In those hours when the night is still dark and cold, we see Alokananda waking up to the faint sound of stifled sobs. The sheets besides her are creaseless, sleepless. She gets up silently, her...

She had been hesitant the first night, right before she had launched into him like a wild animal. The imprint of her violence had lasted on him well until the morning and while he had...

I remember being in the mood for love at the slightest provocation- your nubile body feeling undeniably illicit, under mine, rhyming, heaving, breathing together, each other, squirrel hands, down and across and stolen kisses, on...

I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'(‘Left from Dhakeshwari’)

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one...

Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-chimes...

I had wanted to hate you that day. Believe me, I had. And then suddenly, staring at me incredulously, your extra half-tooth had blurted out aloud, ‘You get dimples on both cheeks!’ your immaculate lisp...

There would remain no sign of you ever having played in this house. Your childhood is going to be swept under a camel-skin rug and elevators are going to be built over the lake we...

That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but...

She had thought, instinctively, that Victoria had a remarkably beautiful face. The face showed an alert awareness of life: her lips- full, overblown like clown-lips liable to laugh at the slightest provocation. She thought that...

Why weren’t you beautiful? That would’ve solved everything.’(‘Left from Dhakeshwari’)

The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between...

Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lights...