though it had run out of steam with its own scale. The word ‘wife’ was too small to accommodate its responsibility.

She gave her a long embrace, like pie baking in the warmth of an oven.

Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.

Their marriage hadn’t died dramatically. There were no adulterous truants or burst spleens or freakish lightning strikes or splattered brains over the highway. Their marriage had died of neglect and errors and abrasiveness. It died under a long protracted illness for which there was a diagnosis but no remedy. The disease had no name. So how could she explain it to others?

Yet, despite their many surgeries and jobs, most of them looked like old girls – girls who had suffered some wasting disease. These same things, breasts and botox, like independence and immodesty, had been powerful and shameful a few short years back, put in the same category as an extra toe or a stutter; they were quaint now.

Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us.

I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence.