Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel The House with a Thousand Stories (Penguin, 2013) is about many things: women, marriage, fear, guilt, purity and xenophobia, alienation from the state, language and its transformative properties, and a variety of oppressions. When Pablo, a young man raised in Guwahati, returns to the village of Hatimura in remote Assam, he becomes witness […]

Nothing wears its cape of spring like

the magnolia tree in their yard does

after waking from the naked ugliness

of its gnarled, rough stumps of winter…

Do geckos know no vertigo

that they cling to the ceiling

to grope, entwine, mate violently,

unafraid of the waiting fall?

Then, along came Uma. It had a lot of expectations attached to it – the actors are among the best of their generations, and the director Tsering Ritar Sherpa is a pioneer among his peers, for the breadth of his vision and for his courage to make fiction-films like Mukundo and Karma.

Standing in queue, with a cheque in hand, waiting for the tortoise-crawl to the counter, the back of the head of the man standing before me becomes an intimate: in the ten minutes since I took my spot before it, surely, I have become more familiar with it than the brief glimpses the man might […]

After a very long time, I looked at a full-length mirror. A surface that could reflect the length and the breadth, the quirk and cookie, the flaw and full. I stood before a familiar face – a wall of mirrors in a theatre workshop. I saw myself there. A newly acquired scar broke the right brow […]