Shamini Flint Quotes

“You see,” whispered Mrs. Singh triumphantly, “we just had to find someone trustworthy.” She continued darkly, “In India, you can only trust your own kind. Blood calls to blood.”
One friendly Sikh and suddenly they were all part of the Sikh brotherhood.

“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.

Singh stared down at the empty clear-plastic slots and felt a profound sense of loss. These pages would remain forever empty now. No happy family, no children. Was that a bit sexist? No Nobel Prize for Chemistry, he amended.

Mrs. Singh finally hove into view. “About bloody time,” he muttered. “These fellows have been trying to take our passports, our bags, our trolley – they’d have walked off with me balanced on their heads if you’d taken any longer.”
“Strong but not that strong,” remarked Mrs. Singh, leading the way to the taxi rank.

He knew from his own experience in Singapore that the further up the ladder one got, the more the job was about politics and statistics than actually dealing with crime.

He would avoid her relatives in the same way he’d always done – by sitting irascibly in a corner and allowing their waves of curiosity to wash over him.

His appetite was sharp and the reasons were twofold. One, he’d missed dinner while traipsing around looking at corpses. And two, his wife had elicited the information that breakfast was part of the generous package sponsored by Tara Singh.

The gods were fighting over her children but she could not seek the help of any of them. And she had so much choice. She had grown up a Buddhist, her ex-husband was alleged a Moslem when he died, her own sister was a Christian - so many options for salvation. [...] Chelsea would have settled for solace through prayer. But she did not believe that there was an invisible hand behind the farce that was her life's play. At the very least she did not believe in a benevolent God. [...] Surely it was better to lay the blame for the machinations of fate at the door of chance?

[S]o many languages were spoken in Malaysia that quite often the wheels of justice ground to a standstill for the lack of an interpreter who could restore the tower of babel to a court of law.

Now he was in a holding pen with various members of the Kuala Lumpur criminal fraternity and they scared him [...] They ranged from a Chinese gang member, whose dragon tattoo foraged up his arm and curled around his neck, to a large, [sic] Indian man with a jet-black moustache and pocked-marked face, brooding in a corner. The majority of his cellmates appeared from their accents to be Indonesians, part of the large contingent of illegal immigrants in Malaysia. [...] At least, he thought, the government should be proud that their efforts to integrate the various races in Malaysia into a cohesive society were bearing such fruit. It was a very multi-racial group that was penned in together.

But these quiet people, in their animal skin clothes with their diet of sago, were not to be left alone to wander through the lush jungles, living off the land, leaving no mark when they moved on, teaching their children the secrets of the forest. The greed of others could not co-exist with the selflessness of the Penan with their gentle humour and generous hearts.

Sycophantic little tosser, thought Singh, protecting his inheritance with a bit of brown-nosing. He looked at Tara Singh. Weren’t these big-time industrialists supposed to be good judges of character? Surely he could see through the boy? And why was the brother reluctant to have Singh involved anyway? Didn’t he want to find his sister?

“Sounds like preparation for war,” remarked Singh, yet again forced to contemplate the difference between Singapore policing’s idea of a tough day at the office, an outbreak of jaywalking perhaps, and the Indian equivalent.
“Sometimes it is exactly like war,” said Patel in a quiet voice and Singh had a sudden glimpse into the abyss.

"He gives away a lot of money to charity and supports Sikh causes.” “Maybe we could persuade him that I’m a Sikh cause.”

[Inspector] Singh closed his eyes and contemplated the gloom within. Circles within circles. Would a child of one of these dead men – killed in a holy place – grow up with revenge on his mind like Tanvir Singh had done? It didn’t bear thinking about.