Fiction

Cardinal Directions by Chundra Aroor

These are the bright points in Atif Janjua’s work week, or fortnight, perhaps — in truth, the meetings come in a non-calendrical pattern.

Fragrance by Namita Waikar

He didn’t know how many days had passed, for he had lost track of time, of day and night, of weeks.

Letters from Nairobi by Selma Carvalho

I understood mostly the sadness written large on her face, which if I looked close enough was tear-stained perhaps for the life she had led or more likely for the life that has passed her by.

Fiction

How to Sell by Tara Dorabji

As a woman, being smart is dangerous unless you cut it with sexy. It seems trivial, but chalk it up to the thousands of unspoken but shared truths between mothers and daughters.

In the End by Kavitha Yaga Buggana

Pushed against two walls were white bookshelves that Bharath had not taken, though they were, technically, furniture. There were gaps, like broken teeth, where his books had been.

Silk Stole by Namrata Poddar

Even her once-dark, voluminous curls were growing thinner by the day, like her Supperware income.

Poetry

Reading the News from Nepal by Carolyn Williams-Noren

What cracked was a place where metal wheels stamped with prayers
spin to spool the words away.

Banner by Ranjani Murali

What deity governs this smelting
ore—slogan, heresy-talk, and your face

Is the postcolonial always already normcore by Subashini Navaratnam

For hard times, learn to monetize your damn brown self
We are all #bindis now

Essays & Interviews

An Actual (South) Asian American Speaks from the Ruins of Best American Poetry by Rajiv Mohabir

Our anger over the faux-et’s appropriation and dishonesty is absolutely necessary. We are right to be angry and to demand that this whole matter be corrected, addressed, and fixed. The stake is the erasure of people of color in a system structured to eliminate us through the pretense of “good” poetry, which presumes poems should be chosen without taking the representation into consideration. Yes, racism still exists, and there are still whites-only poetry communities and spaces.

Makers of Memory: Women in Occupied Palestine and Kashmir by Tara Dorabji and Susan Rahman

The corporate media have failed to tell the whole story of what occupation looks like in occupied Palestine and occupied Kashmir. Contrary to Western assumptions and stereotypes, Palestinian and Kashmiri women continue to live with dignity and act in resistance. As storytellers, mothers, and organizers, women make up the backbone of these movements for sovereignty and independence, breathing life into what freedom could look like.

The War on Education by Zehra Naqvi

How can girls from Afghanistan/Pakistan come from educated backgrounds? How can Pakistani men and women have coeducation with all the taboos in their society? How can Pakistani families live in a house? How can a village schoolgirl be brave and intelligent? It’s just all simply unheard of. And if someone defies the stereotype—well, they’re an exception. They are of little consequence, or deserve to be shot in the head, or they are a CIA agent.

Art

Sudipta Modi

Kalyani Ganapathy

Reviews

Dear Mrs. Naidu by Mathangi Subramanian

Reviewed by Uma Krishnaswami

The most profound message underlying this gentle, funny book is that you can only change your world if you have the courage to change yourself first.

Rainsong by Pratyaksha

Reviewed by Susmita Bhattacharya

The author compares the layout to a plate of food: the short pieces are like hors d’oeuvres, adding piquancy, aroma, and flavor to the main course, which is the long story.

Ram-2050 by Joan Roughgarden

Reviewed by Neelima Vinod

This is a science-fiction tale that attempts to distance itself from its religious predecessor—the reader has to keep this in mind when he embarks on reading this book. There are no kingdoms, only corporations. There are no Brahmins, only geeks.

Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food by Rukmini Srinivas

Reviewed by Sunita Rajwade

The book is truly a feast for the mind, providing recipes interspersed between personal anecdotes and stories, a veritable compendium of tiffin or snacky food that can be eaten at any in-between meal times and occasionally substitutes as a light meal, taking the reader beyond the limits of idli and dosai that commonly define South Indian cuisine.

