#manu joseph

[dafliwali]

just completed 'the illicit happiness of other people' by manu joseph and i'd like to share this paragraph that made me laugh.

Thoma wonders whether he is in love with her. And the question terrifies him because the fate of love in Madras is neatly divided into four kinds of sui/cide.

Lovers who know that their parents will never let them marry go to a cheap hotel room, get into wedding clothes and eat rat poison.

If they elope instead, their parents will consume the same rat poison.

If it is only the girl’s parents who object to the marriage, she is most likely to immolate herself.

Men who are spurned by girls almost always hang themselves from a ceiling fan. Men very rarely set fire to themselves for a girl.

[j-august]

The world is filled with people who wish to impress when they speak. It is not a bad idea at all but there are advantages in being underestimated. That, too, is the art of conversation.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

He only re-reads these days, but not literature any more, which is a flea market of frailties. People love literature without realizing that such a love is a surrender to the tastes of alpha cultures, patriarchs and leftists. But millions choose to surrender, unflagging in their search for a mention of themselves in the works of others; something, anything that reminds them that the world, despite everything, is about them. Most of reading is probably a mere selfie.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

Her father hates that bridge. He complains about it every day to her, but she is spared this morning because he is not in town. Something about majestic cable-stayed bridges across shallow seas remind Marxists that they have lost to capitalism and human nature.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

They are among those men who have not read Chanakya or Machiavelli but love the synopsis.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

Akhila feels sorry for people whose anecdotes flop. So she lets out a faint chuckle. As it happens every time she does something inappropriate, she sees in her mind the grimace of conscientious citizens whom she always imagines to be indignant women with short legs.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

Far away a giant cruise ship sails across the bay, like a beautiful novel about nothing.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

[j-august]

The possibility of death does not occur to her. It never does. If she is ever in an air crash, she knows, she would be that lone miraculous survivor. She might even save a child. It is not hope, which is merely a conversation with the self. Hope is a premonition of defeat. She knew that even as a little girl who used to wait for her mother to return, wait for days, for weeks. Optimism, on the other hand, is psychosis. Its victims alone know how cheerfully the disease takes them to their doom. She has tried but is unable to have complete faith in the view she will die one day. Science will find a way to make her immortal.

Manu Joseph, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous