October 30, 2023
People can hold out on their land for a while, but no one can stay without water.
Siddhartha Deb
All articles by this author
May 26, 2023
The Assignment
The farmhouse, or mansion, or whatever it is, looms in front of her, like a sunken ship raised for salvage
The approach to the farmhouse is not meant for walking, and Bibi feels that she is barely making any progress. The haze blankets her surroundings, giving her approach a dreamlike quality as images come into focus like memories and dissolve like dreams. Slashes of moss-green lawn, the sharp, blue inhalation of what is perhaps a swimming pool. Bibi wonders why swimming pool floors are always painted blue and if this has anything to do with the sky and the ocean. She wonders what it would be like to swim in the ocean and look up at a blue sky.
Paranoir
What is this Committee that you speak of?
We are filled with joy that you take your riding examination today. From such surmounting of physical boundaries do we prepare ourselves to traverse thresholds where matter dissolves into spirit, where time and space fall away, and where the glorious universe reveals itself to us in its infinite shades of compassion and love. A horse may be just a horse, but for you it is only the first of your many vahanas. You will not fail.
The Mouse
There was a woman in a white suit who had grown a human ear on a mouse and a curly-haired MacArthur genius who made documentary films on government secrecy. There was a two-man team of economists from Harvard, one of whom apologized for the absence of his companion, who was sick, and for sitting far apart from everybody else because he too was sick, although he assured everybody that neither of them had the swine flu.
Without the aspirers emulating, admiring, and parting with their cash, moguls like Arindam would not exist.
Gatsby in New Delhi
A Rushdie novel, like its author, is a public figure, its thingness easy to lose in the sound and the fury.
