Category: Uncategorized
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On the desert and its songs
I was smoking a cigarette lying on the sands of the Thar when I heard, or remembered, a Rajasthani folk song in which a woman is telling other people, most likely her female friends, about how she could have died the night before when an enemy scorpion bit her. (In the desert, after all, there…
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on sonata dreams
On the banks of Ganga, you came back to me. As I looked at my own hands, moving them around out of boredom, stretching its joints, bringing them in and out of shadow, I remembered how elegantly you used to type: from a distance, without my glasses, it always seemed to me that you were…
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On the many songs about India
I recently saw an exhibition, of photographs, by a British photographer who photographs India’s abandoned beautiful spaces and edits into each image an animal, sometimes two or three. So it seems like only swans, cows, monkeys, elephants, tigers, etc. inhabit the country, living in these mysterious ornate buildings: a deserted planet which, after its original…
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On the memories of a fevered mind
Well past midnight, in the middle of the now empty M.I. Road, unable to drive further, I sat inside my car staring at the oppressive light of those five halogen lamps and thought how strange it was that I felt so beautiful under my burning hot skin, imagining what it would be like if it’s…
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Stray Notes on Days and Dreams
Lying on my bed in the warm glow of the afternoon sunlight, which is now soft but sometimes still unbearable, I started watching, without my glasses, mango leaves move ever so slightly in a blur of deep green and light, and kept watching even when the wind picked up and the whole tree started swaying.…
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On men, guns, and cameras.
After my car broke down last night just outside the city, I walked into this strange lone building looking for some help. The building was empty, only a big room painted red was filled with men, only men: they were beautiful, their hands stilled in graceful positions, their bodies stuck in a slanted rhyme, their…
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A minor update of sorts.
My review of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s brilliant and humorous novel Mirages of the Mind (Aab-e-Gum in Urdu) was published in the August issue of Words Without Borders. Goes without saying but still: read it if you want.
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On dreams
My dear, remember the time I used to write to you about my dreams: just last night I dreamt about a woman talking to me in words I had never heard, her pink lips moving through her sheer black veil looked so beautiful in the soft sunlight that I wanted to photograph it but just…
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On Staying (II)
Looking at my somewhat grim face in the mirror, I remembered what a writer from New York had said to me about the city that is home. Sitting across from the table, he told me that Jaipur had made him sad. It was the first time he had witnessed Indian poverty and he could not…
