#chanyado

I don’t remember much from my first funeral. We stood in line, waiting to view the body. When it was my turn, I observed how the body was ashy, its arms stiff by their sides, nostrils oozing with cotton wool. I didn’t know who the dead person was. My mother told me that didn’t matter. In our community, you don’t have to know who the person is in order to pray for their passage to Heaven. Every…

Pulling out By Aleya Kassam

I sat cross-legged on the floor under the dangling naked light bulb; three tests arranged in front of me like obedient children at school assembly. We’d had an argument about how to approach the tests. He’d wanted me to take them one at a time after we knew the results of the one before. I’d wanted to take all three at a go.Now he was in the bedroom, sulking, pacing. And I was in the bathroom…

Mumbai is in Heat

As we sit caged in the tuk tuk, stopped in traffic, I can’t stop watching them. He stares straight ahead, completely unflustered as she runs her palm down his denim covered thigh. It isn’t a tentative graze of fingertips, but a possessive stroke, as if she knows this part of his body well. The rhythm. The pressure. The pace. Knows it intimately. His expression doesn’t change, as she squeezes his…