17 August 2013 I am sitting in a car. The driver (Saleem? Already names are eluding me) is playing some Pakistani song on the radio. It’s too modern, too racey for my father next to him. I sense my impending embarrassment, for who, I’m never sure. Perhaps sensing something, he […]
Paris, 17 February 1903 Dear Sir, … You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me […]
‘It rained furiously that day, the monsoons raking across the land, an electric storm tearing up the sky, and Jenni was wearing a green men’s shirt and shorts, and the rain had soaked it onto her like one long changing and glistening fish-skin. The quad was empty of people, they […]
Land where I flee by Prajwal Parajuly (Quercus, 2014)The Angel’s Share by Satyajit Sarna (HarperCollins India, 2012)Letters to a young Poet by Rainer Marin Rilke (Penguin, 2011, letters written in 1903 – 1908 and translated from German)Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Penguin, 1985)
This was a moment before they flung the autumn leaves at me. Just before they walked us down the mountain from their secret place at the top of Bhatupura. Just a few minutes before they carved our names into the special rocks up there. Where they argued with us with […]
This is what she imagines it must be like to be held by another person: It must be like sleeping. But sleeping held up by someone else whose body becomes your bed, who becomes the tree that you fall into and the earth that holds you still. It must be […]
I reset my bones. Rearrange their order, chess pieces in a cruel game. Realign my jaws so that my smile breaks apart, cracks open my cheekbones like chicken bones on Sunday. A hideous grimace, transition takes hold. I readjust my spine, the vertebrae running another metal track. A grinding shift […]
January reading list completed: Austen’s Emma, Gabriel Josipovici’s Everything Passes, Eula Biss’s The Balloonist, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Albert Camus’s The Plague, Henry Jame’s Portrait of a Lady.
We know what happens to abandoned places in the world. Grass pushes through the concrete, vines climb up the steel. Birds nest in buildings. People seeking quiet; the misfits, the rebels, the dregs and drudges find their way to these places and settle. They spray the walls with their hopes […]
