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footsteps hear you
2006-11-27 19:53:00
REPORTS FROM THE SOUL } Haven't you sometimes moved between moments? As you walk through the arch into the courtyard, have you got submerged by a sudden twilight that was never yours? That arm which brushed against yours as you crossed the street, did it give you the tingle of the bangles? Perhaps the little face that hid behind the motion of the day, did it leave a memory of a smile before
More About: Hear , Foot , Steps

some light, through the windows
2006-11-09 03:35:00
REPORTS FROM SOUL } We tremble as about to touch a cloud Through the ethery fog we pick a swallow, unwet. Only to hold and caress and unfold the palms in midair To leave the flutter in its own music that vanishes into its own heart
More About: Windows , Light , Some

a fine, fleeting moment
2006-11-01 16:43:00
BITTA KARATE } Not that the moment hasn't it's own magic. But by the virtues of minds, the freeze frame would be soon gone. Before it does vanish, before the past goes to the white shore, perhaps you might want to know, to see it a little more closely. He, if you'd remember well, moved among them like a groom.  So you used to get orders to kill anybody and you used to kill them?Yes.Whosoever it
More About: Moment , Fine , Fleet , Leet

the promise of the right grammar
2006-10-24 22:37:00
INVENTIONS } Meliquides who crosses the mountains through measureless swamps, coming with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums with his new inventions to Jose Arcadia Buendia might have prophesied this. That you can beat bacteria with simple grammar. The man would have thrown his sparrow hands in air to illustrate how a bunch of bacteria would soon set out to fetch copies of Wren & Martin,
More About: Grammar , Promise , Gram

loss of innocence
2006-10-24 07:44:00
DESAI'S DAUGHTER } These days I'm gripped by a puzzling fever. You sit up in bed, bleary eyed, utterly dunk in the hotchpotch, believing that you had indeed lost out on a great moment in literature. You missed the book. She, it's sung far and wide, sat in her English home right above her novelist mom's room for seven years, in a self-imposed exile. And her mother left for a Tibetan refugee camp,
More About: Loss , Inno , Innocence

couch that isn't
2006-10-22 14:04:00
WRITERLY YOURS } McEwan has a large Knoll sofa at his London home. McEwan, Ian. On holidays or at weekends he slips off shoes and climbs into the sofa with a glass of wine to read to his wife, a Guardian editor, five or seven thousand words of what he has written new. Pleasures of a quilt-soft sofa on a London Sunday afternoon, with a fair and caring woman slumping on your chest, you holding
More About: Couch

boyle's rooster
2006-10-15 08:40:00
RITUALS } In the deep brown den of nowhere, the writer sits. As the charmer of tales, he/she sits to conjure magic from...from where? Writer writes as you breathe. It always excites me to read in old books, books no one reads these days, about the invocation of the muse. Like a child who listens to Potter's Gothic flights through a dark and monstrous castle, I've drunk from these lines, my eyes
More About: Rooster , Boyle , Roost

ways with names
2006-08-23 18:37:00
DISCOVERIES | I come from a small town where George is a man. So are Isaac, James, and Leslie. So I had to grope and wonder and still wonder when The Story And Its Writers told me Isak Dinesan and P D James and Leslie Marmom Silko are women. Quite a while ago I had also discovered George Eliot's gender. It was a little unsettling to me. The way they used their names and hid the identities of
More About: Names

morals of the morons
2006-05-25 13:03:00
INCREDIBLE INDIA A gaudy jpeg, a telephone number, and hourly rates for her services as a social escort. That's all you get on the site. But the detectives picked her Monday evening from a Kolkata guesthouse in eastern India. Kavita should be standing by the rusted iron bars in a dingy policestation, trembling, thinking of her son. 'This is the first time we have arrested a woman for soliciting
More About: Morons , Morals , Oral , Moral , Mora

so dark, the con of man
2006-05-21 14:39:00
RESERVATIONS | Corporate tears slide on the white skin. Angsts, so white and plump. Angels of merit flapping wings to fan fire on the dark demons of caste lizards. Talent, merit, skills, money, ladders, all our glory going to the crawling creeps of cobblers, scavengers, and sweating clerks. Sleeveless slogans, pedicured war of freedom against the beasts of the third kind. We the doctors who
More About: Dark , The Con

