"There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not travelled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in my last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding paths were pitiless."
Ian Mc Ewan, Atonement
Again the day, again the night
Dawn and dusk, winter spring.
In the play of time, life ebbs away -
Only desire remains
Again birth, again death
Again the dark journey through the womb
In this world of changes, nothing holds fast
Except the coiled vine of desire
Bhaja Govindam, Sri Shankaracharya (A.D. 788-820)
"It was her picture he'd been looking at, all this time. But he whispered the name rather than calling it out in passion. Can we salvage a broken bit of hope from that? Out of consideration fro Anju, he had whispered the name of the woman he'd been trying all this time to keep away. The woman he'd been mad for ever since he saw her in a garden tented with jasmine - too late, for by then he was already betrothed to her cousin.
But was it consideration, or was it fear? No, not fear. Not that. For there is one thing about Sunil that even Anju knows: he is not afraid of anyone - except perhaps himself"
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Vine of Desire
Anymore
And so it was that she saw his face again. The face she'd been fearing to see for all those months. And so it was that she touched his hands again, and his feet, and his eyes. And of course his heart. She still doesn't know for sure how deep beyond the surface anyone could touch him, anywhere, ever again...
(LB)
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