Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a story about three children ¬ Jai, Pari and Faiz – a story that’s deeply cracking under the ills of hate, pollution and society, and even when it reads like a fantasy, mystery absorbing prose, woven with vivid images, a hugely disturbing India looms for us to reckon with.  Papa says we are going on a patrol as soon as the smog let's a bit of morning light into our basti. But outside our house the world's changing... In her fiction, Deepa Anappapra gives the voice of the book to the voice of children, who live in a world of confusion. This confusion is not about seeing cities change or the emergence of alternate intelligence, it is a confusion in the world of masks and smog, it is a confusion of seeing friends move, of feeling a future missing, of seeing abuses hurled at each other; it is the confusion about ‘presence of precarity’.  When Jai’s bastimates go missing, he along with his two friends – Pari and Faiz – chalk out plans...

When we are children, we wait for our mind to grow, for experiences to accumulate and choices to solidify, taking shape into likeness of a person. Tara Westover, did exactly that. In fact, these above lines are paraphrased from her memoir Educated's last chapter, Educated. Educated is a story of Westover's relationship with her family and how she got educated. This memoir is about the relationship that became tumultuous. It is also about stories that families create for their own. Who they call 'own'? Very basic instincts of people and a nation. It is also about an education people enable for other people. The scenes in the story have been vividly written even when she uses other people's memory to write them. I like that she addresses the scenes with gaps — When Shawn falls, when the confrontation happens, when they are in accident. Sometimes the way to address a gap staring at your own story is not to include only your own version of it. It's also ...

  A Missing Climate - Summer Issue 2020 - Writing in Education, National Association for Writers in Education An essay discussing making space for creative writing in the Indian Education System. Special thanks to Cambridge School for their valuable support and space while I reflected on my experience. Grateful to Sparsh, Aakriti, Sarah for lending their reading skills and sheltering me in their friendship!

‌If you want to read short stories from the same world where characters reappear, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar offers this in multiple rich forms. It's a collection of short stories about young adults who move from Muzaffarnagar for education. Perhaps the world of Muzaffarnagar is like that — it reappears, not changing anything, so much so that even short stories set in Muzaffarnagar, have characters from the same universe.  ‌ ‌Education is seen as a ticket to freedom, to 'bas ye karlo phir sab mast', is never said aloud but always hinted at. "To study, to learn something about the world that could be used to earn some money — that was the only to escape the pettiness of Muzaffarnagar".  ‌It was Education that took these characters places, leaving them only as pieces of this town that appeared in these stories. Muzaffarnagar always appeared in mid way journey, as if the town was on a journey too. The town in these stories doesn't appear depressing, c...

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...

Having been wary of the yellow funnel like flowers of Cascabela Thevetia since 2003, on 53rd day of lockdown, the tree was looking radiant in full strength of its lime-green and honey-yellow.  During those days of summer's arrival, purple sunbirds would frequent the neighbourhood. Around 5:30 p.m. a small black colour would dash into the heavily flowered tree of Kaner, a fast and direct way of flight getting lost inside those yellow oleander flowers, as the flight rested on one of the petals, and relayed high metallic calls of c hwing, chwing, chwing...  Upon seeing the sun behind the tree at 6:45 p.m. I would finally detect their companions already nearby, on one of the trees that has become habitual of residents looking with 'what a waste of space' as they tell their evening walker mates: "Why haven't they cut this dried up Mango Tree yet". The sunbird may have brought summer, guarding it from the month of May.  On Day 63, I went for a walk.  Before stepping...