Here is a piece my mother wrote upon a trip in Uttar Pradesh a few days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Continue reading “Shagir Mian” →

This is a one-act play my mother wrote. The point of it wasn’t whether it could be enacted though (which explains some of the supposed ‘stage directions’). She wanted to show how from one perspective (which could be portrayed in this medium), the relations between the countries of the subcontinent had come to resemble playground politics at a point in time when India was regularly portrayed as the Big Brother political entity. She didn’t necessarily agree with this, nor wholly disagree. But she could tell the effect it had on the media. Continue reading “India Blues” →

My mother’s story can be difficult to understand if you land in it at just any point in the tale. To understand her journey, you’d have to go back a little and know something about the earliest phase of her life, the one she spent under the guardianship of her father, Shri Surendra Nath Tripathi. Continue reading “Her Father” →

My mother was preoccupation itself. Much like a dervish entertaining a divine ideal of work (like her father, for whom work was worship), she was always in a whirl of constructive activity. She would come back home from office and almost immediately begin setting about the house.

Thanks to this ceaseless pattern of action and planning the next action, it was easy to forget that she was a person who had truly inherited her father’s creativity and taste for the literary Continue reading “A Poem. A Manifesto.” →