On the anniversary of the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, I wrote a brief prose-poem which was published by The Wire: A lot of life is left in a man being killed. He does not at first foresee the end. He knows, of course, that anything can happen. When it begins his only worry… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Writing
In Patna
I have returned to my hometown to read from The Lovers as a part of a #BiharKalam event.
Heat of Life
My brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Lingua Franca on Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2017. In an author’s note, Desmond has written that often the very people he was studying taught him how to see. Nevertheless, he missed much, at least at first, “not… Read more »
We, the Mistaken People
My piece for the New Yorker on the attacks on Indians living in America. On a September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by… Read more »
Heart of Darkness
“Central India’s Ugly Fight for Environmental Justice.” That’s the title of my report from Bastar about a meeting organized by Soni Sori. If you threw a dart at the heart of India but your aim was off, a little low and to the right, you would hit the village of Matenar, in the administrative division… Read more »
The Lovers: A Novel
Forthcoming/Monsoon, 2017/Indian subcontinent only/Aleph Book Company. The book will also be published under the title Immigrant, Montana: A Novel by Faber in the UK, Knopf in the US, and in translation by publishers elsewhere.
Trumpistan
Post-election, my thoughts from a writer’s notebook in The Margins: Early on November 8, I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton at my son’s school. The school was closed for the day and my children were at home. Then the wait began. That evening, the writer Chang-rae Lee was doing a reading on my… Read more »
Thank You, United States Artists
These are hard times and they call for hard work, not least from writers and artists. I’m thrilled to report that have I just been awarded a literature fellowship from USArtists. This year’s other literature honoree is the truly magnificent Claudia Rankine. Look at the list of past winners in the photo above–the complete… Read more »
The Agony and Ecstasy of India at the Olympics
The testimony of a disappointed but not resentful Indian fan. My essay for NewYorker.com: Not long ago, I discovered that I could own a piece of my childhood trauma if I shelled out sixteen dollars on eBay. The August 22-28, 1976, issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which came out just after the Montreal… Read more »
Pyre
I’m thrilled to report that my essay “Pyre,” published in Granta 130, will appear in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. My mother died in Patna on 7 January 2014. We cremated her two days later on the banks of the Ganga at Konhara Ghat near Patna, more than 150 miles downriver from… Read more »