Known Turf

Sometimes I look to you, minority citizen, to understand what it means to have faith in the motherland.  There was a time when many of y...

I often get approached by aspiring authors who want to know how to get published, and what my own experience has been like. So I thought I ...

I have been searching online for the English translation of "thithak" – "baulk" comes closest but it does not quite c...

"Gulab is restrained, ephemeral, delicate. Her characters leave much unsaid; there are telling silences and crucial pauses. Her prose...

I have a new graphic short story in this great new anthology of feminist speculative fiction  Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean .  It is targete...

What does it mean to "indulge" in a food culture that has made sugar and grease the norm? Today, you can get a bar of cheap ch...

Dear Santa, Compliments of the season. I don't usually write, but I've been a very good girl this year. Worked hard, met deadlin...

Mr Mac And Me, set in 1914, neatly blends fiction with history as it tells the story of a young boy with a twisted foot and a talent for dr...

We can be buried on land or at sea, or burnt, or left to the vultures. We can turn into dust and manure, or we can line the digestive tract...

Seshadri, born to Tamil- and Kannada-speaking parents, did not study Indian literature or the epics, but as a teenager in the US, he did en...

Indian woman wearing traditional Indian clothes (before 'western' influences hit mainstream sartorial choices): Exhibit 1 Ind...

It could be that I'm blinded and deafened by the deliberate sexiness of the new Bollywood. But I often feel like feminine desire as de...

  Gulab tests the limits that our mind sets upon a ghost’s powers. If you see her as a woman clinging to life, there is not much to fear...

This is the latest comic I wrote for the Mint . I have been thinking for a while now about the inadequacy of our secondary and sen...

The best thing about being able to look at a banned book in hindsight is that it also offers a kind of foresight. The short stories – ...

I stack books in double rows on each shelf so that an invisible row sits behind the visible row. Some shelves are three thick. I’ve also b...

I was invited to read and talk about love at the Godrej India Culture Lab book club event in February 2013. I had upheld love as the onl...

Peoples’ political and cultural choices are directly impacted by history, or whatever little scrap of history is allowed into our narrative...