The church was packed like sardines, raising a stink at the funeral mass. The cops found Vincent in a pool of blood, next to a dresser with two Styrofoam cups, one with crimson lipstick, in a motel. “Lydia, I’m sorry you had to devote your life to this man. He deserved his fate.” I sat […]

My virgin bronco-spasms scripted a champion story for me. Bronchitis was fun, I’d think, lying in a bed thrice my size, until a mini-blackout changed everything. I gasped hard enough to remember it vividly even seventeen years later. Two caps of medicine was shoved down me as the machines stopped working, combating a heartbeat thrice […]

After a lifetime of depression, Kaya was determined to end her suffering. The tablets hadn’t taken effect when her panicked mother shook her, shouting: “We must rush! Kapil is in ICU! Car crash!” Kaya vomited the pills, reflecting on the irony. Even in this, her final act, Kaya’s twin and everybody’s favourite, had upstaged her. Plan […]

She looked with disdain as she brushed her long, unruly hair. She resented having to wake up day after day with minimum sleep, keep a house that no one lived in and head out to work to earn money she didn’t have a say over. She slowly realized that she hated her life twice as […]

At the threshold of the cell, her old identity peels off her, and she gains a new one.  The pair take turns to feast on her, come day or night. When they’ve taken their fill and leave, she sinks back in exhaustion. Agony coils itself around the center between her legs. Rivulets of crimson flow […]

From an imaginary perspective All my life, I have wondered why? Why do people think I am different? Why can’t I just be accepted for who I am? These questions have haunted me, and they have controlled me. I pondered over these questions,  perhaps most – when I was applying for college. I faced seemingly […]

The perfect wife, and now the perfect widow. All her life she listened to her husband, he was the one who decided what she would wear and now, even in these times before anyone could even say a word she disposed of all her clothes and started wearing only white.  They said she was like […]

Your hand feels cold in mine. I’ll probably shatter bone as I hammer the nail in. Now I pinch the skin at the base of your belly and run the scissors up. It feels easy, like cutting cloth. It feels powerful, this unzipping of life to reveal a bag of organs. Wasn’t that how you always saw […]

Krishna, our milk woman was beautiful, pleasant with a beaming open smile and a happy temperament to go with it. She came in like a burst of sunshine and left with the month’s milk money. Like all women of her class, she had a husband who drank and was violent. One day, when her mother […]

The perfect wife and now the perfect widow. All her life she listened to her husband, he was the one who decided what she would wear and now, even in these times before anyone could even say a word she disposed of all her clothes and started wearing only white. They said she was like […]