August 2024
In this issue
Contents
Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally…
Book Excerpt from Deccan Queen: Take Two
“Of course he’s not a fool, darling. He’s very clever. He works in a bank. He just likes Khurshed and wanted to show us that he knows about and eats foreign delicacies, and I suppose wanted us to think that it was quite expensive. He was trying to impress us,…
Wake
Sundar’s voice had risen. His shawl had slipped into his lap. He sat there in the wind, in his torn vest. He appeared smaller and shrunk, his thin bones poked out of his shoulders like a sparrow’s. A single teardrop quivered at the end of his mustache. A part of…
Tic tac toe
He didn’t want to put out an ad. Online or newspaper, anywhere. The moment you do that, the phone will begin to ring constantly, he said. All kinds of people calling. Brokers! Who wants to deal with the brokers! He hoped to get someone through word of mouth. There were…
Mother
The only thing you could never bear about your mother was that she’d always been a terrible liar, an atrociously unconvincing one. She’d only half-look..
Sunday Mornings
S is confusing my count of how many wrinkles I have found under my eyes when I smile. He sits at the edge of the bathtub, unbothered about lines, creases, or drooping at the corners of the mouth. I continue with the lined-up bottles of toners and essences and serums…
A Living Otherness
Her deliberate pulling back of her spinning out-of-control thoughts, by latitudes and then by degrees, that bump into her present-day life. Of her stacking and re-stacking of newspapers by date. Of her pushing their edges into alignment. Perhaps, in a bid to guarantee to her life a shape of order…
Ant Colony
You asked me how to kill An ant colony I told you to press firmly on each speck Until you thought they were no longer breathing,
Jonestown
The jungle has reclaimed the camp, a bed of daisies growing now where the pavilion was. The oil drum stands rusting, its remembrance burnt away.
Back Row Crow
Now, still, I’m sitting in the way-back, where I can flick my ashes on the floor and exhale freely.
THE ANTI-TYGER
Anti-tyger Anti-tyger, burning bright, In the anti-forests of the anti-night; What immortal anti-hand or anti-eye Could frame thy fearful anti-symmetry?
Pistachios: A Sestina
In the rain, eat pistachios The girl with the red dress, hands me a lily Secrets of the house—of the blouse—of the bruise I begin eating them and them and them: flax seeds We cannot live in mud of melancholy Like a sticky hot bun, this is all…
Before the Last Sigh
The things we do to keep alive: Whisky, weed, write & lie. We settle, we deny, we Play-Boy. We work & sleep & hunt to avoid the final gasp, life’s last sigh.