reel sends faith reeling
2006-05-15 06:53:00
DA VINCI CODE | A shy, 38-year-old high school teacher sits in his New Hampshire home typing out a sequel to his novel which 45 million people took home to read and drop their jaws. His mom played organ at church. His dad taught maths. He sang in the church choir, attended Sunday school, and spent summers at church camp. Today, the same church slams the door shut when his name is mentioned. Dan
More About: Faith , Reel

a clueless lover
2006-05-14 14:27:00
INCREDIBLE INDIA | A strange bouquet of fire, he gifted them. And once he was burst into ash, the woman who always spurned him moved a little away with her new love, away from the warm flesh and burning bones, to look into each other's eyes, to let lose in a pink kind of shyness, to blush, to tie the sacred thread, to garland each other. Later that night when the groping groom pressed into the
More About: Lover , Clueless

come on, cook up the book quick
2006-05-06 06:59:00
PUBLISHING Thank goodness I have a poor memory. And that I could never internalise a song, let alone somebody else's novels. Else they'd have stuffed my mouth with $500,000 with a book deal for How Josh Newtonn got paid and screwed up his life. Kavya is a victim of somebody else's ambition, more than hers. Publishing has turned into a vengeful act of creating stars out of dust, eating up
More About: Book , Quick , Cook

the american spy
2006-05-01 08:27:00
SURYANARAYAN | His coarse voice over the telephone cracked when he shouted the slogans. Then Qari Ahmadi told the agency reporter that the abducted Indian was an American spy. Two expletives : American, Spy. Three days back, the spy, the sole breadwinner of the family of six, had told his wife and father that he was trying hard to cope with the rugged life of Afghanistan. He was concerned

east of delhi
2006-04-28 08:40:00
MAHAJAN & MAHAJAN | And Cain went out from the presence and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. In the north of Delhi , a perplexed brother sucked in some valuable air. He was gasping for life : Don't go to cops against Chandu, said he while the lead and steel bolts wriggled his innards. On his way to hospital, bleeding, he wondered: What was my fault? What is gravity? In silver labs
More About: East

beyond secrets
2006-04-23 12:25:00
JUDAS ANEW | One hot noon, we climbed the dusty wooden stairs up into the attic of his house, my friend's. As our mothers traded gossips in hushed tones below, we with glee in our eyes, opened one of the four metal chests, lying shut all these years. We dipped into the box that opened with a roach shit smell. Old papers, diaries, beads, an unloaded revolver, many editions of Bible, toy cars,
More About: Secrets

footloose
2006-04-15 06:03:00
TRAVEL | Wasps buzz, streams guggle, and the day turns into sheer light. Heavenly whiteness blinds you. Look away to feel the earth wet and slushy beneath. Squint at the brilliance of the green bursts of tender paddy shoots. White cranes glide across. Blades of grass tickle. River glistens over the yellow pebbles. Wind croons through the palm trees. Now move to the silence of those wooded
More About: Footloose , Foot

let's go to the dogs tonight
2006-04-11 06:50:00
KERALA | Aren't you going to vote? It's the way you gloss off the long and deep scars. The way you black out into the void of your memory. I walk across the rally. Yellow-teethed murderer in sparkling white, haranguing before the microphone. Sexed up smiler whistles an old tune and walks away from their bed blood. Promised people, harrowed people, emptiness in their eyes, duck away on the
More About: Dogs , Tonight , The D , Toni

look who's talking sex
2006-04-09 06:02:00
INTERVIEW | The first thing I always ask sanyasins when I meet them, is about sex. Nothing naughty about it. I just love their version. Once a Buddhist monk, the official translator to Dalai Lama, sitting on a large stone in the serene temple grounds in Dharmasala told me the best thing Ive heard of sex. He said in the middle of a long and charming smile: Don't carry your dick in your head. Let
More About: Talking