Men are bastards, Mishu-moni, was a pronouncement for which my grandmother switched to English. She’d pause for effect, take a measured sip of her whisky and tell me stories of bastardous men.

I was 13 or 14 at the time. Thima somewhere in her sixties, with a dead husband and a dead son behind her, and her body neatly divided into three sufferings – spondylosis on top, irritable bowel in the middle, arthritis below.

But her evening ritual did not suffer.

At half past six, when other grandmothers in other houses were lighting incense, ringing their little brass bells and sending up prayers to 33 crore gods, Thima attended to more important business. She unlocked her almirah, stroked her chiffons and organzas for the right sari to wear, before ringing her own little brass bell for Bani, our help, to bring in a glass of Scotch.

Thima. In front of the mirror. In a perfectly tailored sleeveless blouse, matching petticoat. Thima wrapping her sari in intricate folds and tucks, her fingers spread out like a dancer’s mudra, swishing this way and that, magically gathering cloth into neat concertina pleats like the paper fans I made on breezeless summer days. ...

The peepul of Sikandar Bagh! That is how the people of Lucknow know me. I am the tree that is the heart of the bagh, the centre around which it grew. My branches spread wide and many birds perch there. I cast a thick shade that travellers enjoy in the summer. And in winter, my Sikander Bagh comes alive with the sounds of laughter and of music. Crowds gather then to enjoy a musical evening, while the stars slowly flicker to life in the sky above.

But that was in the past, when the Nawab lived here. Things changed last year and it happened so gradually that I barely noticed. Fewer and fewer people walked in to relax in Sikander Bagh. I started hearing the hurried shuffle of feet, angry whispers, and sometimes shouts. As the sun grew hotter, the anger grew, too. Then one day, it burst out. Lucknow was shaken by shouts, yells, and screams. It has begun, I thought. And yet, I did not know what exactly had started or how it would change my city.

As the sun grew harsher, the booms and shouts grew louder and more frequent. Screams became a part of my world. They scared the birds into flapping in terror, sending clouds of them rising into the air, squawking and crying. There were days when the earth shuddered. And I was afraid....

Canteens are under-researched not only in India, but elsewhere too. Therefore, in November-December 2023, we conducted The Canteen Survey 2023 in three states – Karnataka, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. The purpose was to understand the role of canteens and how well or poorly they are implemented.

One persistent problem with canteen schemes is that they have fallen prey to petty politicking at the state level. This can take different forms: in Andhra Pradesh, Anna Canteens were closed en masse. In Karnataka, the Congress government introduced Indira Canteens in 2017. When the BJP government came to power in the state, there were budget cuts, layoffs and in some canteens, opening hours were curtailed. Tamil Nadu’s Amma Canteens, which started in 2013, benefited from the fact that the party that introduced the scheme (the AIADMK) remained in power until 2021. When the government changed, there was a widespread perception that Amma Canteens were being neglected.

Rajasthan’s Indira Rasois were just three years old, when elections became due (in November 2023). This created the possibility that a change in government could lead to the neglect or closure of canteens. The Canteen Survey 2023 was conducted before this could happen in Rajasthan, and to study the implementation of older canteen schemes in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. ...

Joachim remembers Crystal from time to time. He recently heard she eloped with a gangster, and no one has heard from her ever since. He is happy his wife Emilda is far more beautiful than her and that he gets to see her every day at work and at home. It had been raining the day she landed in Bahrain wearing a yellow salwar kameez. He had been tempted to lift her and dance in the rain. He will never forget that day; the way the rain had upset her. She had been quiet for a long time, and he had tried different ways to make her speak or respond in some way. Finally, she had admitted to being upset because he had lied about the rain. “What else have you been lying about?” she’d asked. He had laughed, making her even more furious.

But when they reached home, she had kissed his cheek on finding out he had gotten rid of his female flatmate for her. He had frowned, disappointed at her aim and pointed at his lips. She had then blushed and helped him unbutton his shirt, aiming for his nipple instead. A bold move which aroused and irked him at the same time. “Where did you learn to do that?” he’d said irritably, his thick eyebrows furrowed together....

Clothes are not just fabric. They are the first sentence of every story you tell about yourself, written before you have opened your mouth, before anyone has heard your name or understood your intentions. Whether you are conscious of it or not, every morning when you open your wardrobe you are making a series of quiet decisions about how you wish to be received by the world that day.

The question is not whether your clothes communicate. They always do.

The question is whether what they are saying is what you mean.

My grandmother never once dressed for an audience.

She dressed for herself – with the same care and intention whether she was receiving visitors or spending a solitary afternoon in the garden. Her standards did not fluctuate based on who was watching. They were simply her standards, maintained because they reflected who she was rather than what she wanted others to think of her.

This is the foundation of dressing with intention, and it is almost entirely the opposite of how most people approach getting dressed today. ...

