July 2022

My poetry is about that fire known as language, which a woman carries under water. Anar Anar’s voice is distinct in the arena of contemporary Tamil poetry. Hailing from Sainthemaruthu, Eastern Sri Lanka, Anar’s poems has a mesmerising allure. Anar’s poems are

I am in a transcendental trance Of transmutation To transnationalism From nationalism To translatability of cultures And translanguaging! From monolingualism To transhistoricity From historical binaries To transmission of the viruses Of love for humanity! To emancipation From translucent biases To

Sometimes my aunts sit around the stove And talk about their husbands in shy whispers While they talk about countries and their fall in another room This is how it has been ever since I was a child The demarcation

The time I spent with my father for years Never expressing my love for him Making me unease The moment I realised It’s time to go This transition seems easy to the rest As he is the one with I

‘Mother, to suckle and suckle insatiably The milk sentient from thy life breast’ —Subramania Bharati in Krishna – My Mother Alamelu, my mother, is a small made woman. But from her childhood, heavy burdens were placed on her shoulders.

My grandma was the first woman to be part of the newly built road. She had only one milch cow. A calf. (I took them grazing on the grass.) Four five hens that laid eggs for us. Boiled egg and

Cousin Freddie I’ve spoken often of the black sheep I know (if anybody is the black sheep of their family, I surely am) but let me devote some time here to one of the good eggs. Let me mention

“A well read woman is a dangerous creature,” it says and how about she who writes? to say absolutely nothing of her who should but cannot! Even though she must, she must, she must if she is to leave behind

When I was a little girl, I had a crush on the boy down the road. We’d walk home from school together. He still wouldn’t know that I held on to every moment the two of us had known. Wondered many nights

“Fix everything in the apartment, my parents can’t know you practically live here,” Mariam said to her boyfriend, Steve, before getting ready to take her parents to a Father’s Day breakfast. “I will, don’t worry,” Steve said, rolling out of

Unstoppable were her wings And each morning she woke up to fly Like a coo-coo, she could sing And aloud she would neigh She jumps, she dances And she loves to fly She delights it so when she glances, Down the

Abba was the kind of man you see every day, the kind you see, work with and watch him pass by, maybe even attend his daughter’s marriage reception. But Abba wasn’t the kind of man who’d incite any excitement in

It was almost past 5 O’clock. However, the lifts weren’t as crowded as many building officers worked on a roster due to the pandemic. I walked across the narrow alley to get the 174 bus. As usual, the receptionist on

Springing up from the ink of the lifeless lines sketched on the architect’s map the four walls started growing swiftly. Layer upon layer of bricks and mortar kept tearing the open into an inside and an outside. Strong they stood

The year was 2012. Exams were near. The day after was our exam. My sister and I locked ourselves up in a room and sat with cups of half-drunk tea and notes for the exam.  It was past midnight. Umma, tired of