Being Sick Is Incredibly Boring, But at Least You Get to Read

“The melody surprised her, for it bore no resemblance to any Indian music she had ever heard before – neither the Hindi film music her father liked nor the Bengali songs her mother had sometimes sung. His voice sounded almost hoarse and it seemed to crack and sob as it roamed the notes. There was a suggestion of grief in it that unsettled and disturbed her.

“She had thought that she had seen a muscular quality of innocence in him, a likeable kind of naïveté, but now, listening to this song, she began to ask herself whether it was she who was naïve. She would have liked to know what he was singing about and what the lyrics meant – but she knew too that a river of words would not be able to tell her exactly what made the song sound as it did right then, in that place.”

— from Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”