KhepiAri

Book Review: When The River Sleeps by Easterine Kire. Quote: Perhaps the answer lay not in striving but in being. In simply accepting that the loneliness would never be eliminated fully, but that one could deal with it by learning to treat it like a companion and no longer an adversary. Ville a hunter wakes up from a dream, ventures out to search for the heart-stone; that holds the power of the river that's asleep. And this stone is guarded by wailing-angry-widow-spirits. Many attempts have been made at magical realism in Indian English writing, and I didn't like them. My personal opinion is that magical realism needs a deep connection with nature, maybe never explicitly explored in the text, but the traces of that connection always shows in the words written. And I have always argued that North East India is the most fertile ground to plant the seeds of magical realism in. Easterine Kire, pens our deep connection with nature for the national readership to gawk...

Three months back Jerry Pinto was reciting on how we humans clutter and crystallize with each other based on our prejudices. Even the most educated and liberated mind have a queer screw which never bends on an idea. Our prejudices are the secret screenshots our friends enjoy. Sometimes in the company or on the online platform, we let our mind roll and like a Djinn in the bottle, our prejudices make an unwanted statement. Four days ago, as I sat inside my pre-heated blue bus and waited for the driver to unroll the shirt down his hair nipples and pot belly and press the clutch with his slippers, some pretty girls took the front seats beside the driver and chatted away in their own tongue, a tone similar to my ears but meaning scarce to my ears.  The bus driver out of the sense of shame roll downed his shirt and smiled at the girls, exposed hairy chest are not everyone's wild fantasy. Two women dressed in sarees, sitting before me observed the friendly driver talking...

For almost six months City of Joy has become by my new address, the addressee finds the city overwhelming and loud, populated and confused, filled with rude yellow cab drivers and helpful blue bus conductors. It is both logical and magical, basically an irritating place but none the less very homogenizing in approach. One can find a street named after every other historical figure, except Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin we have Ho Chi Min to Lenin at one random nook. Navigating through this city is hard yet funny, going to my darling college is a journey of its kind. Fortunately, we have the metro which is efficient unlike this lazy city. Travelling through metro has bought to my sight hilarious scenes from everyday life, from a pervert being publicly shamed to an old man getting off at wrong station, in five months four eyes of the addressee has seen a lot. Often the addressee has been part of tragically comic scenarios herself where wrong exits have made too many cameos. In th...

First time I saw a mannequin is a memory lost in the Ocean. My major encounter with one happened when I was around seven. I was visiting my paternal home during summer vacation, on one particular horrible summer day my family had decided to go shopping. That was where I met a doll that was my size and wearing a metallic brown skirt, I fell in love with that skirt at first sight. Poor doll was also wearing a bottle green sleeveless tee, the greedy me desired that too. Shopkeepers found me exact copy-paste of the brown skirt, but when it came to the tee, they didn’t have another in stock. They bought me white full sleeved white shirt with red flowers, a yellow collared shirt, a pink frilly blouse, but I wanted that bottle green tee. Meanwhile my sister, mom and dad had selected their clothes; I was still stuck on the green tee. My love for green has been dominant trait since childhood; those were first strikes of my green-insanity. I made the shopkeepers bent to my demand, ra...

To my imaginary reader buddies, let’s close our eyes and imagine our lives; it has its downs and ups, falls and rises, sadness and happiness, anger and love etcetera etcetera. It’s normal, ordinary and has a history. We were born and like the saying goes we don’t get to choose our name or family, hence we stick to them for life. Keep your eyes closed though. When my elder sister bought her egotistical six months old Persian Cat, the poor proud brat had no name. He had assumed “oye” and “Oi” to be his epithet. Finally when I named him Goldie, the happiness he had was shining on the tips of his whiskers. After that he has been supplied with multiple nicknames which somehow are always similar to mine, but he loves all his names. If tomorrow I were to stop calling him Goldie and call him Sunflower, he would be perplexed for few days, maybe weeks. My housemate and I, we have adopted a stray cat and named her Petush. For first few days she was far from responding to her n...

