Taylor Swift blares from the U-Haul’s radio, and we immediately burst into song, switching the lyric without needing to confer: I’m feeling twenty-FIVE, oh, oo. My partner grins at our telepathy, then comments: “Partner, really, don’t quit your day job.”  I laugh; continue to sing, happily off-key. We’re packed into a 14-foot U-Haul, speeding up…

At first it’s like a regular evening. Not that that’s a good thing, but at least you’re used to it. You sit on the chair next to your mom. Your granny’s called four times already: to ask if your mom had locked the door in the summer house when she last visited a month ago,…

When my friend, Letty, and I were fifteen, we cut our fingers, touched them together, and became blood sisters. As adults, we can go months without communicating, but when we get together again, we are still those sisters, mixing blood and staying up all night to talk smart and laugh ourselves silly. We wanted to…

Once, while my senior English students were discussing whether or not Ophelia and Hamlet “did the deed” our discussion turned toward questions of rape.  I was shocked to hear a number of my male students express their belief that a girl who dresses provocatively or gets drunk “has it coming”.  I was equally shocked to…

I am twenty-three years old, and I’m in love. I love my boyfriend. I’ve known him since grade nine, and he loves me. I can’t believe he loves me. It’s so important that he loves me because I don’t love myself enough. I’m shy and his love makes up for it. His laughter and games…

  THE RED-COATED luggage wallah wedges my bag under seat number 23C.  I push a folded one hundred rupee note into his rough brown hand and he is off. The train shunts forward; we’re on our way. Seated, I catch my breath, lean my head back against the green formica wall, close my eyes and…

  An elastic band breaks, and in quick succession another and another and then another,stinging my fingers with their snapping, and I’m amazed to find my eyes are wet, not from the pain of the stinging, but from the pain of remembrance, that these elastics, these bits of dried and desiccated rubber have lived neglected…

She recalls the first time she saw her parents as people. Not the perfect figures of her picturesque childhood. But real-life, living, breathing people. With feelings. With flaws and fractured hearts. It happened all at once, like the unmasking of a superhero. Still, there was nothing super about it. The world felt larger and the…