Fiction

Swimming at Midnight by Jamila-Khanom Allidina

Adjusting to calling myself blind was like adjusting to calling myself a wife, or a mother. It changes how people see you – how you see yourself.

Hands Held To His Eyes by Padma Viswanathan

I entered one of the conference rooms to find everyone huddled around a radio. Indira Gandhi: shot. Shot. The word in English is more onomatopoeic than we realize.

Poetry

Back home by Poornima Laxmeshwar

She asked me not to sit
Not to touch anything
Or even be touched

Baffle Roof by Khairani Barokka

The pastels used to coat windowed
Barriers against the chill of Rajasthan’s
November—-another strain of roof.

Brink by Geetha Sukumaran

Closed eyes dusted with ash
Charcoal and red it clings to the skin
Ebony, brown or white?

Essays & Interviews

Love Language by Nina Bhattacharya

Balancing on the tricky tightrope between “Indian” and “American” already felt hard enough without throwing language into the mix. I occupied this space of linguistic liminality, neither feeling completely bilingual nor completely monolingual.

Summer Pervez In Conversation with Olivier LaFont by Dr. Summer Pervez

Acting and writing fulfill two distinct needs in me. I’ve always looked at them as facets of storytelling, which is my central passion. In fact when I act I ‘write’ my character and scene as I do it, and when I write I act out the characters and scenes in my mind. So the two are inextricably linked.

Art

Uttam Grandhi

…Paper and origami teach me the true sense of tolerance. You fold it, crumple it or slash it, paper sustains everything and produces a beautiful piece of art.

Louie Crew Clay

Christa Pandey

Lilla Dent

Reviews

Atmospheric Embroidery by Meena Alexander

Reviewed by Shikha Malaviya

Towards the end of Atmospheric Embroidery, one realizes that Alexander’s angst about dislocation is no longer dictated by the geographical or cultural, but rather by the metaphysical.

The Normal State of Mind by Susmita Bhattacharya

Reviewed by Mahsuda Snaith

Susmita Bhattacharya’s debut The Normal State of Mind is not your typical novel. Here is a book dealing with big subject matters: the limitations put upon widowed women, the illegality of homosexuality in modern day India.

Warrior by Olivier Lafont

Reviewed by by Asha Richards

Olivier Lafont’s debut novel, Warrior, is a frenetic, adrenalin-charged fantasy caper. Its hero, Saamu, is a Indian demi-god and must save the world from an imminent apocalypse.

Fiction

What Happens In India Does Not Stay In India by Mira Jacob

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 by Sandip Roy

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 by Jibanananda Das

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

For Wagah On Sunday by Sabrina Ghaus

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

Atithi Devo Bhava by Shloka Shankar

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 by Khairani Barokka

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 by Susheela Menon

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 by Usman Mushtak

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

Khairani Barokka

Celeste 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.

Samina Farooq

Dinusha Jayawardane

Reviews

A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

Reviewed by Tanaz Bhatena

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

Reviewed by Divya Rajan

‘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

Reviewed by Shobhan Bantwal

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

Reviewed by Dipika Mukherjee

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…

Fiction

Corvus by Sharanya Manivannan

He had re­entered my life like a changing season: without omen, a single door opened
onto a transformed landscape, rainfall from a cloudless sky, a tree that burst into ripeness overnight. I prepared for him to leave it the same way.

Black July by Nayomi Munaweera

She marvels at these feet, at their earnestness in moving away from loss. At the biology in her that has so assuredly chosen her unborn child over her dying husband.

Why It Often Rains in the Movies by Anil Menon

In the early days of our marriage, I’d been moved a few times from twitch in the pants to passion, but it was only in the movies that tabletops, walls, balconies, and bathtubs were ideal surfaces for sex.

Poetry

Badaun by Scherezade Siobhan

mother, the banyan spreading
a colony of tarantulas through her bones

Letter from Nabila Rehman to Trayvon Martin by Aurora Masum-Javed

They will call us collateral
for someone else’s
safe sleeping.

