‘His room is as he left it, furnished with a carpet, a spinning wheel, a low white table, a mattress and cushion.’
The western state of Gujarat, where Mahatma Gandhi’s life began, has a prohibition law in deference to the great man’s memory. ‘The sentiment that attaches to Gandhi’s name in Gujarat makes it impossible to repeal the law,’ I was told one warm evening. ‘The outcry would be tremendous.’…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
“I’m from here. I grew up here. In fact, that’s why the government invited me back for this work.”
Short fiction by Karan Mahajan.
‘India, as we know it, is changing. What will it become?’
Memoir by Amitava Kumar.
‘In Delhi the heat is chemical, something unworldly, a dry bandage or heating pad wrapped around the body.’
Memoir by Amitava Kumar.
‘Before chintziness there was chintz, a fabric produced in India and imported to Europe by colonial traders.’
Sam Johnson-Schlee on what chintz means.
A conversation between Kamila Shamsie and Sunjeev Sahota.
‘My friends say I am secretive and devious,’ he wrote in the introduction to Picasso and Dora. ‘They’re right.’
