Shamini Flint Quotes

“I’m telling you that I knew Ashu. She was like a daughter to me. There is no way she would have killed herself – and in such a way.”
“The police seem quite sure,” he replied.
“The police in India are like a river, Inspector Singh, always taking the path of least resistance.”
Singh decided to save the metaphor for an occasion when he could use it on Superintendent Chen.

He could have added that many bodies went unclaimed because relatives could not afford a funeral. Men and women left their villages to find work in the cities and were far from loved ones when some accident carried them away. And of course, there were those who were killed in the sudden outbreaks of communal violence – it was difficult to find the family of these victims, many of whom might have died at the same time, escaped to their villages or be too traumatised to search for the missing.

Rupert did not understand why the parasites in cities did not understand the most fundamental tenet of nature - that a parasite eventually kills its host. Did these people not know that if they continued to feed and spread and grow, with the tendrils of their greed wrapping themselves around their host, the day would come when it could no longer sustain them and when it died they would too?

A shudder ran through the stout frame of the policeman. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen a rat in Singapore. A few scrawny squirrels that looked a lot like rats and the occasional garden shrew – that was the sum of rodent life in his recent past. Inspector Singh, who prided himself on his familiarity with the dark fringes of society, realised that he’d been fooling himself. His Singaporean version was the Disney equivalent of the seedy side of life.

“What are you trying to say?” “Well, she’s due to get married and she runs away from home…what else is one supposed to think?”
“Are the Singapore police trained to leap to conclusions, Inspector?”
Tanvir’s ironic remark was a little too close to the bone. Still, one did have to examine the obvious before indulging in colourful speculation.
“Embellish your theory, Inspector,” said Tara Singh. His voice was as sharp as the knives with stiletto points that Singh sometimes found embedded in the chests of victims.

The act of speaking, the release from silence, invariably meant that the prisoner would say too much, give something away, let slip an honest truth in the midst of the self-justification. Inspector Singh, like a fine piano-tuner, could listen to these verbal outpourings and pick up those hints of expression or emotion that were off-key and those that rang true. And so he waited for Jasper Lee to open his mouth, and a door to the truth, at the same time.

Having accidentally watched ten minutes of a head-waggling, hip-shaking, breast-jiggling extravaganza on television, the inspector wasn’t surprised that thespian qualities were not at a premium. It was disheartening, however, to think that it was skin colour that was of paramount importance instead.

Do you think of yourself as an Indian, Inspector?" "I suppose so. In Singapore, with so many different races living cheek to cheek, it's hard to forget your roots." "Outsiders think that all Indians are one big happy family. But within the country we know better.

The inspector wondered whether ‘those people’ really had immunity or just died at a higher rate than the wealthier denizens of the city. He suspected the latter.

“Finger prints?” “Wiped.” Singh sighed. Was there a criminal out there who didn’t know to wipe his prints?

“Eighty per cent of doctors in the United States are of Indian origin,” snapped Mrs. Singh, looking up from the computer for a moment to ensure that he was paying attention. “That can’t possibly be right,” protested Singh. “It says so right here,” said his wife, pointing a bony finger at the screen and basking in the blue light like an acolyte before a high priest. “Not everything you read on the Internet is true,” muttered Singh, addressing his remark to the skinny back in the flamboyant pink caftan.

Humanity was doomed, decided Singh, which made his job of hunting down individual murderers particularly pointless.

I'm quite persuasive," said Singh, his face forbidding. "And," he amended, "she was willing to be persuaded.

No respectable Sikh family would buy art merely for its aesthetic qualities.

I thought you didn't approve of my job." "Different when it's family."
"Most murder victims have families."
She nodded once. "So you better hurry up and find this killer instead of hiding here smoking cigarettes.