Sly Smile by Gethsemane Herron

“Don’t give them money, it goes to the mob!”
Yes, dark criminalizes here,
Too.

Stoichiometry by Shobita Mampilly

Measures of salt seep from orgasmic arch
Sufi foot taps echo in New Delhi slum

The Prayer by Saba Husain

One crow, then more, in the pebbled courtyard.
New voices join in, here’s to dawn, to dawn;

Essays & Interviews

Red Thread at Fatehpur Sikri by Samira Ahmed

All around me the brown faces are my face, and their retroflex consonants also curl the tip of my tongue and ricochet off my palate. And as I wander through the bazaars, elbow­-to-elbow amidst locals and tourists, I find I am nostalgic for memories of a life I did not live and to which I can never return.

The Journey Home by Nabill Idrisi

While West Pakistan controlled Bangladesh, all visible manifestations of culture and
nationalism were suppressed. The suppression became more and more violent over time, as intellectuals actively urged Bengalis to be proud of their own culture and heritage and to resist Pakistani control. Nearly 1,000 academics, journalists, physicians, lawyers, writers, artists, and engineers were murdered, and my Nani and Dada were two of few who escaped this systematic slaughter.

Art

Malavika Rajnarayan

Linear drawing demands sharpness in my articulation, a keen observation and keeps my intellect nimble. The human figures I draw reflect this attempt for nimbleness and strength. My language and aesthetics are closely aligned to Indian and Asian cultural traditions, where the poignancy of ideas are conveyed through beauty, grace and poetry.

Courtney Stephens

Even though the city can be very chaotic, I think of it as almost silent, as though parts of it died awhile ago and are quietly dreaming themselves into the present.

Reviews

Family Life by Akhil Sharma

Reviewed by Sandeep Kumar

Akhil Sharma follows his award­winning debut, An Obedient Father, with Family Life, a first­person bildungsroman about a boy and his older brother migrating to the United States East Coast from India in the late ’70s.

Fragments of Riversong by Farah Ghuznavi

Reviewed by Susmita Bhattacharya

Farah Ghuznavi’s collection of short stories is an opportunity to journey to Bangladesh, to live alongside the characters and share their dreams, aspirations and fears.

Her Name is Kaur by Meeta Kaur

Reviewed by Shobhan Bantwal

This anthology is a pleasant and refreshing surprise. I found myself captivated, moved, and inspired by the wide­ranging essays written by young Sikh­American women.

Fiction

The Humanly Dog of Colonel Haider Usman by Anubha Yadav

Ms. Bhonsle knew the diplomatic power that is necessary for a single woman in her fifties who lived alone. Indeed, balance meant a moderation of excesses that would otherwise not fit into Indian middle-class life.

Skokie Nights by Swati Khurana

Rimi loved the tragedy—or rather, the poetry—of teenage girls found dead. She didn’t want to be raped or murdered or harmed in any way. She just wanted to be a corpse, like some girls wanted to be a bride or a princess.

Poetry

A-B-C-D by Sasha W

A for assimilation
B forgetting the brown
C for Columbus, not Colombo—
that song that every immigration child knows

Republic Day, 2014 by Roomy Naqvy

I wanted to parade a toy soldier,
Impotent and unmanly,
In this country of men and manners.
I asked the police for permission.
They said, sorry,
We only parade puffed up chests.

forest, matheran hills by Priya Sarukkai Chabria

notice, she said, language body nature prayer
follow the same rules of resting

My Father’s White Shirts by Preeti Kaur

i fill the washing machine with soap and a week’s worth
of my father’s undershirts
tangled like a clutch of heron’s eggs ready to hatch
only one will live

Oranges, memory by Natasha Arora

I buy one and dig my nails
beneath skin. Ride these waves
of scent with me

Essays

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on Books for Young Readers by Uma Krishnaswami

I wanted a story that would be a great adventure for readers, but also one that would introduce readers to the Indian landscape, Indian ways of life, and Indian philosophy and values. I wanted a magical object out of Indian myth. I wanted a reverse quest tale (returning a magical object to its original home) . . .

