Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the...

The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in...

Everyone has a story. I don’t believer anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.

Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.

For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That...

Fenugreek, Tuesday’s spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.

The power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it...

Danger will come upon us when it will. We can’t stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There’s no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it...

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for...

In the white marble hall of the hotel, I’m waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we’re dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.

Each day has a color, a smell.

I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable–but I always was so, only I never knew it!

In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess’s glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti–no fancy modern clothes for him. That’s...

Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs...

After the fire, when I’d tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they’d been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common...

The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.

Truth, like diamond, has many facets.

She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through...