There’s a moment in A Lot like Love, when Amanda Peet is watching helplessly as the man she loves kisses someone else at the end of the New Year count down and as she watches in despair, Ashton Kutcher suddenly rushes in, grabs her sorry face, pulls her into his […]
I like, when a piece, begins to form and days after beating your head against a wall and finding every other thing to do and check, you finally at your seat, begin to write and finally the piece is flesh and you know how to clothe it and you know […]
On rainy days in the village, N and I would press our faces to the window and watch the mountain disappear as the clouds rolled in. The world was a quiet whispering thing then and we stayed indoors lest we be carried away.
There are things you learn as you get older, that you do not learn from books about how to be a human being. For instance you learn not to say certain things, you learn to avoid certain people, you learn that it is better to be quiet, that it is […]
I still find it difficult and most days I do not think about it, but on the days that I do, when I see something or hear something or remember something (I hide from my memory now, play a game, always evading its fingers) it is hard, harder than I […]
Once we were walking in Chandi Chowk and someone was opening mandarins and handing them to me and they were small and sweet and we passed a movie theatre that was showing Krrish 3 and there was smoke in the air and noise on the streets and my head was […]
Dear Abbajaan, When I was a little girl you would tell me about the apple trees in Jannat. In Jannat anyone could wish for anything you said. If you wanted an apple, an apple tree would just appear and the fruit on it would be so sweet and so juicy, […]
Once, on our way to a funeral in Johannesburg I was sitting on my mother’s lap and my head was full of all sorts of normal things, not funeral things and I made a joke about my friend and asked if we could visit her and my mother, her face […]
At her daughter’s funeral she repeatedly banged her head against a wall in her grief. On seeing my mother she clung to her and said, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Her grief, like her joy, was a tidal wave that nothing could contain.
