Meghna Pant

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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

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She stood above the sink and broke the Swarovski glass frame – a wedding gift – with her hands. Her thumb got cut. As blood drops fell into the sink, like mercury balls she thought, she lit the photo on fire. Ashes fell into the sink. Fire and vermilion. Ashes and blood. Her marriage from start to finish

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In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind

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Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves