Percy Bysshe Shelley came first. I remember reading Ozymandias in school and how it blew me away. It still does and its powerful imagery holds me in a stranglehold today as it did then when I read it for the first time in sixth or seventh standard.

Ted Hughes came much, much later. I was in college then. Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow was the first collection I read. I chanced upon The Hawk in the Rain, Hughes’s first collection much later. I found a rain-soaked copy at the bottom of a pile of books in a second hand book shop in Murray Market, Madras. His poem The Thought-Fox about a writer working in the solitude of a late night, and beyond the writer’s domain of the blank page, remains a favourite.

Between these two poets stood Gabriel García Márquez like a colossus. I remember reading Lewis Jones review of John Banville’s The Sea. He writes: ‘Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one’s next fix.’ This is what Marquez does to me. His sentences are like drugs, words arranged in a wonderous way, words that evoke magic, words that speak of the unreal as if it is reality itself.

Who are your favourite writers? Which work have you read and reread the most?

1. Desire: In 1951, Márquez returned from a trip home to Aracataca, his home town, to write Leaf Storm (1955), his first novel. ‘From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.’

2. First sentences are important: First sentences are important for they ‘can be the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book.’ Each and every Márquez book begins with a stunner. From One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ Or from Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004): ‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.’ Márquez was notably influenced by Franz Kafka. ‘When I read The Metamorphosis, the first line almost knocked me off the bed. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . .”

3. First paragraphs are important as well: According to Márquez, one of the most difficult things to write is the first paragraph of a novel. ‘I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be.’

4. Find your own voice: After In Evil Hour (1962), Márquez did not write for five years. He had this idea in his mind of what he always wanted to do, ‘but there was something missing and I was not sure what it was until one day I discovered the right tone – the tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ It was based on the way his grandmother used to tell her stories, fantastic stories that she told with what he called a ‘brick face.’ Said Márquez: ‘When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day.’

5. Adverbs: To tighten his own writing, Márquez eliminated adverbs, which in Spanish all have the ending -mente [the equivalent of -ly]. ‘Before,’ he said, ‘there are many. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I think there is one. After that, in Love in the Time of Cholera there are none. In Spanish, the adverb -mente is a very easy solution. But when you want to use -mente and look for another form, the other form is always better. It has become so natural to me that I don’t even notice anymore.’

6. Have faith in your writing: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970) was originally published in fourteen consecutive installments in El Espectador newspaper in 1955 and attributed to the sailor Luis Alejandro Velasco. ‘The sailor would just tell me his adventures and I would rewrite them trying to use his own words and in the first person, as if he were the one who was writing,’ said Márquez. It wasn’t until twenty years later that it was re-published and people found out Márquez had written it. ‘No editor realized that it was good until after I had written One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ Even for One Hundred Years of Solitude he set aside everything to write the book. It took him eighteen months of concerted effort. While he wrote his wife took care of everything. They had to sell their car, pawn their appliances and obtain credit after credit. When he finished, he pawned a few more things to buy postage to submit the manuscript.

7. Discipline: Márquez writes every day, working from ten in the morning to two or three in the afternoon. ‘I don’t think you can write a book that’s worth anything without extraordinary discipline. The most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.’

8. Writing is hard work: According to Márquez, literature is nothing but carpentry. ‘Ultimately, with both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved. And as Proust, I think, said, it takes ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.’

The dictionary defines words as units of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation that functions as a principal carrier of meaning. English philosopher John Locke wrote that the use of words is to be sensible marks of ideas. Therein lies the sensibility of words. Words that we use every day to communicate ideas, instructions and impressions. Without them, where would we be. Words, the way you use them, defines you.

Words serve many purposes. Words are the atoms of our cognitive world. Without words, the world as we know it will cease to exist. Words put Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo behind bars. Words also have the tremendous power to heal. I remember reading this post in Psychology Today about the use of words to both describe and prescribe. It declares that the choice of words we use in everyday life is a reflection of the state of our life. It gave the example of a patient who was having a harrowing time and used strong words to describe the most mundane situations in her life. Her therapist convinced her to use gentler words. So while traffic used to be ‘hell’, it became ‘rough’, and then ‘difficult’. The choice of words did not solve the patient’s problems, but her everyday struggles became more manageable when described in a different light.

Great works of literature are honed by the brilliance of how words are employed. Experienced writers treat words like gold for they add value to their writing. Every word serve a purpose. The appeal in their books lies in their selection of words and the manner of their presentation in a cohesive, aesthetic manner. English poet Robert Southey said it best: “If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn’.

Why is it that we prefer some writers over others? Is it that the use of their words appeal to our sensibilities.The monograph Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis by Robert S. Sinclair has an interesting take on the whole process of writing and the use of words. When a writer writes, he is trying to define his ideas by clothing them in words to communicate those ideas to others. The complexity of this operation is called cognitive overload. Skilled writers use a variety of means to reduce the overload. For example, they satisfice by using certain words, words that are good enough for the present, but could be polished or substituted when working memory had been cleared of other demands. That is to say, they try to improve on the imprecision in their language. But does even the best writers achieve perfection in their use of words? American academic Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid has this to say about the use of words: “The amazing thing about language is how imprecisely we use it and still manage to get away with it. If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut; they’d just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.” The trick is to find the right nut for the bolt.

You don’t need to know too many words to write a book as long as you are clever with their use. Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss wrote the well-known children’s book Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 different words on a 50 dollar bet with Bennet Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, his publisher. This was after completing The Cat in the Hat using 225 words and Cerf suggesting Geisel could not complete an entire book using lesser words. The Wikipedia lists the 50 words, which are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you. According to Publishers Weekly, Green Eggs and Ham is fourth on its All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books list, even outselling all the Harry Potter books before 2001.

There you have it. Words. The building blocks of language. What I used to put together this post. Words, that made us, our world. How clever are you with them?

There is another point. Among translators, it is accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating from their second language into their native language. For example, The Alchemist was originally written in Portuguese, then translated into many languages, including English. Now imagine a translation into Hindi from the English text, and not from the original Portuguese. Also, while it may be easier to translate works originally written in English, imagine translating an original text from Swedish to Hindi. How many persons are proficient in the original language and the second language. A dilution of a dilution? Perhaps. And then you begin to wonder, is it worth reading? It is, to a point. And this is where English readers have an advantage over say someone reading in Hindi or Swahili. And that is why you shouldn’t miss out.

UNESCO’s Index Translationum is a regularly updated list of books translated in the world i.e. an international bibliography of translations. Browsing through its lists, you will find that the English reading world trails the rest of the world by a distance when it comes to reading literature in translation. Germany publishes the most translations. In fact, the top ten countries are all European except for China. The US comes in at 13, the UK is at 24. Agatha Christie is the most translated author. Shakespeare comes a distant third followed by Enid Blyton! Some translation trivia. The Bible has been translated into a staggering 2527 of the world’s 6800 languages. Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio is the most translated work of fiction in the work having been translated into between 197-200 languages according to the Wikipedia. Among books published after 2000, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner has been translated into 44 and 42 languages each. Among non-English books works, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has sold the highest number of copies at over 200 million.

I like the acceptance of translated works into mainstream awards instead of having separate awards for translated books. The Man Asian Literary Prize is a trendsetter in this regard as it awards the prize annually to the best novel of the year by an Asian writer that is either written in English or translated into English. In 2012, the winner is Korea’s Shin Kyung-sook for her book Please Look After Mom, a book translated into English from Korean. The biggest challenge is what to read, for how many names are familiar other than a few famous. But once you make a beginning, you can always find a way. Prize winners, book reviews, even most online book retailers have sections dealing with translated works. But don’t read translated books if you are looking for culture trips. Books are always about stories and writing, not anthropology. New experiences maybe, but not some sort of Lonely Planet guide to the Indian or Swedish mindset. Good books are good books, no matter what language it is written. Without literature in translation, our lives would be so much poorer. Imagine what we would be missing and not even be aware of it. Imagine missing the genius of a Marquez or Murakami. What gems are out there waiting to be uncovered?

Why we were having this debate was because the food was terrible and we would rather do something to pass the time than eat. The only saving grace was dessert by which time we decided instead of strong, why we can’t use words like unforgettable or memorable. Somebody suggested favourite, but favourite sounds like you are being partial to someone. Memorable is more egalitarian. It doesn’t put the onus of performance on the female character. She doesn’t have to battle half the world or face stigma or suffer one tragedy after the other. She is memorable because she endures in her feminity. What else, we thought. She is funny and irreverent towards society’s sensibilities and the conventions of her times, an utter romantic, but with a dark side to her character. I like the dark side bit.

So how is the modern memorable character different from those before? Are they better educated, slimmer and carry more advanced weapons? How would somebody like Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander compare to the tragic heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. How would Éowyn from The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, a woman of much grace in the face of adversity compare to someone like Vladimir Nabokov’s Dolores Haze from Lolita. What about someone like Erin Brockovich, someone grounded in reality, an ordinary woman, a single mother with a bunch of children taking on an energy giant. Would she count as a memorable character? By the time coffee arrived everyone was busy naming their MFCs. Jane Eyre was a popular figure. Everyone liked their heroines to suffer a bit before redemption. Somebody else said Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series. She was booed and we missed her company for the rest of the evening. Others that made the list include Haruki Murakami’s Eri Asai from After Dark (might I add, Murakami does create the most enticing of characters), the ever popular Lady Chatterley from D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Gustave Flaubert’s irreverent Emma Bovary, Éowyn again from The Lord of the Rings trilogy and so on, a few helped by their recent movie avatars. It is safe to assume our memorable female characters change over the years, but a few endure.

It gets a bit dicey because the consensus was that male writers create more memorable female characters. Someone suggested (and adds that it is pure speculation on his part) it was because men write with a detached view of things, an inborn, inherent trait in the male of the species, which comes to the fore when writing about female characters. Someone else said it was because the male understanding of women is at a more profound level, which was basically saying women are more superficial. Granger fan gathers her courage and suggested female writers tend to have this inherent need to make their female characters stronger. They are more stereotypical of their female characters while the male writers are more exploratory in their characterization.

It was midnight when we left. By then we were getting into an argument over strong male characters, and we came to the came to the conclusion that there weren’t any.
‘There is no need,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said my friends. ‘Now you know why we hate strong female characters?’

My dog distracts me no end. It is armed with endless energy, it is dangerous and it is incredibly naughty. Not to forget the melancholy face if it’s ignored for too long. I give her an intense ten minute run-and-jump routine at the end of which she is too exhausted to trouble me further. Selfish, I know, but the dog gets its exercise and I get my peace.

The Word Wide Web and it is truly one, for it ensnares me in its clutches. A minute, I promise myself, to check the mail, and when I look at the time again, an hour has flown. How I hate this most necessary evil, how I wish I could do without it. Nowadays, I hide the dongle. No dongle, no internet.

How miserable my life would be without movies? Moving pictures that tells stories. Stories that inspire, teach and thrill. Stories without which life would be dull. My favourite writing distraction without a doubt. It is a difficult distraction to battle and the most I do is try and succumb as little as possible to the moving images. And if I need a bit of inspiration…

How could I possibly stay from words that tantalize, writers that invite us into their woven world. To have a new book waiting nearby for its pages to be opened and read, what could possibly be more distracting? If not for movies, they would have been my favourite writing distraction. And isn’t reading supposed to make you a better writer.

