Reading Time: 3 minutesShaadi kar do, theek ho jayega. Marriage as a cure is one of the most trusted treatments in Indian homes, and the only one where the medicine is a real person. When families lie to preserve their secrets and ruin more lives.
Reading Time: 3 minutesMy short story won Platinum, the first prize, at the IFP 50 Hour Writing Challenge. Here’s what those fifty hours asked of me, why I almost walked away, and what villages do with a woman’s grief.
Reading Time: 3 minutesFiction fits mothers into two costumes, the saint and the monster. The damaged mothers of Cobra Orchard wear neither. Every one of them loves her child, and every one of them leaves a wound. Find out how they carry love and trauma in the same arms.
Reading Time: 2 minutesBook editor Mili Das interviewed me about Cobra Orchard. She asked about the outlines I never wrote, characters I refused to label, and why the men in my book are so quiet. Her questions made me think long and hard on how Cobra Orchard came to life.
Reading Time: 4 minutesWronged by everyone, they remember everything and have never once apologized. The family narcissist isn’t pretending to be the victim. They believe it completely. Households often bend around such a person causing the suffering to spread instead of being eliminated.
Reading Time: 2 minutesEveryone pretends the wedding joins a bride and a groom. It doesn’t. An intercultural marriage joins two different ways of living, and the woman usually pays for the transition. The smaller problems that lie waiting beneath the surface. No amount of preparation is sufficient to prevent them.
Reading Time: 3 minutesSecrets don’t die with the person who kept them. In fact, they begin to rise from the graves that kept them safe. How do families cope with truths that arrive unannounced to threaten their well-being? The dead don’t have the answers to the realities that outlive them.
Reading Time: 2 minutesA book editor wasn’t sure about Cobra Orchard. Three women at the center, a book that looked women oriented. Then she read it, and gave it 5 out of 5.
Reading Time: 3 minutesDo you still carry a version of yourself that was decided by someone else? Were you too young to understand this at the time? Has this childhood label stuck to you like superglue? The burden of these verdicts often scar a person for life.
Reading Time: 3 minutesHurt people hurt people is the sentence Indian families reach for after someone does something inexcusable. Notice how it’s never aimed at the person committing the offence. A wound explains the behavior. It never hands over permission to pass down the hurt.
