“The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.”

“When I'm engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I'm not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.”

“At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope - that the good fortune of others might one day be hers”

“It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.”

“Water and ice made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too...If he had sort all the humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from - and in his view, better than - what it was made of.He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.”

“I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.”

“I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.”

“I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him”

“She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.”

“He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.”

“As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise.”