Posts tagged "blog"
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A Bus and Chai Story
Reposting stuff I like from my archives. This is from 2006. Rajasthan, at the peak of summer. There are no tourists around for miles, except the two of us. For a good reason too. Tell any Indian you were in Rajasthan in May, and he is bound to exclaim, “Vhat? It’s… hot!” And when an Indian says it’s hot, believe me,…
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Portraits Unphotographable
Whether it’s a long-haul transatlantic flight or a regional short hop, or even just a trip out on a local bus, the process of meeting and eventually talking to strangers, can lead one to use quick heuristics in sizing them up. Perhaps it’s our automatic mechanism to do so in order to pass the time, while travelling and…
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Amar Shonar Bangla
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one’s from August 2006, when I'd spent some time in both sides of Bengal. Nine in the morning, every morning — a chef in Sirajgonj district’s “only acceptable hotel”, the Hotel Anik (Residential), cooks me a breakfast of two parathas and two eggs. My decision…
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Why I Am Still A Feminist
Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2006. It has also been republished in print in GASPP, A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose. I am still a feminist because I am no longer ashamed of saying I am one. I have grown tired for apologizing for so many of the things I am: for being liberal,…
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Other Mornings in Other Places
What I have noticed about being away, and still can’t shake off, is how mornings in each foreign place are so strikingly different from what one is used to; how different they are from each other — how foreign the word foreign sounds after a while. I like to believe it never hits you you are away until you wake up…
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Art and Lies, And
Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This one's from 2006. There is this picture of us back when we were even younger; snapshot circa 2004. 3 years after the start of our life together. If pictures could tell a tale this was the tale of us on the page just after ‘happy together’, though there you were, still…
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Incandescent
Reposting stuff from the past. This one from 2005. There she is, your ex-lover, across the bar and incandescent. Gleaming as she always does, though perhaps now from that diamond ring perched so effortlessly off her slender fingers, which grip the cigarette tightly in other places. You steal a glance. You steal two.…
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Roundtable
Where I post stuff from the archives, the stuff I like. This is from 2005. Do you remember how when we first met, I thought you were Adrienne? You were in blue jeans, and a black, backless top. I was in what I used to wear years ago, and still do. Haha I guess things change, years pass, we move on, but not our…
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Excavation
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from April 2005. Wherever I go, I am not allowed to forget – how perfectly crisp and displaced my unaccented English is. If there is an accent it is not one you can pin down. To my countrymen it betrays my independent school upbringing, a way of life,…
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Release
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from 2005. like the foreign worker who, having spent six days of every week, fifty one weeks of every year, building for a country that is not his, listening to languages that are not his, but whose greatest pleasure comes from talking every Sunday in his…
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The Eight Ages of a Woman
Blast from the past: digging into my archives and republishing the stuff I like. This was originally from 2004, and reposted again in 2005. And again now. It is the universal truth — before any woman, man, boy, or girl, is able to walk, first she must spend time crawling. And so it is here, as well as others, that…
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Two Weeks
Some weird poetry from 2003, when I was a wee child. two weeks before and the morning after all that mattered was not what really happened where it brings us now, or what a gamble we'd just taken. It was you planting your signature hasty goodbye sweetie on my cheeks in the elevator just before the doors opened to my…
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X Weeks of Not Missing You
Reposting stuff from my archive. This one from 2003, when I was a wee child. (so I still lie, to myself, more than to you.) sketches for my sweetheart the drunk.. Hey. I don't think about you so much these days. I still do, of course – when my too-good memory starts acting up. Of course I do – it's not easy to forget…
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An Exercise of Faith
This was published in QLRS in Jan 2003. I had weighed the burden of desire in my hands but in yours you weighed reality between your fingers, half serious even as we tried to kid ourselves (and others) nothing else quite mattered. I weigh now the desire of burden in my fingers but in yours you now weigh illusion…
194 posts tagged "blog"