Reviews & Musings

Memory arrives through absence.  What stayed with me wasn't what Khalid Mohamed remembers about his biological mother, but what he doesn't. The story is built around gaps, missing conversations, unanswered questions, a childhood assembled from fragments. It feels like memory is less an archive and more an excavation.  Two mothers, two kinds of love.  The title initially suggests conflict, but the story resists that simplification. The grandmother and the biological mother occupy different emotional spaces. One raises him; the other haunts him. The story refuses to rank their love. Instead, it explores how a child can belong to two women in entirely different ways. 

The astrologer isn't really an astrologer.  The story opens with a man whose profession is built on performance. His forehead markings, saffron turban and carefully chosen words create authority before he has said anything meaningful. Narayan seems interested in how much of expertise is appearance. We often trust confidence more readily than truth. 

I walked into a workshop on memory as storytelling, expecting to learn something about writing. I walked out thinking about the mind.  We spent the day talking about three ideas of memory—Proustian, Bergsonian, and Philip K. Dickian. Three ways of understanding something we all possess and yet never fully grasp. I had encountered these names before in passing, mostly in literary conversations, but this was the first time I was asked not just to understand them, but to write through them. When we finally stopped discussing memory and started writing from it, the theories became something else entirely. 

  “I accepted very late that I had become a husband, it took me a long time. Nearly 10–15 years to realise that she is my wife. Before that, she was just a woman who had my children, cooked for me, and took care of the house. I had no feelings beyond that.” ( Source ) Renowned actor, singer, and lyricist Piyush Mishra said this in an interview with journalist Shubhankar Mishra. The internet responded with the kind of melancholy admiration reserved for tragic lovers. Here was a man still faithful to his great love after all these years. But I could not stop thinking about his wife.

I don’t think I have ever underlined silences the way I did while reading Eighteen Inches Apart.  I have followed Sonia Bahl’s writing long enough to know her gift is not just in telling stories, but in listening to silences, the unsaid, and the fragile tremors between people who almost touch but don’t. And here, once again, she writes in that delicate space of the eighteen inches between two hearts, a glance and a goodbye, and between what we carry and what we dare to release.  Reading this felt like sitting by a window on a slow afternoon, watching light shift across familiar objects and realizing they were never quite as ordinary as they seemed. There is warmth here, along with an ache that settles deep, like the echo of something you once lost and are only now beginning to understand. 

Floating Worlds is not interested in telling a story in straight lines. In her debut, Alpa Arora follows the rhythms of a mind that wanders, retreats, and returns, often without warning, making the reader inhabit that same uncertainty.  At its center is Ruby Khanna, a former scriptwriter, empty nester, and a woman suspended between selves. Ruby does not simply escape; she lives inside escape. Her movement between fantasy and reality is not always marked, conscious, and within her control. The novel refuses to rush into naming this as damage or disorder. Instead, it lingers in that uneasy space where the mind fractures out of a need to survive what cannot be neatly contained. Ruby’s inner life unfolds through a series of imagined scenarios, desires, and projections that slip quietly into her lived reality. These are the novel’s way of thinking.  At a time when so much fiction leans toward clarity and resolution, Arora stays with what is unclear, unresolved, and at times uncomf...

In early 2023, I made a quiet decision that did not feel significant at the time—I chose to stop reading casually, and to start reading with intent, turning towards artists I had long admired, not just to understand what they created, but to sit closer to the question of how and why they created at all.  They were not confined to a single world. They came from everywhere—writers, yes, but also singers, lyricists, filmmakers, actors—voices that had shaped something within me long before I knew how to articulate it. And what I sought in them was not inspiration in the shallow, fleeting sense, but something far more demanding: a deeper encounter with creativity itself, with the discipline it requires, the solitude it enforces, the identity it constantly unsettles, and the quiet, often invisible love that sustains it despite everything.  The process, I realised very quickly, could not be rushed. It refused to remain “reading” in the conventional sense. It became slower, heavier, a...

This month, I am carrying Difficult Pleasures by Anjum Hasan into our mentoring circle.  Not as an expert, not with answers, but with open hands. It feels like the kind of book you don’t really read alone. You sit with it. You breathe with it. You let it rearrange the furniture of your heart. All through our interactions, I keep thinking about how strange and beautiful it is to guide a room through grief while still learning its language myself. 

Quotes (From the preface)  “All theories of writing are bogus. Every writer develops his own method or lack of method and a story comes into being for some unknown reason anyhow.” – R.K. Narayan   “I liked to be free to read what I please and not be examined at all.” – R.K. Narayan  Both these lines stayed with me long after I finished the book. They feel almost like a permission slip to read freely, to write instinctively, and to not over-intellectualise the act of creation. Coming back to Narayan now, while consciously trying to study writing, felt ironic and grounding at the same time.

I am often asked by readers of Between the Lines : “Have you read all the books you write about?”