The most unabashedly given advice on Writing is “Keep your eyes, ears, nose, open to life around you.” Javed Akhtar in a panel with Kausar Munir at Jashn-e-Rekhta said something around the same line, that women have been noticing inner world for so long that they have completely molten this life and are in sync with the outer world to give it the shape they want. As much there is a sense of upliftment to hear this, there is also a very thick line of distinction – inner and outer world. There is no marvel in that adage anymore. It is like seeing a cycle’s rubber tube being fixed when all other cars are passing by. Cycle’s puncher being fixed is an image from the first decade of 2000 when ‘cycles’ were yet to be replaced with ‘bike’ and we were noticing bubbles rising in a rusted tub, made of ferric oxide, earlier of ferrous oxide, and much before that, when someone even called it just ferrum. Some years later, I will be reading The Years by Annie Ernaux, a memoir that c...

There is turquoise blue curtain fluttering from circulation of air by fan and it is September in my damn hot room. Due to threat from Aedes and Anopheles we have had to empty cooler. I slept wondering what is better: to be bitten by mosquitoes or getting no sleep in a miserable hot night of September? Very soon there is going to be one of those days, where, as soon as we get out of the room and feel the wind on our face, it will be a draught. We would balk at weather and its timing. We will smile at our friends coming out of their rooms, who will feel the same sudden nature of change in weather, look at us and shudder, sighing, finally saying, ‘It’s so cold all of a sudden!’. I have shifted to a cooler floor as I am thinking about poems from Preeti Vangani’s, Mother Tongue Apologise . From sweltering heat to the cold of autumn, bodies marvel at a leaf lifting away from trees much before we see sidewalks covered with brown, crunching, old veins under our foot. Our bodies tend to figu...