Previous
Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn)
Padmini is a 25-year-old Indian immigrant living with her parent’s cousin Aishwarya in Jackson Heights, Queens. Padmini loves theoretical mathematics, but she’s studying for a master’s degree in financial engineering and working on Wall Street to ensure that she receives good job and a work visa after graduation. Though Padmini hates her job and dislikes New York City—she only works and studies there to fulfill her family’s expectations—Queens chooses her as its avatar at the city’s birth. Just as becoming an avatar gives Bronca knowledge of history, becoming an avatar gives Padmini an intuitive mathematical and metaphysical understanding of the Woman in White’s attacks. After Padmini saves her neighbor Mrs. Yu’s grandsons from the Woman’s tendrils, Manny and Brooklyn locate Padmini and recruit her to help them save the city. When Bronca explains to Padmini, Manny, and Brooklyn that cities’ births destroy neighboring dimensions, Padmini responds passionately, calling herself and the other avatars “mass murderers.” Yet she quickly decides that she prefers to destroy other dimensions rather than allow the Woman in White to destroy humanity. Meanwhile, when Hong and Paolo explain to Padmini, Manny, Brooklyn, and Bronca that New York City’s avatar must eat them to save the city, Padmini initially reacts with horror and disgust—though she eventually decides to sacrifice herself to save humanity. Luckily, though, saving humanity doesn’t end up requiring such a sacrifice. The novel concludes with Padmini, Manny, Bronca, Brooklyn, Veneza, and New York City’s avatar celebrating their victory over the Woman in White on Coney Island. Padmini’s inconsistent application of utilitarian principles—she’s unwilling to sacrifice billions of humans to save billions upon billions of sentient entities in other dimensions, yet she’s willing to sacrifice herself to save billions of humans—suggests that the novel’s protagonists are not acting according to logical, consistent ethical principles.
Padmini Prakash (Queens) Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Padmini Prakash (Queens) or refer to Padmini Prakash (Queens). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7
Quotes
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11
Quotes
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
Chapter 13
Quotes
“Millions of lives in exchange for four?” She shrugs. It looks nonchalant but isn’t. “That ain’t even a debate.”
Chapter 15
Quotes
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
Chapter 16
Quotes
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
Get the entire The City We Became LitChart as a printable PDF.
Padmini Prakash (Queens) Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Padmini Prakash (Queens) or refer to Padmini Prakash (Queens). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7
Quotes
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11
Quotes
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
Chapter 13
Quotes
“Millions of lives in exchange for four?” She shrugs. It looks nonchalant but isn’t. “That ain’t even a debate.”
Chapter 15
Quotes
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
Chapter 16
Quotes
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
