Reeti was the daughter of the Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department in Patna. I remembered having seen her father’s name in the papers, but couldn’t recall any specific details because one scandal soon gets swallowed up by another. I met Reeti at Stony Brook where we were both new international students, and, when […]

घर जैसा घर नहीं घर घर था. चार दीवारें थीं. दीवारें तो चार के अलावा भी थीं. सरन को कई बार लगता कि घर में चलते चलते अचानक उसके सामने कोई ऐसी दीवार उग जायेगी जो उसको किसी खास तरफ जाने से रोकेगी. सरन जब चलती तब कुछ ऐसे ही एहतियात से फूँक फूँक कर […]

ला मोरा डोमिना सेंज़ा रिगोले (लव रूल्स विदाउट रूल्स) ” मैं चाहता हूँ दुनिया, वह चाहता है मुझे मसला बडा नाज़ुक है, कोई हल लिख दे।” मैंने उसकी – सी नकियाती आवाज़ बनाते हुए यह शेर पढ़ा और पास की झाड़ी में उसकी दी चॉकलेट और पीले गुलाबों को फेंक दिया. गर्मियाँ जा रही थीं […]

‘Search the sky carefully and you will find the stars hiding there,’ Gorai said. ‘But where, Babu, I can’t see any, Uhunuhhn,’ his son wailed impatiently. ‘Look, there is one. Can you see that purple moving thing? Pay attention to my finger. See where it is, that is a happy star, like you, and you […]

Excerpts from the Novel Nuclear energy is the hubris of humanity, like aspiring to fry bacon on the sun. * On Saturday, 26 April, 1986, at 01.23 am, something went terribly wrong with Reactor Four at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Ukraine. Due to an experiment to try to produce electricity from the residual […]

Outside, in the tamarind tree, sits Sanwala. This room affords a full view of the tree. It’s a room made of glass where I am this moment, and now Suparna is too. Anyone on the tamarind tree can now see there are two women in this room. Suparna and I. In this glass room. Suparna […]

She stands in front of the almirah at one end of the dressing room. Behind her, in the bedroom, people come and go. She can hear the low murmur of their voices, deliberately hushed. But she is alone here, in this alcove-like room that leads to the bathroom beyond. It is a large cupboard, made […]

Majid disappeared from the house one day like a wisp of smoke lost in the sky. Ever since he got up in the morning, up until noon when he left, Malka had no inkling he was about to do this. He’d woken up as usual and asked for some cardamom laced tea. Then he’d sat […]

[her] On this planet, you lived through the lives of others. It was that simple. She knew that from the moment she signed up, signed in. In another century, in another kind of story, she might have signed in blood. Not in this one. This was a bloodless transaction, though no less binding. What it […]

THE STREET: ONE Long after the man with green coconuts has come to my door, holding out a coconut to me with his right hand, his body and head just a little bowed towards me as if this were a ritual, and perhaps it is, between him and me; after the schoolchildren at the church […]