What does a chuckle at a crime scene do? An anecdote slipped into an interrogation being done for a murder (or two, or more)? It heightens the senses, I realized, after reading this book, and one looks for the clues with an even keener sensorial wand. Because you see, a least expected thing in a … More A family that kills together, sticks together
Simmering. Never stopping. Always simmering. Simmering at the contours of our cognition. Simmering at the edges of our dreams. Simmering at the rims of our comprehension. At the corners of our being but never vanishing. That’s how our past lives. And how do we make eye contact with it? With pride? With temerity? With shame? With a … More The unending dance of ‘listening’
Katabasis – A journey to the underworld, to Hell. It was supposed to take me in, get me hooked. It was supposed to present me a world from where my eyes wouldn’t tear off. A world where wild things happened, unannounced. A precipice that threw me into vertiginous depths wherein everything was alien, sterile black, … More A rewarding journey to Hell
Imagine a town. An alley in it. Houses lining the alley on both sides. You get a peek into each one of them. And find the same story. Different versions but same story. Man in control; woman, his vehicle. He owned her, rode her, flaunted her, pushed her and upgraded to a modern version when … More Small acts of resilience in a tainted alley
Let’s just say that I shall never stop reading Murakami, just how I shall never stop climbing over the fences of this world to steal a peek into a world that was or could have been. No wonder I found a friend in the protagonist of The City and its Uncertain Walls. In love once … More Life on a rhapsody of memory and magic
“The boy had no sooner arrived, people said afterwards, than Balaram had run into the house to look for the Claws. There were plenty of people gathered outside the big house to vouch for it — boys in buttonless shorts, toothless, shrouded widows, a few men who had not found work for the day, squatting … More ALU-ring while striking sharp
American Fiction is a trick. It sits, grinning, when you open the book and find it containing everything it is supposed to cover and yet, seems to be a misfit. You grimace, it grins. But you don’t mind. Because really, you would want it to wear the face of happy despite its struggles, right? It … More More American or More Fiction?
Just like its name, Jubilee is a carnival. And like in every carnival, the lights go up by gobbling many little patches of dark that the audience never gets privy to. But the dark, the shady lingers and adds wheels to its life. What one gets in Vikramaditya Motwani’s luscious, sepia saga set in the … More Vintage Showbiz, Technicolor Rollercoaster
Languorous, nostalgic, sepia… the way best memories are. In Aftersun, a father and his 11-yo daughter take a vacation to Turkey which, in an odd twist of fate, turns out to be the latter’s last with her dad. Twenty years hence, as she looks back upon that trip, she unflinchingly finds all the details lodged … More Recollection of a faded life
At some point in the story, where something scandalous has already unfolded, this paragraph appears involving the two brothers, of which, one is a narrator – Sree didn’t say anything. I’d rather he turned mad. I wanted to both punch him and be punched by him. I felt that if we punched each other just … More Fun Outdoors, Riot Everywhere
SEEMITA DAS 