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…
I donโt dream aboutthe divine spirits of revolutionabout ghosts in the shapesof struggles, protestsand fightsblood and bombs. I donโt dream abouta place whererain is born to weave the rainbowswhere from there is no exileno head is bowedno sinsno sorrow. where every griefeach sufferingin silencemake up slogans. Azadi. Azadi. Azadi I donโt dream aboutan isolated, lonely…
Ends of February “But, I’ve locked the door,โ mothers shout. “This heat is a slitacross the skin!” They tie their hair up in a bun and talk about womenwho brought them flowers day out and day in. In spring, you and I squat on the terrace and dig away in silence.At our heel sticks the…
โMy mother has not stopped talking about it.โ โ This is how Meena Kandasamy begins her soaring poem of a novel titled โWhen I Hit You Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wifeโ. At around 250 pages, the partially-autobiographical narrative is written in the first person and along with being a chronicle…
Salik In creating a world of shared love, a veil of ignorance and distance have often created imaginative realities that have separated us by creating fears and misinformation about one another. A kid in some corner of the world grows up believing that, whites are white because they ran away before God finished making them,…
New Delhi: Mirza Waheed speaks the way he writes: with care. Ask this Kashmiri novelist a question, he looks a tad flustered. He averts his eyes, fidgets with his fingers and weighs his words before he finally answers the query. I spend time writing my sentences, I donโt want to hurry. And I am not a…
NEW DELHI: She writes poetic prose, employs redolent metaphors and evokes utmost admiration for her novelistic virtues. Arundhati Roy is anything but a boring author. The 1997 Booker Prize-winner, who is equally at ease writing scathing essays, says she is a โdisciplined writerโ whose heart lies in fiction as it is a โconnective tissueโ between…