PROSE
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Milk, Sugar and a Model Test Paper
PERVIN SAKET
I try to complete my last REM cycle, but someone’s scooter needs 17 kicks to gargle out of its slumber. Which is just as well, because I’ve promised to meet Sooni Aunty this morning.
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Treading Water
PIYA SRINIVASAN
At college in the national capital, I would wring my hands in despair at the news of the annual devastation caused by the Assam floods. It was around this time that I became painfully aware of the hierarchy of outsiders in Assam.
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Vanishing Point
RANJIT LAL
For most of us, the doomsday warnings simply go in through one ear and straight out of the other. But when you realise that you’ve probably seen this or that living creature, probably for the last time ever…well, it makes you sit up a bit with a sense of disquiet.
ANGSHU DASGUPTA
Memory of the Elephant
After my grandmother died, my mother and I went for a month-long holiday to a village near Kalimpong. It was a tiny village high up on a mountain, an accretion of small houses huddled together. A narrow footpath led away from the huddle, climbing, dipping, then climbing again. In a glade at the end of this path was a cottage, our home for the month, rented from a family who had moved away to Darjeeling.
I was a little over twelve years old, and until then, I had led a sheltered life under my mother’s watchful eye. I was shocked when she declared that I was old enough to wander on my own, as long as I was home before dark.
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A Tribe without a Lineage
SHALIM HUSSAIN
Miyah poems were initially being circulated solely through social media, though in the years that followed, Miyah poetry would be heavily anthologised. It was all fun and games until May Day 2016 when the first article on these poems was published.
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Fin-ears
NANCY ADAJANIA
The clouds had clotted, gone red. The sky split open and unburdened itself in a gigantic puke. From its mouth exploded fish fresher, more radiant, than any this sea-kissed city had ever seen.
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Excerpt from Spirit Nights
EASTERINE KIRE
The darkness continued. But after Tola’s dirge singing, it was as though a cloud had been lifted from people’s minds. They were still trapped inside their homes but they were making the effort to think brightly.
MAMTA SAGAR
Marching For Communal Harmony and Peace/The Forest
On the 30th of April 2022, a group of people including lawyers, activists, writers, poets, social scientists, Dalit-, women- and LGBTQIA-groups met in Bengaluru’s Freedom Park to protest against Islamophobia generated and spread across the country – especially in coastal Karnataka – by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation.
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From the humble to the humongous: Recasting of sacred structures along the Konkan coast
SMITA DALVI
People see and come across them everywhere, all the time, never taking any particular notice other than them being places of daily worship. They certainly don’t find a mention in any of the volumes on religious architecture of the region. I began to take a closer interest…
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Time Trails
RANJIT HOSKOTE AND SUKHADA TATKE
Have you heard the river? Listened to the stories she tells you when you place your ear to the bank, your whole body? Once you get past the murmur, the susurrus, the dog bark, the wicked laugh of the gull, the creepy-crawly up your bare leg, the din overhead, the child bounding after his dog friend; you shut out the world, and a riverine voice speaks to you.
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Excerpts from mai: silently mother
GEETANJALI SHREE
We realised later that we had simply not understood what was happening. Then even later we realised that we had actually understood something even while deciding that we had not, but there was so much more that eluded us then, and later, and now. We used our eyes, for instance, to see only the shadow, when there was a whole figure we should have seen that cast that very shadow.