The body knows itself to be pure water or pure burning. — Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Content Note: Abuse, death, harm, mental illness and s*icidal ideation mentions I navigate an illness that makes me a protagonist of clichés. Sometimes, the thought of release is a dream of falling through clouds…

I don’t go to poems for skillful ease or what’s rote. I come seeking an empathic witness, what the Sufi calls ruhul seyrani — the moving soul, frequently illegible. I go to a poem for the kind of strength that doesn’t palter with the set of knots so wrangled at…

The first time A speaks about her inability to cry after starting with antidepressants, the streets of Mumbai are angling for space between Atlantis and Venice. Water has been spilling over the streets with a notoriously bullish vagrancy. We are sitting in the breakout space of my office, closer to…

After my best friend got divorced, she decided she needed a hobby. In a marriage one can either afford a husband or a hobby, she surmised. Since she didn’t have any need for the former at the moment, she settled on the latter. So, she became a tea collector. Tisanes…

After Bhanu Kapil : “To write the disaster as a mode of revision: detection, containment, recovery, reconstitution. Translation: 4 kinds of grief.” Detection “Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.” — Clarice Lispector, from “The Departure of the Train” J is in Wyoming and in one of the pictures she posts…

Psychological horror is a redundancy. Violence for me is intimacy inverted. The mind’s dark train whistles through several cratered fiction in this phantasmagoria. Violence is its own origin and completion. The first thing you learn here is that every room is a palindrome. All that you want to transcend never…

Recently, I have taken to growing coriander and mint in discarded egg-trays. It is interesting how almost all of 90s sci-fi films imagined 2020 to be the year of inter-galactic time travel and flying cars and here we are in the throes of a pandemic, sewing face-masks from our grandmother’s…

Today, We Today we stay home and practice a radical vulnerability. Today we invite a trembling loneliness to the breakfast table and ask if it likes its eggs over-easy or scrambled. Today we begin to unstitch the wringing seam of our chronic apathy. Today we don’t throw in the towel. Unless we…

Content Note : Suicide and Self Harm Mention Finding out that a loved one or a friend online is feeling suicidal or has disappeared via digital channels can be a harrowing experience. Sometimes our heart is in the right place but we aren’t sure of what is the best possible…