Laying on a yoga mat, my ear to the floor I can feel the rattle of the metro underground below me, making its way to the river to get to Pudong, rushing through the darkness, rushing under the water, carrying people waiting to get where they need to go, I […]
I will be reading from my novel Onion Tears and discussing some of my new work in Shanghai this week.
So maybe you walk across a bridge and maybe as you walk you see the leaves floating along the water and there are trees on the other side. And maybe you linger on the bridge, throw small stones off the edge, watch them skid across the water. And perhaps it […]
‘I am disappearing.’‘Don’t worry, as long as you have us, we will never let you disappear.’
I see it better now. The threads. Not so simple. Stodgy. The voices run, make patterns in the paper, I see the shadows, the parts where dark deepens and light comes through. I feel more. My sincerity is sincere, the water is in everything now. Half drowned. How can you […]
Standing before a mirror in the wet bathroom something in the music playing makes me recall how I was before. Remembering the past differently now, I no longer recoil at myself, shy away from it, I remember it, embrace it all; how I was, how I gave and I was […]
Last night we nearly missed the train. I ran so hard up all those stairs that I could not breathe. Something deep inside my chest shifted, I thought like a clock, I had broken some spring inside. I could not run anymore. Slowed down. It was a long day. A […]
And finally these pictures go and these dry little questions just sit there without any answers and you’re left with this large heavy pain in you that you try to numb by reading, or you try to ease by getting into public places where there will be people around you, […]
(For my beloved aunt, who passed away this week) Don’t Forget To Take Biscuits Our Gorikhala ate green chillies, popped them in her mouth like sweets When I was 6 and my parents were away, she looked after us for a month, and I watched in wonder as she popped green […]
The Realisation, Ink on paper, Shubnum Khan 2016
