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Lockdown diary / 5-6-7-8
‘mīr’ amdan bhī koī martā hai jaan hai to jahān hai pyāre’ We have gained some perspective in the pandemic. We now know that Italo Calvino would have been more useful as a grocer. Clarice should have been an emergency doctor. And, of course, Mark Rothko should have used his time more wisely and become…
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Lockdown diary / 3-4
We are falling like pieces of domino. We are being buried in mass graves. Our immune systems are killing us instead of them. We cannot breathe. The earth that we thought we had conquered is closed off to us. Tigers are laughing. Fish are dancing in circles. Roses are more fragrant this spring. Sun…
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Lockdown Diary / 2
Red roses and hyacinths are in bloom. There is a cool breeze on this sunny day. I am cooking chicken with preserved lemon and olives. Lola is dancing Salsa and Cha Cha Cha out in the garden. There is a black and white photograph of my grandmother on the wall. The sea is not far.…
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Lockdown diary / 1
I saw 20 million infected bodies. I saw 2 million deaths. I saw my thirty year old body and I saw 2 million deaths and 20 million infected bodies. I saw the body of a baby goat float on the Sundarbans Delta. I saw a crow eating the body of a cow floating on the…
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Joy in the age of apocalypse
When our infected unloved bodies collapse on an empty street in a deserted part of the world, we will laugh like Zorba laughed at the collapse of the mine. Swans will roam the canals of Venice, gold fish will appear in the Thar desert, flamingos will walk the pink streets of Jaipur. We will see…
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The Philosopher’s Nose
The man sitting by the window in a meditative pose was on the verge of solving the mystery of the universe when he suddenly sneezed. That last piece of the puzzle had finally occurred to him in a flash but the faint thought he was about to grasp disappeared into air, lost again. It had…
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Devil’s Daughter V
“क्या यह अधर्म का मार्ग छोड़ दूँ, सार्त्र?” Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle notes that the more accurately one tries to measure the position of a particle, the less accurately one can measure its speed, and vice versa. The more accurately one tries to measure the devil’s daughter’s movement, the less accurately one can measure her…
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Devil’s Daughter IV
The pink public square of Jaipur is now tainted red with the blood of devil’s daughter’s guillotined head – the public is cheering the beheading of the devil’s daughter, the children are sucking on red lollipops sitting on their father’s shoulders. As the head rolls on the street, the public is relieved, they celebrate the…
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Devil’s Daughter III
The Devil’s daughter finds the literary community nauseating. The Devil has taught her that the world deserves contempt and destruction. She once read a tweet that a worker bee makes very little honey in her lifetime and it must be devastating to have it all stolen by humans. The Devil’s daughter is delighted by this.…
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Devil’s Daughter II
The devil’s daughter likes to cook in her spare time. When she is not busy inflicting harm on this fragile world, she also likes to read Clarice Lispector. The devil’s daughter doesn’t like to read anyone else. The devil’s daughter likes red meat and red carnations. The door of her high-rise apartment is painted…