One keeps a tea cup. One forgets it. One does not keep a love. One remembers. Tea has been a difficult love – the subtlety of it, which makes one prefer the purposeful habit of coffee. Whereas coffee was an immediate addiction, and if all addictions are love, then love. Tea came later to the […]

They were coloured in raw gold. The lights I got for our first place. A tiny, dingy room, with no breathing outlets, and just enough space to dance as you said. And me – a claustrophobic per excellence who hates taking lifts, who hates travelling in cars and airplanes, did not feel the lack of […]

I have only ever known it this way. Sirens. Knocks. Thuds on the doors. Warrants. No warrants. The crippling feeling you attach to spaces, places, sounds and smell. I have only ever known it this way. A beloved comrade recently said, we should all document our times. We should all document the way we see […]

It has been a month. I have not written a word on it for a month. The last time I spoke to my friends and comrades was before it happened. And since then the absolute curfew, and other personal clampdowns have allowed me no news. And, in a way, I don’t want to get it […]

I want to write corny prose tonight. I want to write the self I’ve slowly effaced for political consciousness, for civil acceptance, for what Mercuse would quote as ‘public reason.’ I want to get back to that self, like I did once as I assumed Audre Lorde’s pen and wrote an open letter to a […]

The trick has always been so – to divulge, to make weak, and then to seek out. It was eternal – the struggle that is gender, and there really was no surprise there. Practice. Dissociate. Repeat. The surprise, however, was on the other – how familiar and familial ties developed with someone like Ananda Da. […]

‘Once you sleep, everything would be alright.’ The arteries would have burst, if it were a little too longer. I could see the tears even before they materialized into their being. Too loud a music, too loud a silence. Even in the nightmares, I would keep hoping. Truth be told, we have never known each […]

S turned into boxes. Large and small. White. Because the people at the post only take white boxes. So S transformed into boxes. There were bits and pieces of S left, still. A handwash here, a basket there. All these pieces combined could not make up for S. Her worn out flippers, her favourite biscuit […]

Happy Ending. Happy Ending has always seemed to me a paradox. The fact that something is ending – how can an end be happy? If the end is happy, then, does that necessarily mean the event (to which there’s an end now) was not happy in itself? Or does the happy event end happily with […]

When you leave, you think of the most intense, the most important, the most senile. At most, you think you are going to miss the little things in life – those which formed a part of your everyday. And you do, miss them. What seldom occurs then is the really little things. The rare conversations; […]