I hear a low rumbling noise, the same my grandmother so dreaded of. They must be at it againโ the worldโs largest pickle factory, deftly manufacturing history. The news of his death lies deserted on the streets; Newsstands are selling the first snowfall in Kashmir. I see the sinews of the earth, moving beneath my…
The grief of my country is sitting in the corner of my stomach. A pigheaded bacteriumโ it is going nowhere. A garrison in my small intestines;a dogged settler army of worms laying ambush. I cannot throw up, there are razor-wires dipped in my throat. The goddamn grief blocked! From the broken spoon,I have been eating Herr Coloniser! I will digest you; your bones with fluoric acidsโwill dissolve you in…
How often do you actually remember him? You left the dessert half-eaten when suddenly his smile flashed in front of you. I do not. Instead, I devour my meals, my days, I spend engrossed in books where lovers unite in the end or don’t. Or die. Or are victorious against a tyrant. Someday I’ll know,…
Sri Aurobindo, in his seminal essay The Future of Poetry, observes that “Truth of poetry is not truth of philosophy or truth of science or truth of religion only because it is another way of self-expression of infinite Truth so distinct that it appears to give quite another face of things and reveal quite another…
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged lightThis is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,We had set out in sheer longing,So sure that somewhere in its desert the sky harbouredA final haven for the stars, and we would find it.We had no doubt that night’s vagrant wave would stray towards the shore,That the heart rocked…