Known Turf

I have a new essay in Ananke magazine's 10th anniversary special edition. My essay is titled 'Against the Calculus of Skin'. I ...

CAN A WOMAN tell the unvarnished truth about what happened to her? This is the central question at the heart of Anand Ekarshi’s Aattam (The ...

In Western fairy tales, a witch is a scary woman who might ‘eat’ you, cooked or uncooked. In South Asian fairy tales and folklore, she might...

Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (Aleph 2023) is just out. This is a new edition of Known Turf (2010), with a fresh Introduction...

Eight years ago, I had my first essay accepted in the Griffith Review. ' Embodying Venus ' was a meditation on women's bodies an...

Freedom is not simply a matter of being fed. The technical lack of a cage also does not define freedom. She may be trained to perform on sta...

Here is an extract from the first chapter of City of Incident . Please read, and then please go find the book and buy it and read the whole ...

When the traffic light turned red, kids would dart up. Peering into the auto-rickshaw, tapping at the cab window, they offered a dozen roses...

Here's a new short story, recently published in The Charles River Journal. The story is called 'Jhimmi'. It was written after I...

We like to believe that justice is served when a murderer goes to the gallows. Death offers closure. It also shields us from the awful trut...

मेरे नाना साहब की लिखी एक बहुत पुरानी नज़्म. उस ज़माने में वो लखनऊ यूनिवर्सिटी में पढ़ रहे थे. उम्र क़रीब 22 साल रही होगी (नज़्म पे तारीख़ 1938 ल...