It was the winter penance of the blue frozen men—to hand-pump pure, warm waters from the gritty darkness, while the common supply lines froze and clogged.

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Forever blue Sometimes I wonder: who owns the metaphor? who has an absolute right over how I see what I see under star-lit skies? —a kitten’s shiny plaything around shrines that sleep at night I can’t write a story when I’m not writing a story but when am I not writing about you? it’s funny how you shape-shift how you’re spelled after a vowel in urdu, after a pause you break into a subtext I break into laughter in what Stacy would call mashriqi english mine is bad — I am neit

And So To Dream of You And so to dream of you And to tell those mysterious streams in me That disobediently flow back to you again, To stop and think, Of what you said, My breath on your cheeks, A quiet after spread What you did To sculpt such loneliness In me Among the garden trees Where we once together were And to tell you I have no one else Cast in that lost spell Where to be with you again Is to turn aspen And sing alone With all the trembling nightingales Once B

Now the mango tree has been cut down, confused birds fly around an empty concrete blob. The veena’s strings are rust-coated. No newspapers form a layer under the dingy bed.

Watching Hamnet is like being slowly emptied out from the inside. You keep falling deeper into a sadness that feels like it has no bottom.

Marriage is too old, too sacred to be questioned outright so we keep constructing more “good women" - Women who fight exactly this much and no more. Good girls play with dolls. Good girls get their dolls married. Good girls are not even allowed to pause and imagine that marriage could bring anything except happiness — because that would be inviting the devil. Good girls are taught that marriage is happiness, full stop. Good women wake up early, water the holy plant in the fro

Allow me Oblivion Tight-lipped leaders fly private jets in the same sky that houses the military drones. A country that begs to be understood, or saved, or loved, goes missing on the maps of our busy schedules and under ourmoney machines. The needy look at our luxury bags, and we pluck a ten-rupee note for them. A broken neon sign on a house whispers of flickering human bonds. Tears painted as flowers on the walls, rusted sometimes, retouched sometimes. How often does money m

have walked through the ages, infant earth suckling at my breast. Unfazed by skies peeling their skins in interglacial storms and time warps

A gentle breeze leads metoward a house with no mailbox, no nameplate, yet where the fragrance of my ancestors lingers in the wind. The house with no nameplate A gentle breeze leads me toward a house with no mailbox, no nameplate, yet where the fragrance of my ancestors lingers in the wind. Sometimes, a sudden shower washes the dust from the courtyards, where I can hear my great grandfather’s fading voice on his harmonium. The strings still miss him, he who sang lullabies, wed

I can’t see aspirational value in Diwali labour or any form of domestic labour, because all I have seen of it is exhaustion.

In a rapidly westernizing country, this piece is a call for action. A call to remember and tell these slowly disappearing tales and keep lighting those lamps. So the spirits AND our culture, even though invisible and formless, can be content, that they haven’t been forgotten. Kalighat painting of a Pari As a Bengali who grew up in the early 2000s — perhaps the last pre-internet generation — I grew up with ghosts. And October meant huddling with my dadu under a blanket on the

Even here, where I choose loneliness — Une étrangère in the city of my dreams, my hourglass parts its sands for love. Single Red Rose In an alternate reality, I’m brushing my teeth in Paris; my coffee black, cooling beside the pain-au-chocolate fresh from the boulangerie downstairs that wafts its vanilla sweetness up to my little apartment quotidian-ly. I’m reading Voltaire and so Candide sits alongside, pages flapping in the August breeze because my poems need a little pun

Words come through like tetris blocks trying to stack clean, none of them bespoke to my speech.

Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist and incendiary writer whose works — Woman Hating (1974), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), Intercourse (1987) — exposed sex, marriage, and pornography as tools of patriarchal governance and warzones for womanhood. She named them not as private matters but as explicit instruments of political control, insisting that women’s pain was "public", "structural," and "urgent." I wake inside a border dispute, with curfews imposed on my lim

think I was saying— I am tired. not the kind of tired sleep can fix i dream of recipes or the timeline of english literature

The unoccupied bench beside me shakes along with me, a type of resonance between a living and inanimate object. I realize how everything, when left untouched, joins us in lamenting the absence.

My daughter frowns at me when I don't pick up my mother's call.