Delegate pass
Much has been written about muses and understandably so – they are salacious tales and scandalous to boot. The recorder always faithfully documents the gratitude the artistic and literary worlds owe to these little Lolitas who, by dint of their tenderness and tautness, aided the ageing masters in their Elysian pursuits. What might have started […]
Jesus monkey and Mary chechi
As children, our parents kept me and my sisters away from adultery and blaspheme by shifting to English. So we might all be sitting around and talking about the annual day celebrations of our village school in Koko, rural Nigeria, in Malayalam. Suddenly, they would go ‘Mrs Gloria caught Miss Pereira and Mr Okay in […]
Quiet days in Kochi
Alice Delices is a rare place. Besides freshly baked bread, here you find people actually talking to each other, looking at books and photographs, debating the identity of artists on the wall posters next to that of Picasso and kids rolling the good old dice. We sat on the backless benches fashioned from wood, facing […]
The lesser-known globetrotting chai wallahs
Je ne sais quoi For all their famous hatred, the French sometimes do come to the rescue of English, the language. The word above might sound like an endearment in Mandarin but it means a wonderful ‘quality that cannot be described or named easily.’ Which means those four little words can mean everything from the […]
House of the rising sun
Take it easy, he said It all started with a valium prescription following a workout accident: I couldn’t straighten up after I put the barbell down but had to crawl on all fours and finally clamber up a chair clutching with every movable limb. That’s how the ambulance found me – sprawled like a chilling […]
The bridge across furore
Clashing with the police, as anyone who has clashed with the police knows, is addictive. There must be some endorphin involved in the heightened sense of indignation: ‘hey jerk, I am doing your job and you are hitting me?’ Observe the frontline protesters, they are regulars. You will find many of them in gym gear […]
Hippie
The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, I have been told, is a sensory whirl: the colours and sights, smells and sounds waft around you, a gripping menagerie. In Paulo Coelho’s new book, Hippie, it is a phantasm as two women – one high on LSD – weave their way out of the maze. The whole act […]
FRI Day
It’s like John Wick – unless you know the history, you are just looking at a brooding, pretty façade. But under the sempiternal glow of the autumn sun falling unfiltered through a cloudless sky, even the air beholds the sprawling regalia with a breathless stillness. In the boughs and boles, even those afar, one detects […]
Love in the time of flood
Everyone thanked the sand mafia. They said it was their tireless digging up of the riverbed which enhanced its water-holding capacity which in turn enabled additional water from the dams to flow on without incident. Thank you marauders of the earth! They were joking, alright. These jokes, these badly articulated relief sighs, came wrapped in […]