Tagore and I
Rabindranath Tagore – renowned poet and composer, writer and artist, philosopher and polymath – has always been revered as a God-like figure in city-bred middle class Bengali families, and ours was no different. As a child growing up in the US, my understanding of God was limited to Ma’s daily
Medusa
CW: Discussion of Sexual Assault I look at you, but this trick only works if you look back. * In first year, we read the work of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Both believed (or so we were given to understand) that text had a sex; every work written was shot through with man. […]
A Love Letter to the Glaswegian Dialect
“DJ Fucking Badboy here Steamin as Shite Am ’boot ti tell you a story ’Boot ma Friday nite…” This is how DJ Badboy’s ‘Friday Nite’ opens – a track well-familiar to anyone who spent their teens at sweaty Glaswegian house parties. I once made the error of writing about ‘Frid
An Hour After the Phone Call
the woman with a cigarette curses upwards death takes too long she says she grows inside out to house her flaws laughs again despite the walls she laughs despite the persistence she laughs her raspy voice passes through me and flows into another ear ca
Keep
I don’t see it as a word anymore spell out every letter enunciate every syllable begging for kinship from a word so distant, like your grandmother’s saris, the one in the pictures where she smiles unaware of being photographed woven in Banaras, home to poverty and colour, eyes wandering from
Cinema
My grandparents came from a movie-going age – he would call from the office and my grandmother would dress all her children in evening clothes, and wait. At the cinema, the world dissolved into light and sound, the salt of popcorn on your fingertips, and pink soda that fizzed up your nose,
the smell in my room
What if the smell in my room is not the brown skin samosa cold in the corner, grease leaking through wooden floors, or the curry my mother left dead on the desk next to the photos where sunlight from a distant summer is caught between some fat boy’s teeth, laughing with [&h
Bedtime Stories
“Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person,” a girl murmurs to an ex-boyfriend. She is digitised and sports beautiful bangs, a puzzle of pixels dancing across the nation’s laptop screens three weeks into lockdown. But the tragedy of it rings true: falling in love with
At Breakfast
The kitchen tiles are finding their corners in the half-light. In the small flat on the top floor of the house, two women sit at the breakfast table. They’re nurses in the early months of 1933. Two empty porridge bowls have been pushed aside. Two half-drunk cups of tea stand between them on the ta