A Dynasty of Dust by Marc de Faoite

India can harden hearts or fill them with the ripe, sweet fruit of compassion. If the pilgrim is sincere, and attentive, and lucky, then India might deign to reveal partially glimpsed hints of the truths that lay hidden beneath the surface and beyond the cloaking veil of maya woven out of dust and traffic diesel fumes and smoke from wood-fires in rusted upright oil drums . . .

A White Girl Makes Bangladeshi Piaju by Jessica Hardy

Being from Vancouver, I’ve tried South Asian cuisine in fusion form, because Vancouver is the First Lady of fusion food cities. However I don’t recall ever having a traditionally prepared South Asian dish, let alone preparing one myself. I hoped with the available resources I would be able to meet the challenge. So, to Google . . .

Art

Hiba Schahbaz

I am investigating issues of self-identification within the lexicon of miniature painting, and in the process, re-contextualizing miniature painting in contemporary art. By observing the symbolism and iconography of the cultures around me, I construct imagery that fuses the real with the imagined.

Tulika Ladsariya

My paintings are a social commentary on the division of society through the iconography of labor. Bricks, lumber, plaster, and bright house paint recur in my oeuvre. Through this process of hunting, lugging, and working with heavy material, I try to empathize with the workforce that I depict and choose to think of art as labor.

Michelle Cherian

As I wander through the streets of Kathmandu on a crisp morning, I take in 80s neon pink, stark black-and-white stripes, an emerald green satin sash . . . These are the immediate colors and textures that glide through my mind as I download this moment’s inspiration.

Shoili Kanungo

When I draw, I like using a lot of details. I think of the page as a nonlinear storyboard, with no guidelines for where to go and—hopefully—lots to discover. When I paint, I am a little obsessed with swirling lines. I do love lines.

Reviews

Celluloid Man: Back to the Future

Reviewed by Asha Richards

The new documentary Celluloid Man highlights the legacy of P. K. Nair and the debt the country owes this visionary.

Geography of Tongues by Shikha Malaviya

Reviewed by Neelima Vinod

Shikha Malaviya’s first book is a collection of poems that awakens the reader’s sense of taste, offering poems about pineapple pastry, mashed bananas and milk, guava leaves, red chilis and pomegranates, strawberries and mangoes.

Paging Ms. Marvel: The Perks and Perils of Creating an Islamic Feminist Superhero

Reviewed by Rita Banerjee

The new Ms. Marvel comic series offers its readers something exciting, progressive, and new. Kamala Khan, who later transforms into Ms. Marvel, is the first major South Asian superhero protagonist in the Marvel comic book–verse.

Column

Ask the Unicorns by Minal Hajratwala

You do know the difference between procrastination and foreplay, don’t you? If you treat spending time with your book as just an obligation or, worse, a job—well, we all know how that kind of love affair goes.

Fiction

Alexithymia by Hasanthika Sirisena

My thaththa conducts a neurological exam on his newest patient, the cricket. Antennae quiver as thaththa speaks. He asks the cricket to explain the meaning of the following expression: he kicked the bucket.

Once Again Next Year by Oindrila Mukherjee

From somewhere in the darkness rose the groans of a skinny, stammering boy and the chanting voices of a group of young men and women. Aaschey bachar aabar hobey. The annual slogan of the pujas that was meant to reassure everyone about the continuity of the festival, of joy and of life itself.

Poetry

Draupadi by Janani Balasubramanian

In real life, she wasn’t blue like in the comics,
she was dark as soot,
probably darker.
She appears when we’re not looking
like
her parents only wanted a boy to do all the fighting

Street Dog Dreams: Rashbehari Avenue by Neelanjana Banerjee

Is he riding shotgun in an auto-rickshaw, his scarred ears
flapping in the diesel dust?

