Who Will Marry Me Now?
Violence, justice, and a lot of talk of violence and justice. In the one year since the December 16 Delhi gang rape, young women across India have been thinking hard about their precipitous lives. But how precipitous are they, really? A Rashomon report on a Kurosawa year. Image Credit: MS Gopal __ Arvind remembered...
Decoding The Harappan Diet: What Did Our Ancestors Eat?
The only kind of food writing I enjoy doing is the vaguely sociological kind. Here is my first venture into the definitely archaeological variety. One day in 2010, Arunima Kashyap discovered a garlic clove. A 4,400-year-old garlic clove. Kashyap, then 34, and her colleagues had been digging for two months by then. Sometimes, they...
The Pot that Broke Below a Hundred Other Pots
Towards the middle of Aaraam Thampuran, a 1997 movie with Malayali actor Mohanlal in the lead, the hostile villagers are steadily awakened to the true ‘noble’ roots of the bad man who has bought the big house. The villagers – and the audience – are given broad hints that he isn’t just the goonda from Bombay they thought...
Another Short Story: The Trinity
My new short story in nplus1mag.com When had I started carrying a white lace kerchief? We used to call those kinds of girls Kerchief Kumaris. We used to have names for everyone. And everyone had names for us. We were goddesses. Meena, Annie, and Nayantara. Even our names were like heroines. Meena and Annie...
In A Strange Turn of Events: I’m In A Power List
I’m in the Femina list of India’s 35 most influential women under 35. PS: And in this TimeOut list
A New Short Story: Teresa
LAST NIGHT I DREAMT of Teresa again. My dreams are realistic. When I’m worried about money, I dream about money. When I need to pee, I dream of going to the bathroom. Teresa. Who will tell me why I dream of Teresa? I’ve only seen her alive for a few minutes. Never told anyone that I...
The Ladies Finger
In college my friends and I ran a weekly paper called the Enthu Pataki. It was an addictive collaboration and I don’t think I ever had so much fun in journalism since. Straight out of college some of us hoped to run a version of Enthu Pataki for realz. We had meetings, lists, plans but...
What’s so funny, girl?
I’m a little baffled when people say feminists have no sense of humour. I’d be less surprised if someone told me feminists laugh too much. To me feminism is not the reasoned explanation that follows after I’ve stopped laughing. It is the reason I’m laughing. However, I do sympathise with male and female amateurs who...
A new short story: The Singer and the Prince
Thrilled to bits to have a short story in the very cool and utterly self-possessed American magazine nplusone. It begins thus. “How did the singer meet the prince? In all stories of love, we must know how the lovers met, how they met again, how they almost missed each other and, sometimes, how they...
The Martian Sends Postcards Home
Turn up at Ranga Shankara one evening. You are given a topic. 24 hours later, you hand in a script for a 10 minute play. You watch as your script is assigned directors and actors by lottery. Two days later you turn up and watch slack-jawed as the whole shebang goes live. 3 Kannada...
An Offal Love
When we were children living in Palakkad,” my friend said, “my mother used to drive to Coimbatore to buy English vegetables like cabbage.” This is one of many grudging responses I heard when I evangelised about my fantastic culinary experience in Coimbatore. Two weeks before setting out from Bangalore, I’d have been among the...
This month in Elle: Why I Write
(In March, Janice Pariat, Tania James, Supriya Dravid and I were featured in Elle. We each have a short piece about why we write. Here’s mine) 1. My nephew is telling me a story. He is 3 and a bit. Currently the story (Joycean in length and references) is about Monkey. In a few minutes you...