The Forty Rules of Love is a wise, joyous page-turner... and one that speaks urgently to our war-ravaged times.

This is love-not what we say to each other but what we not say. Sometime it just one look exchange. Sometime one word. But underlining everything we say or not say, something else. Something heavy and deep, like when we in bed and looking into each other's eyes. For six years, everything between husband and me was on top, like skin. Now it hidden, like bone and muscle. [] He care for me now. He finally see me. And he like what he see.

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.

She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.

Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.

And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.

Her hands were empty now, as empty as her heart, which itself was a coconut shell with its meat scooped out.