Eulogy to a Skinny Midriff by Amy Paul

On summer trips overseas when I was 3, 6, 9, 12,
My aunties used to whisper, What are you feeding her?

Pankti in Five Padas by Ravi Shankar

So you remember Superman,
not Shaktimaan, veal not enthu
cutlets in Ramarajan pants
turning up half hour early
to help the host host his party?

Essays

Raining in Bhutan by Melanie Bell

Pine air wood smoke crick of jungle insects peaked white chortens with relics in their bellies kuzuzangpo-la do you speak Dzongkha curfew 8pm too many voices culture kit in bag (maple syrup, Canadian flag pins) where you from chilip we had Americans here before.

Finding Home In Madonna Inn by Priyanka Sacheti

The rooms emulated Bollywood as an ode to the homeland, while the décor, the ambience, and general visual appearance were carefully cultivated and curated to reflect an aspirational Middle Eastern lifestyle. These houses were ornate and grand, an interesting coexistence of nostalgic narratives of home and interpretations of the current life away from home.

Shifting Mobilities: Diasporas in Flux in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
by Stephanie Southmayd

Although entrepreneurial labor is a valid way of achieving integration and attaining conventional ideas of success, it unfortunately seems to come at the expense of political participation.

Art

Sa’dia Rehman

Sa’dia Rehman works with themes such as isolation, shame, and hidden social boundaries. Her installations, sculptures, and works on paper explore subjects that are considered taboo such as sexuality, power hierarchies, and normative ideals around gender.

João Pires

Understanding India is as futile as finding the sun at night. Unlike any other place I’ve been, this is a country to feel, to take a deep breath and sense, and it will all come to you. Out of all this contrast and shapeshifting, there’s something that sweeps the whole country: life.

Sabina England

My film explores the emotional state of a woman’s mind: her relationship with self, her relationship with the other woman, her relationship with the divine, her relationship with Mother Earth, her relationship with humanity.

Amina Shafi

In 2010, I went with a team to Nepal to process refugee applications of ethnic Nepalis who fled Bhutan from persecution or were forcibly repatriated back to Nepal by the Bhutanese government. On my time off, I explored the cities of Damak, Kathmandu, Bhaktaphur, and Dharan.

Column

Ask the Unicorns by Minal Hajratwala

Start a “Touchstones” document or a small notebook. Absorb the rhythms and cadences of your touchstones. Feel their heartbeats.

Fiction

Boys Like That by Kuzhali Manickavel

Boys like that are ugly babies. They smile at everyone and offer wilted flowers to tables and plastic chairs. Nobody picks them up unless it is an absolute emergency.

The Summer of Young Uncles by Bushra Rehman

That summer, all of Saima’s uncles began appearing. They were like those Russian nesting dolls made out of the same mold: some with red moustaches, some with brown, some short, some skinny, some fat, but they all had the same look.

Amrikan Dreams by Mariam Pirbhai

Krishna held firm to the view that a traditionalist was a dependable man. A man of moral fiber who would never let a beautiful woman or wayward daydream distract him.

Poetry

what it’s like to be sri lankan in 2012 for those of you who aren’t by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

It’s going home to Jaffna if you’re young, Tamil and male and not automatically being snatched by either army. Maybe. For a moment.
It’s white vans.

Kalkatiya by Rajiv Mohabir

she asked the emissaries, “How much
for a day’s toil?” They carried us away to a dock
and locked us down. Paid in irons, we tore our throats…

At the Dancing Square—Chowk by Ranu Uniyal

Not all men are tone deaf unable to hear the call
of hunger. Body, bosom, bare hips, needless to say
bare feet. She cannot afford the luxury of sleep.

Model Minority by Simi Kang

the Punjabi slips
pungent
against my teeth, weeps
when I stumble
at its edges: arches
and whorls I cannot read.