As we know, the fear of contagion predominated most British reports of infectious diseases in India. The tropical climate of the subcontinent was blamed once again and the dangers of the “miasmatic emanation” were discussed frequently. As sanitary improvements were introduced under the colonial regime, reflecting the hygiene consciousness of the mid-19th century in Europe, the dread of the miasmatic towns of India intensified, leading to the increased focus on social class as a determinant of smallpox. In fact, poverty was discussed as a key element; it became an important factor in the epidemics. Consequently, the filthy habits of people, yet again, acquired prominence in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

Unfortunately for the British, while cholera and later plague were assigned to filthiness, smallpox did not particularly favour the black towns or the overcrowded chawls in the big cities. Once it struck, it quickly spread through the towns and villages alike, apparently without distinguishing between race and class. Still, administrative reports of the 19th century denounced the ignorant people of India for not being hygienic, and for dwelling in insanitary conditions, especially for living in “credulity and childish ignorance”. Given that miasmas continued to be blamed for contagion well into the 19th century, the stench from the bodies of smallpox victims – during their removal, as well as during their carriage to, and exposure on the banks of the river – was thought to “taint” the air with its malodours that were believed to carry the disease, and pass it to those who came in contact with it. This came to be understood as a cause of its diffusion....

Some time ago, I spent a week staying among and interacting with the staff and the students at three remote tribal schools of Dahanu Taluka in Maharashtra’s Palghar District. I stayed long enough to catch bursts of ebullience on the school playground day after day. That ebullience is the very force of nature running through their veins – the nature that they don’t see themselves as being distinct from.

Ramesh Karthik Nayak’s poetry collection Chakmak is replete with bursts of the very same ebullience throughout this book. It is best manifested in the way Nayak constructs his imagery. The abstract nouns or the qualitative adjectives that account for the lock, stock, and barrel of much of the imagery in mainstream poetry are not his weapons. Instead, it is the action verbs that convey the images in his poems. Consider the way Nayak captures nightlife in a forest:

Bats and owls
ransack the night.

— from ‘Night’

He strips the image to the bare minimum and then lets the verb carry it. All the vividity and the vivacity of that image come from that one word: ransack. Even when an image is loaded with sensory words, it is his verbs that carry the image:...

In September, 2015, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote about Ken Dornstein, whose older brother David had perished in Pan Am Flight 103 which had exploded mid-air, six miles above the earth. The debris fell over Lockerbie, Scotland. Over many decades, Ken kept trying to solve the murder mystery of his brother’s death. Who was responsible?

If a writer’s career is a sum of its parts, then all of Patrick Radden Keefe’s career has led to London Falling, his most recent non-fiction book. Ostensibly about the death of a teenager, Zac Brettler, in 2019, the book is a matryoshka doll of stories with charming rogues, liars, criminals and various nefarious types. At the heart of the tale, the centre of it is the grief and bewilderment of Zac Brettler’s parents, both children of Holocaust survivors, thoroughly decent folks who realise that their teenage son, while alive, was a fabulist of the highest order. Zac went around lying to everyone about his family and wealth. Using the name Zac Ismailov, he claimed to have been the son of a Russian oligarch....

Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, resembles a proper madhouse in Damilare Kuku’s 2021 debut book, the short story collection Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad. It is hot and populous, and everyone’s hustling for more money or better sex. The men take shortcuts for both and women trip over themselves trying to make sense of this collective madness. Time and again they realise there is no substitute for extreme caution.

A heady romancescape

The 12 stories in the collection describe the experiences of cisgender women in various stages of heterosexual relationships. Women of all age groups and socio-economic classes suffer the madness of their men – but few take it lying down, finding ways to make the most out of their compromised circumstances. The title is catchy and relatable, and women in every city in the world will nod in approval. The men are a diverse set too, from cheating pastors to mama’s boys, from gay men to “alpha” Whites, men who endlessly pursue and those who are emotionally unavailable. Lagos’s heady romancescape often sweeps up unsuspecting women in its unique madness....

Having read several of Saikat Majumdar’s novels and a couple of his non-fiction books, I consider him one of those rare contemporary writers who move seamlessly across fiction, nonfiction, and academia – embodying the spirit of a true literary polymath. What I find particularly compelling about his writing is the way it inhabits both intimacy and ideas with equal ease. His novels delve into love, desire, friendship, memory, cities, and the shifting textures of modern life with emotional acuity, while his nonfiction carries the same depth through sharp insight and elegant prose. Across genres, his writing has consistently challenged and moved me, often leaving me with unexpected reflections long after I’ve finished reading.

In a conversation with Scroll, Majumdar talked about his latest book Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial, the value of narrative intelligence, why we urgently need to re-evaluate our intellect, and more. Excerpts from the interview:

Let me begin by saying that I’ve long admired your fiction – you are among my favourite contemporary Indian writers. So, I’m especially curious to know what prompted Saikat Majumdar, the novelist, to write Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial?
Fair question. Writing through the years, the technical difference between genres feels less important than certain overarching preoccupations that are now finally taking shape for me. One such concern is a certain ability of language to shock and surprise, to evoke a sensory, atmospheric reality. Likewise, the fundamental question of how we take shape as the characters we eventually become – our making and education, but one that is not limited to institutions: school, college, university, though obviously they are significant too. The Bildungsroman, also called the novel of education or the coming-of-age story, has been important to me, particularly through the question of sexuality and the self-making of the artist or the intellectual, as you might sense in novels like The Firebird, The Scent of God, or