China and Clay
It was the morning of Christmas Eve – never a big deal in their part of Calcutta – when Putul came in with her mother in a hand-me-down jumper. The Mistress of the Mansion was awake, sweeping the dead leaves in the garden towards the southern wall. She never truly honoured her title, which irked
Battered Bodhrán
I worked at the Battered Bodhrán on Hackney Road. Six days a week, I’d come in at 7pm and leave shortly after we closed at one in the morning. They paid me seven pounds per hour, which added up to roughly a thousand a month, or nine-fifty after National Insurance. Of that, seven-fifty went on [&h
Not this
We’d been arguing for a while already before I became aware of the plant growing over the windowsill, reaching into the room through the open space left by the raised window as the light outside assumed red evening angles and multiplied the dimensions of things, its exploring fronds so distant fro

