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Issue 5: Spring 2015

Fiction

What Happens In India Does Not Stay In India

She felt for the step behind her with one foot, then the other, hoping illogically that if she walked all the way to her parents’ room backward, she would unremember the entire conversation.

The Discipline of Haircuts

The touch of Sultan’s hand was warm and rough, almost electric against his skin and Avinash suddenly had a vision of holding his hand to his nose. What would it smell of – tobacco and hair-cream?

Poetry

Untitled

Like those asleep, she gathers us into her embrace,
One by one, she comes and gathers us into her embrace;

For Wagah On Sunday

was Partition not enough.
was this body only yours
that you could hurt it like this.

Atithi Devo Bhava

How unnerved they are
by our friendly, yet obnoxious neighbours
who look at them like exotic creatures,
only faintly resembling us Indians.

Essays & Interviews

Datuk in the Wallet

I kept Datuk close to barely-there Nepali and Indian rupees, flush against the photo of the lover I reunited with in Chennai, and then in Kathmandu, although—assuredly—they would have despised each other the first time they met

Battling the Sea: Maldives

A coral archipelago of about 1200 islands, Maldives faces a formidable foe in the sea that besieges it… An average ground elevation of just 1.6 metres renders it vulnerable to growing sea levels, a phenomenon that threatens to create millions of environmental refugees across the globe before the end of this century.

In Conversation with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Stories create the world. Seeing stories that look like your own, that you’ve never read written down before, or that are stories you’ve never thought of before that change your whole idea of what is possible, are a big revolutionary deal.

Art

001Khairani Barokka

Freedom-1Celeste Regal

Brutality is often brushed aside; victims are expected to quickly forget. This creates a walled-off disconnect with the rest of the world. I seek to transport the viewer toward events and responses most people would rather ignore.

1-620x465Samina Farooq

1-Legal-Genius-3Dinusha Jayawardane

Reviews

A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

All Mili had ever wanted was to be a good wife. A domestic goddess-slash-world’s-wife-number-one-type good wife. The kind of wife her husband pined for all day long. The kind of wife he
rushed home to every night because she’d make them a home so very beautiful even those TV serial homes would seem like plastic replicas.

Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition by Devika Chawla

‘Home’ as a figurative and emotional entity is a difficult concept to configure, for those who were forced out of their natural homes and then went on to build homes in a different environment, starting out as sharnarthis, or the dreaded term, refugees.

Jaya Nepal by Martin David Hughes

Jaya Nepal opens with the protagonist, Benjamin Creed, a young wide-eyed, jet-lagged Peace Corps volunteer, arriving in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu…

Sultana’s Dream by Begum Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain

Sultana’s Dream was first published in 1905, ten years before the American feminist and novelist, Charlotte P. Gilman, presented her feminist utopia, Herland. Yet Sultana’s Dream languishes in relative obscurity, and even those interested in feminist science fiction are often ignorant of this work…

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