A 9-year-old boy is witness to rows of coffins from his mountain house window. Through his innovative Blues, short dirges straight from the heart, he pines for his soldier father caught in the crossfire of Russia-Ukraine conflict, and pays tribute to the...
With a view to bringing voices from faraway places, especially of the marginalised and the forgotten, we have had poetry, stories and reports translated from...
The death of Wajiri did not make it to the local news, nor did the police check on her disappearance. It was just another case, a statistic best forgotten.
They’re my children who experienced the warmth of my womb for nine months. Today, I can’t even say they’re mine. They’re Raja Khan’s children. Not...
Ruskin Bond, India’s best-loved author, turned 88 on May 19. He recollects a spooky incident that happened during his days as a struggling freelance writer...
For Hasan, a man seemingly in his mid-thirties, roads often lead to more roads. An encounter with Vikram near a temple on an October night ends with a strange...
It must be difficult, having to worry if you could die honourably, if you could die with dignity, not asking, not begging, for the pain to stop. For if you...
‘I am not comfortable in the company of women, to the extent that I had agreed to a nikah about a year and a half ago but had not made any arrangements to...
It was her quiet and fiery resilience that had attracted me to her: she was glorious, mysterious, and almost unattainable. Even in the throes of desire, a part...
Everybody—her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, children and the servants in the extended family—huddle around her on the carpet, enchanted by the...
“How was your day?” I ask my wife as if I can still ruin it...
Mr. Bose, a psychotherapist with a practice of over 20 years, would get a stream of middle-class urban clients, but Sunita was different. The first couple of...
As Ma laid her healing hand on her back, Anisha felt like she had magically inserted some fallen, missing piece of a little bone back into her column of...
He had thought of her as she was, as her name spoke of: a single star. And now the star had burnt out, consumed by the vastness of the galaxy.
The short story by Mayabhushan Nagvenkar, a writer and journalist based in Goa, is part of an unpublished collection titled Anjuna Tales
A seductive tale of love, marriage, desire, promiscuity, quirks of fate and submission, emblazoned with complicated family history.
For youngsters in Kashmir, the unprecedented lockdown of 2019 was a tough time: the phone lines were dead and they couldn’t get to whisper sweet nothings...
Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story ‘Das Rupay’ is the tale of a 15-year-old pushed into the flesh trade by her mother. In his early days in Mumbai, Manto...
When my father invited the tall, fat man to stay for the night before he took a friend from the farm, I sat by Cola’s side that whole night.
My uncle fell in love with a stunner at work when he was young. When the lady he was in love with left him for a rich man, he never recovered from the...
I do not remember. But gently and firmly, like a mother embracing her newborn, I remember I fell in love
Once, I saw a yellow half-moon, fringed between the tall trees and the velvet skies. Hung in the stillness, it shone amidst the clouds. Gazing at it, I was...
Zurich, 12 years ago: The bed sheet was silk, its luster almost a mirage. Your embrace, the shelter of a tree in monsoons. Fade Out: There is no smoke now,...
Antonio Vaz, a peon at the municipal office in Mapusa town, had a one-storied mansion so close to the sea that the waves would spew fury on its walls when the...
'A day, when I saw my life running in loops and circles, vulnerability enmeshed with resilience. An afternoon, when two strangers discovered an unknown land...