Pickling by Sohini Basak

embalming mangoes in mulled mustard oil, she tells me
the best of the season must live longer. So each April
she carefully preserves. Pickles in glass jar churning…

Here Is a Red Cat and a White Cat by Karen Bradway

All these children with their dark glossy hair;
They sail on in their small shoes.
They are floating upward almost…

Essays

Flying Saucers by Mamta Nainy

I took the glistening black vinyl out of its sleeve, removed the dust wrap, placed it on the turntable.
… Lost in the grooves of these long-playing records is the history of discography, which began in 1902 with the founding of the Gramophone Company of India.

The Cab Driver and I by Samina Najmi

The driver freezes in the middle of his three-point turn. He gazes up into his rearview mirror for a better look at me. “You’re from Pakistan, and you teach Americans?” His frown is so concentrated that he looks angry.

Bitter Honey: Sexual Violence in Desi Hip Hop by Isaac Komalathukizhakkathil Oommen

Although generally approbatory attitudes toward sexual violence in music would not necessarily lead directly to rape, they create and reinforce a culture that allows rape, facilitates woman-blaming, and disempowers women. In the context of the Delhi gang rape case and the protests that ensued, it is important to note that this culture attacks women just for being women.

Race, Class, and Gender at the Margins: Exploring My Name is Khan by Ajay Parasram

Post-9/11 Islamaphobia, enveloping all brown-skinned people into one homogenizing dominant gaze, opens some room for mutual recognition of Otherness at the margins of American society.

Art

Freedom Colour by Sanchari Sur

… moments where the “play” that arises from the festival allows for a freedom of transgression between caste, class, and gender lines in India.

Indo-Caribbean by Preston Merchant

Indians have lived in the Caribbean since the mid-1800s, brought by the British as indentured laborers to work in sugar and rice plantations in Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, and other colonies.

Delhi Through the Night by Neha Chaturvedi

…the gaze of a middle-class, academically-oriented woman from a relatively small town, who feels more comfortable and safe behind a camera as she walks anonymous through the wide and narrow, intimidating and yet liberating streets of the capital city of Delhi.

Sacred Heart by Texta Queen

…delicate interplays between vulnerability and empowerment, intimacy and exhibitionism, and subjective and collective expressions of feminist, queer, and cultural identities.

Reviews

Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali

Reviewed by Rita Banerjee

In trying to grasp and define the contours of his own spirituality, Ali comes to some of the most startling and refreshing conclusions about his own religion and selfhood.

Karma Gone Bad: Or How I Learned to Love Mangos, Bollywood, and Water Buffalo by Jenny Feldon

Reviewed by Soniah Kamal

For an immigrant such as myself, who moved from a big city in a developing nation to battle the loneliness of living in the US, I was eager to read Jenny Feldon’s reverse experience.

The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry edited by Sudeep Sen

Reviewed by Divya Rajan

This anthology serves as a conglomeration of assertive, fresh voices, a long way off from the rich inherent, albeit stringent, tradition of Itihasas and Puranas.

Crossing Black Waters by Athena Kashyap

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

Kashyap writes of sundering, separations, crossings, reunions, and uncertain reconciliations. The break with an imagined home is never forever; return is always a possibility yet remains unsatisfying whenever it occurs.

Column

Ask the Unicorns by Minal Hajratwala

A spoonful of hot ghee is nothing like unicorn blood; and yet it is a way of extending the life of the butter. … Now I’m going to tell you the secret to immortality.

Editorial

Why Jaggery? by Mary Anne Mohanraj

The publishing world often tries to put its writers into boxes: easily-marketable boxes. You can’t really blame them, in some sense—it’s much easier to create a shelf in the bookstore, label it ‘ethnic literature’ and then put all the ‘ethnic’ writers there, than it would be to market each complex writer individually. The big publishers want a young desi woman to write an arranged marriage novel, because they know where the market is for those books. There’s a reason they keep putting red saris on our book covers; they know what sells.

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The inaugural issue of Jaggery is co-sponsored by the Asian Studies and Asian American Studies Programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.