Shamini Flint

Quotes

1. Now he was in a holding pen with various members of the Kuala Lumpur criminal fraternity and they scared him [...] They ranged from a Chinese gang member, whose dragon tattoo foraged up his arm and curled around his neck, to a large, [sic] Indian man with a jet-black moustache and pocked-marked face, brooding in a corner. The majority of his cellmates appeared from their accents to be Indonesians, part of the large contingent of illegal immigrants in Malaysia. [...] At least, he thought, the government should be proud that their efforts to integrate the various races in Malaysia into a cohesive society were bearing such fruit. It was a very multi-racial group that was penned in together.

2. 

   Singh was distracted by a strong and unpleasant smell that suddenly pervaded the airplane. He sniffed cautiously, protruding nostril hairs quivering. It didn’t smell like burning fuel or melting plastic or any of those olfactory sensations that would have caused him to make a dash for the exits.

   He turned to Mrs. Singh who was reading the in-flight magazine with the disdain of one who preferred to Google her subjects rather than have them pre-selected by an editor.

   “What’s that stink?” he whispered.

   “India,” she answered succinctly and then turned her attention back to a gleaming picture of the Taj Mahal resplendent in its manicured gardens, its reflection shimmering in a lake ...

3. 

   Sometimes, if you want to protect something you care about, you have to take extreme steps.

4. 

   Her life had all the ingredients of a Bollywood movie except the happy ending.

5. 

   And yet, the inspector thought, Kuala Lumpur had a certain something. It was difficult for him to put his finger on what it was exactly. There was a sense of freedom perhaps, of anarchy even, that Singapore so sorely lacked. Perhaps it was the lack of deference to authority, the physical space, the ability to take a step back and enjoy a moment of quiet that lent Kuala Lumpur its atmosphere.

6. 

   Women like her, conservative and narrow-minded, were quite willing to believe that someone arrested for pilfering was congenitally pre-disposed to commit more serious crimes, eventually and naturally culminating in murder. In her view, fixating on the evidence for an individual crime was just pedantic. Mind you, Singh had met high court judges with the same attitude. He wondered for a moment why his wife had such faith in the police force in the abstract and so little confidence in his role in it.

7. 

   [S]o many languages were spoken in Malaysia that quite often the wheels of justice ground to a standstill for the lack of an interpreter who could restore the tower of babel to a court of law.

8. 

   He would avoid her relatives in the same way he’d always done – by sitting irascibly in a corner and allowing their waves of curiosity to wash over him.

9. 

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

10. 

    In the foreground, right on the waterfront, was a massive pastel yellow arch – the Gateway of India.

    “It was built to welcome King George V when he visited India,” explained his well-briefed, Google-friendly wife.

    “They didn’t think a bunch of flowers would do?” asked [Inspector] Singh.

    “Anyway, it was only completed twelve years after the visit.”

    Singh grinned. That was the sort of managerial incompetence that he found amusing.

11. 

    He knew from his own experience in Singapore that the further up the ladder one got, the more the job was about politics and statistics than actually dealing with crime.

12. 

    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.