Visitors, especially uninvited ones, sales representatives, hawkers. They would often arrive at the most inopportune moments, sometimes at times when your concentration is at full go. The dog helps, but Lyka’s playful reputation is ruining everything. She has been found out. They are no longer afraid. I am thinking of getting a poisonous snake (of course with its fangs out, but how will they know). If that doesn’t work, the Himalayas beckons.

I have an inherent dislike for phones. How I hate the sound of this beast in a gadget’s guise, ringing at odd times and disturbing my peace. How it controls my life, making me answer its every call, do its biding at all times of the day. The best thing is they are easy to get rid of. Sometimes a simple hammer does the trick. Sometimes I pretend it is lost. Friends and family know how I hate to be called on the phone. So they don’t. Otherwise there is always the bin around.

Tea, not the drink but the excuse to make myself a cup. Assam is the land of tea and you couldn’t blame me for the hourly cup of tea to go with the accompanying chatter and the time spent in savouring this rather fine drink. Gosh , how I hate and bless Robert Bruce at the same time.

I have this thing about needing to know what’s going on in this world. I am sure many of you do. The Arab Spring ruined a lot of my time last year. First Mubarak, then Gaddaffi. Now Assad is not helping with his tantrums. This distraction will go away only when all the tyrants in the Middle East are deposed.

India is an incredibly noisy country and living in a city doesn’t help. There is traffic on the road always. Add to it, fireworks almost every night at two wedding halls nearby, police sirens, people chattering arguing laughing on the pavement below, televisions playing and I used to pull out my hair. But no longer. I have protection. Nothing reaches my ears. The silence is blissful.

How I met him? A scuffle had broken out between beggars over alms at the temple gate. The police retorted with a baton charge. Those fighting scattered like chickens. I heard shouts behind my back, people running, cries of pain. I turned and caught a pair of bright eyes looking out from behind a rose bush. A young lad came forward and sat down by my side. He pointed at the pack of cigarettes in my pocket. I gave him one. How he smelled. I turned my face away.

‘My name’s Tablet,’ he said. I half expected him to tell me he had a twin brother ‘capsule’. I ignored him. Tablet kept talking, words that drifted away in the wind and never reached my ears. He was always around whenever I came. Sometimes he asked for a cigarette, sometimes a green coconut, a couple of times, money. And he could talk, words in a rapid staccato between vigorous pulls at a straw or cigarette.

One afternoon, he turned up as I was about to leave. He had this look on his face, happy one moment, confused the next. His hair was cut, nails clipped and he was wearing new clothes. When I offered him a cigarette, he declined. ‘No tablets, either,’ he said. He followed me to my bike. ‘I got job,’ he said.

I ran into him several times in the city: in the bazaar at Machkhowa; once in a dark street, when his hand flew out of a door and touched my shoulder and gave me a fright. Several times, I saw him near his old haunt at the Sukreswar Temple, helping old people across the road. He was always smiling, always with a minute to spare. And his eyes, how they lit up when he saw me. How welcome I felt.

His story came out in bits and pieces over cups of tea and spells of dolphin-watching. His mother had deserted him at birth. He was brought up by an old beggar, who came under a lorry one night while sleeping by the road. Beaten, hounded from one place to another, he found refuge at Sukreswar. My initial reluctance gave way to a desire to know him better. I took him to lunch one day on the ferry. On Puja, I gave him a shirt, my brother shoes. My mother knitted him a sweater. I invited him home. Sometimes he stayed the night. He became a part of our family, trusted, heard and loved.

And then one day, he wasn’t there anymore. Like he never existed. He was supposed to come for dinner, but never showed up. I went to his lodgings the next day. His room was locked. The landlord told me hadn’t come home for a week now. When they broke inside, it was empty. We filed a report with the police, but it was a waste of time. Tablet was gone.

It is six years now. This is a troubled land. What if Tablet is dead? A victim of a hit-and-run somewhere? Shot? Knifed? Drugged and dumped in the river? I like to think he is well, somewhere nearby. I wish I took his photograph, but I have this picture in my mind of this kid with a smile on his face, bright eyes looking out with trust at a world that gave him nothing but pain. It feels like yesterday when I saw him last. My mother expects him to walk through the gate any minute. He is around somewhere in the city, in the park, by the riverside, lost in thought, wandering.

He is around for sure.

Wars also produce the most extraordinary of stories. Who can forget the Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda’s itch for war when he continued fighting on the Philippine island of Lubang until 9 March, 1974 – nearly 29 years after the end of the Second World War. Another strange tale I heard was from my grandmother. This from the Sino-Indian War of 1962. She told me how they were ordered to evacuate from Tezpur, a frontier town on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. In fact, grandpa had broached the topic a week before should the Chinese advance, but grandma declined to leave. ‘Let these little men come,’ she said. ‘Let me see how they take my house. I will show them.’ No amount of argument or cajoling moved her. No, she will not leave even if she was the last person in town. Her neighbours had left, one family after the other, but grandma wouldn’t budge. ‘Let this little men come,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll show them for disturbing the peace.’ She cleaned grandpa’s hunting rifle, and sharpened her khukri, a present from a devoted Nepali servant. The evening before they finally left, grandpa saw government officials burning the currency reserves in the banks on orders from New Delhi. Rumours floated about the Chinese being less than twenty kilometres away following the path, everyone said, of the Dalai Lama fleeing from Tibet. Stories flew about how a few government officials had fled with most of the money, gold, whatever riches the town had. There were inspiring stories too. One Sikh soldier holding out against a Chinese battalion and killing forty three Chinese soldiers before he was himself killed. This only made grandma more determined to stay back.

A night later, she was woken up from sleep. It was grandpa. He whispered that all the inmates from the district jail and the lunatic asylum were to be released at dawn. They had to leave immediately. At first, grandma thought it was a story made up to convince her. But when she saw he was serious, she needed no further convincing. While grandpa locked the doors and windows, grandma bundled what she could into two suitcases. At the door, she sprinkled Bandar kekua or Mucuna prurita, the velvet or mad bean, which is known to cause a terrible itch. ‘A welcome for our Chinese friends,’ she had whispered. Outside their house, the streets were filled with people. A blackout was in force. Like silent sentinels of the night, they made for the river bank in the darkness where huddled shadows of ferries waited to transport them to Silghat, three hours across the Brahmaputra.

The Chinese reached the outskirts of town three days later, but never entered Tezpur. They withdrew soon after across the border. Everyone was allowed back into town. Grandma returned home after a week. Her house was as she had left it. Across the porch, a single word written with a broken piece of brick: ‘Nepai.’ You shouldn’t have.

Of those released from jail and the lunatic asylum, only a few were caught and returned.

Those were dark and terrible days, the nineties. For the soldiers of the Indian army, every local was an insurgent. To have a gun thrust at your face was commonplace. But the rebels had a vice-like grip on life. Not a leaf stirred in Assam without their knowledge. Refusing a donation was akin to becoming a traitor. For months after that, I expected a car or a bike to screech to a halt in front of my office, when I walked home or drove. Nothing happened.

My friend in the loose shirt burst into prominence a few years later. That village boy with a stammer and a gun too big for his fingers walked up to an army Major and shot him dead. Revenge, the rebels claimed, for a girl raped by soldiers on a raid. Newspapers carried his aliases and a photograph. He had seven names. Does he get up in the morning, look at a mirror and decide “who am I going to be today?” He became the most wanted man after the leader. The soldiers went after his family. They took away his elder brother and his wife. Nobody saw them again.

For some time, he laid low. There was the odd snippet he was in Peshawar. Some said he was in Dacca, then in Myitkyina. Stories about crossing the border into Yunnan and travelling through Tibet, then through Nathu La into Sikkim and back to Assam. Regular jaunts to Bangkok, and to Phuket, where he was the proud owner of a beachfront property. The short guy with a loose shirt and a gun behind his back was going places.

