A Passage North

A beautifully written at places book - takes us into the heartbreak of the Sri Lankan civil war.

There are some beautiful lines

THE PRESENT, WE assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted.

On women in public spaces:

In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren’t being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted.