May 2023
In this issue
Contents
My marriage to Madhubala
All I got to know was that the bride’s name was Madhubala, even though I preferred Vaijanti Mala’s magical moves and Sadhana’s chic haircut.
Room for Change
I pulled my shirt down, opened the door, and rushed out, with Kaira following closely behind, having hastily buttoned up her oversized shirt.
Because He Can
She hugged her knees to her chest and thought about what one of the newscasters said, that O.J. might have been framed. She thought about all the people in the street around his house, about whether they thought he did it, about whether they cared.
The Renamed
She sat down, anger gone. Dissipated. Like a promised storm that never lands after the clouds are blown away by the wind. Alina didn’t go to Hira’s funeral. She would never open that chat again. After her phone broke, she didn’t throw it away. She packed it in a box, tissue paper at the edges and put it away in a drawer.
“PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”
“Please do not touch”, Or on labels where a child’s game lie paralysed in description, Where people come and gawk and say, this is spectacular!
An Everyday Dementia
I hear a frog croak in the dishwasher I wash a single memory down the sink look up above the toilet bowl a painting of a housefly eating the head of another housefly
ञ
Call me Śiva, Call me Hijra, Call me Lucifer, Circe, Crow, Call me Ishmael, Hecate, Kālī, Call me Coyote, Loki, Toad.
Mom
Winter sound is blue and bell sudden. Shadows are knife blades. I was her nurse, butt wiper and cook. Still strong enough to hurl a bowl
Mother Tongue
it slipped then through the cracks lost on the highway of a life lived in layers of wanderings.