The Bastard of Istanbul

the indifference deep underneath had just whispered to her not to mind other people’s opinions since they would make no difference at the end of the day.

That was the one thing about the rain that likened it to sorrow: You did your best to remain untouched, safe and dry, but if and when you failed, there came a point in which you started seeing the problem less in terms of drops than as an incessant gush, and thereby you decide you might as well get drenched.

How could he take refuge in his manufactured amnesia any longer?

Yet at other times he had been satisfied impersonating a man without a past, a man with a cultivated denial.

It is hard to say. With them she had started a family and a new life with only one direction for it to go in. For her to have a future, she had to become a woman with no past. Her childhood identity was nothing more than morsels of memory, like crumbs of bread she had scattered behind for

“Of course we will welcome your uncle. Family is family, whether you like it or not. We are not like the Germans; they kick their children out of the house at the age of fourteen. We have strong family values. We don’t meet just once a year to eat turkey. . . .”

Sometimes Zeliha couldn’t help but think it had been fortunate that her father died so early, like all other males in their ancestry. A man as dominant as Levent Kazancı would have probably not enjoyed his old age, becoming weak and ill and in need of his children’s mercy.

While the two sides constantly conflicted but also managed to coexist under the same roof, paranormality, crosscutting ideological divisions, was deemed to be asnormal in their lives as consuming bread and water on a daily basis.

Half of her family was staunchly secularist Kemalist, the other half, practicing Muslim.

Thus, it had taken the Kazancı family some time to discover Mustafa’s misdeed. And when they had, though visibly embarrassed by his greediness, his mother had not scolded him, but from then on she had kept extra bowls ofashure in the fridge, ready for him and him alone