Shamini Flint Quotes

Sikhs seem to have done quite well in India," said the inspector provocatively, looking around the gleaming office with its panoramic views of the brown smog hanging over the city. "Don't be fooled," said Tara. "This is just window dressing. There are Sikh figureheads everywhere including that Manmohan Singh. But if you look deeper, you will see the truth!" "And what is that?" asked the inspector. "We're second-class citizens. They deny us our rights in Punjab. What about water rights? What about Chandigarh? What about our language? They attack our places of worship and massacre our citizens ..." Tara Singh was a man who preferred to have the last word. "You foreigners," he said. "You don't understand India.

Everyone needs a hobby," said [Inspector] Singh. "Terrorists also." "Oh, I see," said [Inspector] Singh, flippancy erased from his voice. "That's not good news.

“Where’re you from?” “I’m a policeman from Singapore and a distant relative by marriage to Ashu’s family,” replied Singh. “I’ve been there – most boring place in the world, I think,” said Sameer. Singh grinned. This was a different opinion from that of the American boss.

There had been encroachments by Pakistani troops over the line of control in Kashmir. Editorials solemnly urged the government to adopt a firm stance. Right, thought [Inspector] Singh. Two nuclear powers adopting a ‘firm’ stance was definitely the right way forward.

“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.

So your certainty that Ashu was murdered by her family despite the absence of any evidence is based on your certainty that they were behind the assault on you for which you don't have any evidence either?"
Sameer was undaunted by the sarcasm. "It's your job to find evidence, Singh. I've just made it easy for you by identifying the murderers.

If they’d been in Singapore, he’d have thrown an army of investigators at the place, established once and for all whether there was a nexus between the factory and the illness at the slum. He didn’t have that option in India.

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.

Self-immolation was a peculiarly anticipatory gesture for someone who would eventually be cremated and her ashes scattered in a river. Mrs. Singh wondered whether the family would take the ashes to the Punjab or whether a river closer at hand would suffice. ... She tried to imagine for a moment what [her husband] would do when she died.
Probably chuck her ashes into the nearest monsoon drain and head to a coffee shop for a cold beer.

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.

“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.

Temples are places of worship, not war. We should never have let separatists hole up in our gurdwaras.

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?

He didn’t bother to answer his wife and opened the newspaper instead. There was a cholera outbreak in the slums, more nuclear sabre-rattling from the governments of India and Pakistan and a riot because a Bollywood film had gone too far. Apparently, Indian morals were being compromised. Singh smiled happily. They just didn’t make the newspapers like this in Singapore.

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.