By Keki N. Daruwalla

Like Ted Hughes, Daruwalla draws our attention to the natural habitat, an earth that is home for birds and animals, plants and rocks. ‘Winter Migration’ has images of ‘dall sheep’, ‘rust-coloured rocks’, ‘dwarf birch’, ‘antlers’; ‘wolves’, ‘bear’, and ‘the Arctic tern’, ‘the marmot’ and ‘the squirrel’ wake up and move, or decide not to leave. The story of the ‘Alaskan Bear named Sky’ in the poem ‘Mother Bear’ brings alive the instinct of motherhood and responsibilities associated with it. The mother protects and nurtures her young cubs with much love and caution.


Reviewed by: Ranu Uniyal
By Anju Makhija

The poetry collection by Vinay Sharma moves deeper into an inner terrain. The idea of change is not driven by external factors alone, but by the dissolving of the inner boundaries. The slipping of selves happens so fluidly in this moving, shape-shifting book that I now hold in my hands. It becomes difficult, almost impossible to pin these poems down, for time and space seem to have no fixed hold over the words that inhabit these pages.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
Radhika Oberoi

While my novel will survive this onslaught (glorious endorsements, remember?), what shocks me is the type of critical analysis the piece is emblematic of–it felt like a personal attack rather than a rational debunking of the novel’s premise, its characters, etc.


Editorial
Edited and translated by Tridip Suhrud

Though short, her observations are penetrating and, at the same time, insightful. A case in point is an entry from 3 January 1947, in which she describes her visit (along with Gandhi and others) to a Harijan locality, named Namasudra. She describes this visit thus: ‘In the forenoon we went to visit the Harijan locality—they are called Namasudra—here. The inhumanity perpetrated on them makes one quiver’ (emphasis mine).


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By Zara Chowdhary

The memoir is spread in five sections, namely ‘Fire’, ‘Threads’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, which are indicative of violence’s contamination of the most basic elements of the everyday. The section titled ‘Fire’ tells us about her association with fire in the train burning, and the burning of the Gulbarg society, which saw the killing of Ahsan Jafri and Bilkis Bano’s gang rape. The chapter discusses violence that is personalized through its effect on the hearing body and writing body, in this case, the narrator, and her attempts to formalize an affective intimate public sphere to form an affective community. She writes, ‘When I hear the story of the night Bano spent in the forest, I will think often about Bano’s body


Reviewed by: Aman Nawaz
By Rudolf C. Heredia

Despite securing prestigious opportunities to study abroad, Heredia was confronted with personal sacrifice, as he was unable to attend his father’s funeral while in Chicago. He pays tribute to the influential Jesuits who shaped his journey, including Fr. Joseph Neuner, Fr.
George Soares, Fr. Jose Ugarte and Fr.


Reviewed by: Amala Valarmathy A