Posts Categorized: Drawing

River Notes

I’m starting a Substack with an account of my journey, beginning June 25, through small towns and cities on the banks of the Ganges. Subscribe here.

Particulate Matter

In which I report on my visit to India this past winter. Many thanks to the editors of Granta magazine. A Bihari man working as a driver in Delhi told me a strange story. His name was Deepak. When his mother complained of chronic stomach pains, Deepak brought her from the village for treatment in… Read more »

Many Words for Heat, Many Words for Hate

Granta Magazine, one of my favorite literary journals, has just published a report of mine entitled “Many Words for Heat, Many Words for Hate.” Above are the first two pages. Get a copy of Issue no. 162 or subscribe online. Here’s a paragraph from the piece: In Delhi the heat is chemical, something unworldly, a… Read more »

Dilli

I am delighted to report that I will be in conversation with the marvelous graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee on December 17. Our discussion will focus on how storytelling and commentary is, in reality, a way of keeping a diary. Not just a personal diary but a public diary. A collective diary of the everyday and… Read more »

October

  The leaves are turning color and this is what I did over my October break. I have painted the foliage that I can see outside my window onto the calendar page for October. The calendar, a gift from The Bookshop in Jor Bagh, Delhi, carries a poem by Maya Angelou. One line reads “I… Read more »

Writer’s Notebook

In the manuscripts and archives section of the British library, I found Shiva Naipaul’s notebook that he kept during his visit to India to report on the assassination of Indira Gandhi. My piece about that notebook has been published in the Hindustan Times. Read it here.

February, Delhi

February 23 is the first anniversary of the Delhi riots. When making this painting I was thinking of Bashir Badr’s lines: ‘Log toot jaate hain ek ghar banana mein / Tum taras nahin khaate bastiyan jalaane mein.’ (People go broke in building a home / And you remain unmoved as you burn down whole neighborhoods.)… Read more »

Postcards from the Pandemic

Virginia Quarterly Review has uploaded three of my #coronavirusdiary entries and three drawings as a part of their #VQRTrueStory series described as a “social-media experiment in nonfiction.” Go here for the first, here for the second, and here for the third.