He surrendered under an amnesty. He said he was “joining the mainstream” whatever that meant. He went on television, regretting the error of his ways. “There were days when I couldn’t go without killing,” he confessed. Months passed. I heard he was doing well. Tea, coal, handloom, construction. He was into everything. Then the shootings began. Relatives of rebels were called out of homes at night and shot. Dead bodies left on the roadside, hacked limbs on the sands of the Brahmaputra. My friend’s name was touted as the prime suspect. The rebels threatened him with dire consequences. He laughed in riposte.

He opened his office near where I worked. I, in a rundown thirty-year old building peeling paint and chipping off brick by brick. He, in a glitzy glass and steel affair, two buildings away. He had come a long way from the hesitant village boy with a gun.

Time passed. One afternoon, I saw him again. A blurry, dark- glassed figure in a black suit inside a bullet-proof Japanese SUV. Our eyes met for a second. Lingered. His were still the same. Cold. Lost. Eyes that have seen. What must he think? Does he remember me? That he came my way once. Walked up the stairs, sullen in the dim light. Knocked at the door. Waited an hour for me to finish. Bowed and stammered his threat. Showed me his gun, then quietly left, as if sorry for the intrusion, sorry he didn’t understand my situation, how hard life already was for me, sorry he came to make it harder. What must he have thought when I asked him to shoot me? What must he had thought?

The next evening, I found the road jammed with traffic and people. Cars honking. Sirens wailing. Everybody talking. There has been a shooting. Later that night, I saw it on TV. In the morning, the newspapers carried his photograph on the front page. What was left of him, that is. Two rebels on a motorbike walked past security and shot him on the face while he was getting out of his car. Not once, but many times. They made certain of his death. They were fulfilling an age old adage.

*My friend in the loose shirt formed the basis of the character Manav in Where the Rain Falls.

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife wrote the ending first and the beginning last. She says, ‘The book was written in no order at all, just me working on whatever I had some idea about. By the time I wrote the beginning, I’d already written most of the book.’ Was it helped by the fact that she is a visual artist, her book broken down into chunks, curdled thoughts picked at leisure and written? I did similarly with Where the Rain Falls, beginning with the ending, but perhaps it was helped by the fact that it was based on a true incident, one that claimed many lives. If you are the perfect writer and outline your novel, you already have a sense of the ending. By the time you reach the last chapter, the words are already there in your mind waiting to be set in the right order. Writing the ending earlier is a good way of moving forward if your book is stuck, and the plot is getting all muddled up. What if it turns out well, what if it is so good you can’t wait to finish the rest of the book?

At book stores I have seen people reading the back cover blurb, and then a few lines from the last page. I know people who insists on buying books with happy endings. The meticulous reader, those who read books from cover to cover will take an occasional guilty peek at the ending, and happy that things are going their way, motor along. Unlike films, where a good ending makes the difference between a film you enjoyed and a film you remember, endings, however, doesn’t make a book. Memorable endings, however, stay with you, their words, the stories they embellished, how it all brought everything together. Great endings make you mull over the book long after it is finished, a friend you just said goodbye, but can’t wait to meet again.

All great last lines need to be understood in the context of the entire book, like the final breath before you sigh and close the book and think about what you just read, and how it affected those in the book, the characters, you. Sometimes, it’s just a word. Tomorrow, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; sometimes, it’s a query – Are there any questions? in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; sometimes, it’s a pronouncement as in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore – You are part of a brand new world.

Last lines leave you with hope and feelings poignant as in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table: From the distance, before she disappeared into the world, Emily waved. It can touch you with feelings tender and passionate as in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera – Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said. Sometimes they mesmerize, saying much more than the words, even the book – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past – in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or as in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, leave you spellbound – It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. Then this, which when I read for the first time, when I was ten or eleven, made me think of a friend I lost a year before in an accident – He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). And finally, an ending’s ending in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. It is concise and perfect – So that, in the end, there was no end.