Category: Uncategorized
-
some things, some updates
I didn’t write a lot last year, since I am busy working on a longer project. My first manuscript ( a novella) is still without a publisher but not everything has been bad. My translation of Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories, Wolves and other stories, was shortlisted for the PFC-VoW award and my next translation of Rajkamal…
-
Delhi and other forests
Every morning, I look at the swaying palms and an azure swimming pool from my balcony while drinking a passable Darjeeling. I stare at myself in an ornate mirror for some time in a glistening gallery. People walk past me without noticing me. Each morning, I eat a delicately perfumed almond muffin, a croissant, and…
-
What is sadness?
My mother once had a dream soon after her mother’s death. My grandmother is calling from an unknown place to let my mother know she is okay. She asks her to describe the place she is in. All my grandmother is able to answer is: a large building, grey, grey. Moments after, a man disconnects…
-
Our Lady of the Forest
“Just this year, I’d read in the newspaper that researchers from the Geological Survey of India and the Indian Institute of Technology had discovered a new extinct species of hybodont shark in the Jaisalmer Basin of Rajasthan. Over thirty teeth specimens collected from the region proved that the species lived about 160 and 168 million…
-
God and Grotte Chauvet
I have been dreaming about maneless Eurasian cave lions. In these dreams, I see Palaeolithic paintings of horses, eight-legged arguing bisons, extinct rhinoceros, ancient bones of bears, sparkling formations of rocks that resemble tourmalines, and etching of one woman whose head is turning into a mammoth’s. The name of the man who has printed his…
-
The enchanted phrase
The devil’s daughter has been dreaming a long dream about a castle of arguing horses. People who stare at her from below her apartment don’t see a woman but just some slow moving dashes of the colour terracotta, black, and gold. The devil’s daughter is a beautiful sloth, who has been sleeping in the warm…
-
Devil’s Daughter VI
Many years ago, at a concert in Rambagh in Jaipur, the famous Indian singer Hemant Kumar finally got tired of audience requests and announced defiantly to everyone who had bought a ticket, “Hey! You will listen to whatever I sing.” Not too long ago, however not too far from Rambagh in Jaipur, the unknown devil’s…
-
Omnes una manet nox
Yesterday, someone bought a pocket watch that would have been mine at an auction. I will not know the name of the person who now owns it but our fates are now forever intertwined. On the English Crown rests the mountain of light. The fundamental principle of the world is the same as that of…
-
Lockdown Diary / Fragmented notes from the 21st or 22nd day?
In the small towns of the desert, children make houses of sand in the evening. Before going home, they smash those houses of sand with their feet and say, “I created, I destroyed.” In the last rites of most Hindu people, a close family member of the deceased has to take a bamboo stave and…
-
Lockdown Diary / Day I don’t know what
I dreamt about my grandmother. She died 12 years ago and I woke up in tears. I dreamt about her. I dreamt about the old woman I’d met in a Bristol hostel who didn’t want me to go out in the cold. She served me a dinner of three tomatoes, two toasts, and cheese. I…
Beyond Six Rivers 