Author Archives: Shubnum Khan

I was so close to death, I could see inside her mouth.

So she’s sitting at the sea. So she’s sitting at the sea and she’s thinking. She’s thinking she has folded over at the edges and she has become a tiny little box. She would like to disappear, she thinks (already she had started to, fighting at first against it, but […]

I am in the elevator. The foyer is empty. It is 5: 45am. I am wheeling my suitcase.The street has never been this quiet. The sun is just touching the buildings. Just hovering over their edges. But I am not thinking of this. I am not thinking of anything except […]

So she’s on a road. She’s been driving. She’s been driving a long time. She pulls up on the side of the road one day. It is hot. The sun is burning down. She can’t see anyone around for miles. There’s a feeling in her elbows she’s trying to shake […]

So she’s standing on a roof. The sun is not yet in the sky, it’s lighting up from below, pulling out the blue so that everything turns to ice, even in summer. There are cars on the road, probably taxis, their headlights still lit, carrying people coming home from parties, […]

I fall asleepI wake up, I turn my head to the windowlisten to the birds, the sky is bluemore blue than that day at the beachwhen I wore yellowsmiling in pictureslike I was the sun I am 6, sitting on the carpetI am praying to God,asking him to help me, […]

I was sitting in the room in the tower. I was cutting green peppers in the kitchen when I checked my phone. I was sitting in a road side dhaba in Jaipur eating mushroom soup. I was sitting in the back of a restaurant waiting for our lunch. I was sitting […]

Nadine Gordimer writes in Telling Times: Writing and Living: “What is a writer’s freedom? To me it is his* right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he […]