The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame - it was just fate and the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed. Page 15

Presumably Saeed had been warned of Indians, but he didn't seem wracked by contradictions; a generosity buoyed d him and dangled him above such dilemmas. Page 86

The whole system seemed to favor, in fact, the criminal over the righteous. You could behave badly, say you were sorry, you would get extra fun and be reinstated in the same position as the one who had done nothing, who now had both to suffer the crime and the difficulty of forgiving, with no goodies in addition at all. And, of course, you would feel freer than ever to sin if you were aware of such a safety net: sorry, sorry, oh so sorry. Page 219

Worst are those who think the poor should starve because it's their own misdeeds and past lives that are causing problems for them... The fact was that no one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure as so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell. Page 219

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, nose, enveloping their faces. The black climbed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kanchenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink... each of them separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this... how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. Nothing so sweet, dear friends - Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank. Page 244

This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure. Page 303