I have been in love with trains since my childhood, I love the constant rocking, the vanishing site and the upper berth, cool blue seats! I love climbing up to my berth and coop up with a book and listen to the constant chattering, vendors walking and screeching wheels. I find trains to be the perfect example of living without excess as well the true emblem of class division. Though a three-day long train ride might leave one fatigued and a three-hour long chair-car ride with back ache, trains are in the end a necessity for all in this country. Nehru travelled a lot in trains where he would read, write and sell nationalism to fellow passengers and well Mahatma Gandhi was denied the luxury of first class once and look what the scorned man did? When I am to return from a mini-vacation of books, drinks, pizza and cookies, my heart might be too an unwilling partner. To escape heat of my current location, I ended up in another hot place. The vacation in nutshell was journey from...

February tickles in and the new year spirit leaves us with the gloomy bloom. It’s the month of love or in other words the most profitable month for the card makers, soft toy sellers and restaurants. Love either overflows or dries a human heart for first fifteen days of this small month. I who am in love with the idea of love finds imaginary wings growing out from my toes in this month. For years now my friends and I we have been gifting each other chocolates on valentine’s day. We can blame this flaw of ours easily on the Japanese and Korean rom-coms we grew up watching. My once walking mate and now my partner in quest of  self love, turns into over-feminized creatures in this month with me.  Valentine’s day is a big event in the life of loveless. By loveless I simply mean the love that comes from a lover. My family is strictly forbidden to enter my non-existent love life and express their suffocating love to me to counter my loveless comment. I love wearing red on...

(Happy belated New Year! and the first blog post should begin with Twisted Tales)  I have decided to draw my own images as googling is time consuming & I am not an artist. Best thing about sudden vacations is, people can take small trips to rejuvenate their scrambled and scattered spirits. When these battered creatures get magical three days to escape university, they whoosh past their backpacks and run home to re-nourish their starved body and souls. While some vacations are gift from the divine, some vacations come into life of people as double edged swords. Instead of rejuvenating to glorious beauty, one ends up being errand boy, a job that befalls with birth under right stars on wrong night. One particular battered soul, decides that expensive unhealthy junk food is a must for the system after living on green tea and hot-chocolate diet for a month, when the news of sudden vacation breaks out. This particular creature could never escape the all reaching...

On twenty ninth of last month, I finally did it! No you dirty minded reader buddies not that ‘did’. Yes you all who have been reading my blog for last four years, I did it, by you I mean both real life and imaginary readers I have. I finally travelled alone, alone in the sense where I had no parents with me or my elder sister and my brother-in-law but my best friend. My university loves festivals; hence I got a month long vacation. Now that my second sets of parents are no longer living in city of joy, I had no other option but return home. I so wish I had a cat loving aunt living in the hills. Alas I have to settle for a cat loving mom in the valley. And this woman who is my mother had conspired with her husband to assault me with food. In last one month I have been fed up to my brains, my once less bulging tummy is now flubbing above my waist band. My eight girl friends and I we had been planning on a girl trip before completing our undergrad to celebrate our passing ou...

Attempted Flash Fiction:- belongs to rightful owner, PC- Google There are days when I fall under spells; today was one freshly lit afternoon that had charmed me. I was seated on my coarse blue seat and looking out of the window. I was under two spells. My feet rested on the empty seat opposite to mine, my black slippers cowering under its vacant space in the shadows. The green outside was rushing past my vision and the sunlight was making it hard for my eyes to keep staring outside for long. It was one of those days when rain had wiped off the dirt from sky and the smell of wet earth was numbing all other senses except the olfactory glands. My fellow passenger on right was fast asleep; her toes curled in dreams, her knees pulled to her swollen chest and her face half hidden in white dupataa, blocking the sunlight. As the train kept gushing on her tracks, I saw her body getting swayed softly on the blue berth. The mauve kurta and jeans she was in highlighted her outlin...