On Love, and Dosas
It’s 10am on a Saturday. An unfamiliar crowd trickles in. Strings of couples, each having breakfast at my favourite South Indian restaurant in Bombay, each blissfully lost and painfully comfortable with the other. They share dosas and coffees, aspirations and casual morning slippers. Is there anyt
Easter Weekend
When time stopped, at some point between frost on the grass and the break of summer, there was a day when we all went to the river. I packed my swimming costume, optimistically, given it was the end of March. I was in a good mood, smoking again, my body was so wonderfully […]
Renaissance Lives in the Songs of Hozier
Aside from the catchy, smouldering, melancholic and husky tunes, I’ve always loved the rough ‘subject-matter’ of Hozier’s music – singing about Idealism in prison, and Chivalry fallen on his sword. It really is something else. Hozier boldly name-drops terms of immense cultural weigh
Body at Stake
Boys will be boys—my hands are tied! A witch, they scream, she’s the devil’s crook, She’s seasoned with sins. I burn—I cook. My body is here! Mine! And naked upon the stake. So, gird your loins for the big strip tease: The fire and myself at one, at ease. A biting
Anna and Mary
Anna put her index finger to her mouth, found the sore molar and pressed down on it. The layer of phlegm in the back of her throat was still faintly sweet. She put the jar of honey back in the cupboard. As a child, she had ground her teeth as she slept; she couldn’t help […]
Do We Need Backbone?
To read Moby Dick is to learn that Herman Melville really cares about whales. Not in what they represent, not for how they make us feel: whales matter as whales. In this sense, he is a bit of a surprise to readers whom secondary education has trained to search for the point behind the premise. [&hel
Constant Screaming: A Review of The Zone of Interest
“Are you sleeping well?” asks the white-coated SS doctor. “Yes,” replies Rudolf Höss. Jonathan Glazer, the man behind Sexy Beast, a heist film about a retired English gangster with skin sunburned to the colour and texture of red crocodile leather; Birth, in which a ten-year-old (graphically
Resurrecting Killed Darlings: “Write, Cut, Rewrite” at the Weston Library
Joan Didion needed a drink before she edited her writing. She admits as much to an audience packed into the New York Public Library one day in November 2011. “The drink loosens me up enough to actually mark up my work, you know”, she twangs as she gazes, unblushing, into the crowd. Dry humour is
