And why these should not be banned. — If the novel Lolita etched a line of doubt in my understanding of the difference between good and moral fiction, American Psycho scarred a yawning chasm. Both books present morally dubious subject matter in structurally excellent literary prose. But this line blurs more in the latter as Bret Easton Ellis…

And I was left drenched in the torrent of her memories — As the long piercing shriek of the train’s wheels dragging on the iron tracks finally stopped, and the wrinkled doors of the train stuttered open, the mass of eager crowd poured out, rushing towards the existing stairs. Like a torrent, the unceasing flow gushed down the stairwell and emerged into…

And the ephemeral questions that come with it — Late winter dusk, velvety and dulcet, and I am walking on the street looking ahead at the lights, hazed, and blurry in the mist, their blue and red and yellow soft, faded out. Looking at these I feel I’m looking back in time at some distant memories. Memories that had…

As we evolve as a writer, our writing evolves too — Writing is many things — the thrill of stumbling upon a new idea, the rush of putting it in words, the high of completing the first draft, the drag of endless revisions that follow, and that fulfilling sense ‘of something growing’ that envelops us as we progress in our work…

A pivot tilts our existence — Isn’t it the bitterest of feelings — the feeling of waiting for someone with bated breath? This feeling that courses in your body like a second stream of blood, that spreads like fog in your mind, sounds like sweet chimes of a far-off temple to which you must go, but…

You are not burning with me anyways — Not that I don’t want you to stay; I do; I really want to; it is the only thing that I care for, and nothing I will ever so much desire as I desire you. Your presence, your closeness, how it changes the very atomic structure of the air around…

It made me reflect on my changing relationship with my country of birth — On a Sunday morning couple of weeks ago when I was still in bed my toddler who is extravagantly chatty in the morning asked me to tell the names of my co-workers. I began reciting names in the order they came in my head. Ashley, Brian, Sam, Emily, Jason, Todd…

Is she still alive? — Saturday night, no graduate papers to check, no thought about her mother that left her worried. So, Marie decided to do one thing that she relished — watch a movie. God! It had been months since she’d watched a good one. Any, in fact. But her life hadn’t been in…

Why do I wake up at three forty-five, and live by Pomodoro Technique — Three forty-five am. That’s when I wake up, every day. When I do not, five minutes later the alarm on my iPhone nudges me awake anyway. But that rarely happens now as most of the time I am awake before the alarm rings. After nine months of waking up at…