• Subarnarekha | Sounak Krishna Biswas

    December 2013. The house reminded one of an illustrated Grimm’s fairy book scene – greens and gardens on all sides – exotic floras of our Gangetic heartland, all trimmed to perfection; yet there were a few places where it seemed untended since parthenium had grown; perhaps, it was intended. I have known people to love…

  • August Rains | Roudri Bandyopadhyay

    “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” – Jawaharlal Nehru,…

  • Water Wars | Priyanka Mathur

    Arnav came inside the house hurriedly and double locked the door to their cramped one bedroom apartment. “It’s happening” He said to Aditi. She swiftly opened her system. “How much time do we have?” she asked calmly, concentrating on her screen. They had expected this to happen and were ready for it. Almost ready.

  • Waves of Solitude | Shashank Chimbalkar

    The journey back home was tedious and disappointing than the last one, six months ago. I slept more than usual in the twelve-hour flight in spite of the bustle by twenty first-time flyers. The taxi to the apartment reached at midnight, and I slept instantly once inside. Amma has been stubborn, refusing to leave our…

  • Orientalism in Disney Movies | Arnima Singh

    “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)…

  • Stages of a Cocoon | Sasheera Gounden

    I Shells form part of a uniform for blue crabs and members of the mollusc family. The blue crab undergoes an uneasy process of moulting. The pressure of a blue crab’s growing body becomes so heavy and intense that it breaks open the exoskeleton. Moulting takes about thirty minutes. The newly formed crab with the…

  • Disconnected | Chaitali Ray Sengupta

    Angry clouds gather in the west corner of the sky. Thunder crashes, once in the overcast skies and then in her bosom. Scanning the sky with her nervous eyes, Ms. Bose switches on the TV, her mind in complete turmoil now. Her twenty two year old daughter has not yet returned home and it is…

  • The Forking Bristles | Anshuman Yadav

    I never believed in spirits. But the way I figure it now, my understanding of entities was absolutely flawed, always. Although it doesn’t matter now, I’ve learned several facts throughout my life, the most important of them being that it’s almost impossible to fight the blaze. One may perceive this as a vague generalisation, but…

  • Hsi-Wei And The Village of Xingyun | Robert Wexelblatt

    Early in the reign of Emperor Yang, the peasant/poet Chen Hsi-wei was making his way through Jizhou. He had no particular destination but thought he might visit the city of Dingxiang. It was a wet November. Hsi-wei was drenched and cold and a long way from the prefectural capital when he found shelter with a…

  • The Trouble with Mangoes | Janet H Swinney

    Charanjit would have liked nothing better at his time of life than to take things easy, but his daughter-in-law’s dilemma meant that he had to reconsider the situation. Everything had been turned upside down the night his elder son had been killed. The very next day, they got the news that his small grandson had…

  • The Walking Man | John Richmond

    The neighborhood- for a long time- had been relatively health conscious with quite a few people jogging and cycling, so, it came to be that almost no one paid any particular attention to a man walking. Well, at least, not right away. He first appeared at the beginning of summer- three years ago- simply walking-…

  • A Gift Of Divine Love | Sriji Das

    Ghanshyam baba was a beggar with an odd peculiarity. He stood at the crossroad outside his hamlet every day and begged the wayfarers to listen to a little katha from him. Anyone who has travelled the length, or breadth, or even a small stretch of India knows that beggars usually don’t give; they ask. But…

by: Sounak Krishna Biswas