The Bowed Head (Poetry)

I fear sadness now,knowing what it can do, turn my head away from it,bow my eyes in the face of it,delicately,at my edges it pecks,but I am covered in layers of tissue,ice on the edge, and yet, yet,at the right moment,in the right breathwith the right sort of eye, I […]

Continue reading

A Moment (from the square)

Once in Madison Square, I stopped a woman with a pram and she took a photo of me next to a sculpture and I was wearing my big jacket and I had to put my bag down, behind me and I kept turning back to check on my bag and […]

Continue reading

Summer in Durban (Sunday Times)

There’s never quite a summer like a Durban summer. Each November I anticipate the heat with growing dread. I begin preparations by checking that the air-conditioning units are working, that their remotes have batteries and that all stocks of insect repellent are replenished. Next everything gets moved to the fridge; […]

Continue reading

Quote (The X Files)

Mulder: I saw things Scully. Powerful things. I saw deep and unconditional love. Scully: I saw things too. I witnessed unqualified hate. That appears to have no end. Mulder: How to reconcile the two? The extremes of our nature. Scully: That’s the question. Maybe the question of our times. (Babylon […]

Continue reading

Quote (on awe)

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The […]

Continue reading

A Moment (from the mountaintop)

We were sitting around a fire at the top of Srayaan and it was cold, more cold than I ever knew and I was sitting so close to the fire I could feel the flames on my fingers and I didn’t care if I got burnt and my back was […]

Continue reading

A moment (from 1998)

Most days in the morning Harish would come and give me a handful of sweets. Sparkles, yellow chappies and if I was lucky green watermelon flavoured chappies. I don’t know why he did it. No I lie, I do. I can still remember the taste of plastic watermelon in my […]

Continue reading

Of 2016

In 2016 I lived in Shanghai I bought a stove and carried it on the subway Gorikhala passed away, I wasn’t there, The last thing she told me, was to take biscuits I learnt that mourning alone is not mourning I travelled alone and told no one I learned a […]

Continue reading

A Moment (From Adolescence)

When I was 11, I cried a whole lot. I don’t know why. Hormones. The idea of death. The idea of life. The idea of losing the ones I loved. I would sob and sob. The inner turmoil a landscape in which I buried myself. 

Continue reading

Rooms of Water (Ajar Press, Summer 2016)

Rooms of Water In a tub, one evening, she steps out and quickly wraps a towel around herself and he asks her, why? Why has she stepped out so fast, so determinedly; why is she behaving like this? And she turns her head, her body still facing away from him, […]

Continue reading