Category: Uncategorized
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Devil’s Daughter / Issued in public interest
I have embraced my new position as a ghoul. It was long time coming, for the daughter of a devil (more often than not) turns out to be a devil herself. For anyone interested, the discovery was not startling and rather liberating. Like a criminal, I am now against the world, free to do whatever…
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Mound of the Dead
The famous Hindi writer Rangey Raghav has a novel on the Indus Valley civilization. It is called मुर्दों का टीला, or Mound of the Dead. Apart from describing the long defunct civilisation, this phrase can also be used to aptly describe modern men. To encounter the modern man is to encounter a dead body. To…
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An incomplete list of all the things I am
The first thing I am is not good at mathematics. I am not intelligent. I am unmarriageable because I had no interest in cooking, wore shorts, and read books like Dracula. I am ruined because I wore perfume when I was nine. I am too domestic because I eventually started enjoying cooking. I am intelligent…
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The immortal intellectuals
In an important part of the world, right next to a colony of cockroaches, is a group of people who claim to have understood the ephemera of existence, their beautiful faces glowing in the aureate evening light with melancholy, hands holding the poetic letters of an incomplete love, their feet perfectly arched in a sorrowful…
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Notes on love / A found letter by Ingeborg Bachmann
Life is not going to accommodate us, Ingeborg; waiting for that would surely be the most unfitting way for us to be. Be—yes, we can and are allowed to do so. To be—be there for another. Even if it is only a few words, alla breve, one letter once a month: the heart will know…
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Tale of a dazzlingly boring girl
She is in bed, her neck is swollen, and the ubiquity of mirrors in her home suddenly bothers her. She doesn’t want to look at herself. She doesn’t want to do anything except talk about her illness. She realizes that no one wants to hear her talk about it continuously. She is dazzlingly boring. To…
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A discovered note
An unknown woman’s suicide note in an unknown corner of the world: there was nowhere in the world one could live like an animal.
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Notes on love / on disturbance
I find ridiculous the contemporary idea that love must exist without disturbance, without inconvenience. That love must only be continued if there are no consequences, damage, “cost” (to borrow the favoured business term). When a person extends her hand into the water, the water is disturbed. When the whisk goes into eggs, the eggs are…
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My Heart Doesn’t Want
From the city palace, the ghost of the disabled emperor still gazes at the city from his wheeled sofa. The city’s colour alternates depending on the colour of the stained window. The secret is that one who goes into the Pichola emerges from the Vltava. I wrote a short essay on the state I call…
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The Tale of Basil
I recently started researching how to prune basil – my interests are more domestic than I would like to admit, nothing pleases me more than cooking, or planting a new herb, or the chance to not leave home – and it seemed like now was the right time. Basil must be regularly pruned and must…
Beyond Six Rivers 