We have started feeling the impact of climate change with a bevy of natural disasters this August. Glacial ice melts, peat fires, haze, rising seas, more storms, warmer climes and fires wiping out greenery are just a few that come to the mind. But, long ago, our ancestors — without the support of technology — survived climate events. Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), an ancient human settlement, more than 11,000 years ago was lush and green. People moved as it turned arid. Humankind was nomadic then. They moved with shifting riverbeds. In Europe, humans survived the last glacial age, about 20,000 years ago. Then, now when we are faced with the reality of climate change, why is it we tremble with trepidation? We even have technology in hand. Ideators and writers like Asimov found solutions. In Caves of Steel (1954), Isaac Asimov had humanity move underground to survive unfriendly surface conditions. He created a huge city underground for humanity while some moved into other planets. Perhaps, the time has come for us to think out of the box. And that is what we hope all of you will join to do in Borderless.
September has thrown up varied content. We have non-fiction which reflects on how changes are a part of human lore and how diverse cultures can co-exist to enrich each other. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri dwells on this idea while talking of Nazrul’s approach to the Persian Ghazal. He writes, the poet through his adaptation of this form “showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before.” And perhaps from that largeness of thought will emerge a one-world community — that Yatish Kumar S espouses. Maybe from people who think beyond borders, we will find the solution to tackling and adapting to climate change. We have an essay from Charudutta Panigrahi where he attempts to arouse the survival instinct in humans. Young Shruti Keskar writes of how she finds a new lease to life by accepting and adapting to changes while Farouk Guslara philosophises on living and possessions. We have Meredith Stephens adding to the vivacity of non-fiction with a recount of her sailing adventures with wonderful photographs by Alan Noble. And Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in sardonic humour with his piece on art and artists.
A story-poem by Tagore, Swopno (Dream), has also been brought to us in English. An interesting memoir by Kallol Lahiri centring around his childhood in Bengal has been translated by V Ramaswamy. Translations offer fiction from Isa Kamari. He has transcribed in English the second chapter of his Malay novel, The Throne. The novel focussing on psychological torment is being serialised in Borderless.
Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Booksis an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books.” Meenakshi Malhotra has discussed the renowned historian Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being, a book that reflects not only her own journey but the freedom and outreach that privilege and capability can bestow on women in South Asia. On the other hand, Mudassar Javed Baryar refers to the plight of birongonas, war time widows during the 1971 conflict that birthed Bangladesh, while discussing Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines. He reflects: “Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their ‘humanity, resilience and heart’, depicting them as ‘architects of family and community’.” Somdatta Mandal has praised Omair Ahmad’s novel, Homecoming.
We have also featured Kanuprya Dhingra, who has written a book on a unique book bazaar. In a candid exchange, she tells us her non-fiction, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, “is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible…the book is for everyone.” It’s an interesting read almost inviting you to stroll into the serendipitous democratic reading space full of local colour and stories.
We would like to thank not only Dhingra but all our contributors for their wonderful work. Huge thanks to the fabulous Borderless team for their input and to Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. Thank you all — without all of you and our wonderful readers, it would be difficult to have a journal. In the spirit of ubuntu, heartfelt thanks.
Do pause by our September content’s page. And let’s look forward to the hope for happier climes and times.
An conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, TheSunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.
“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.”
-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public
Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).
In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”
Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.
The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”
One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”
Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi.
Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women.
What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets. “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”
She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:
Kanupriya Dhingra
“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?
Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.
Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?
Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.
Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.
As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.
You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?
The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”
Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.
You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?
Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.
And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.
One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?
I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.
After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.
I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.
You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?
The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.
The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.
Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.
What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.
There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.
I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.
I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.
Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.
The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.
What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.
The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.
Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.
Title: Her Hajj Story: Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assam
Author: Teresa Rehman
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Trudging along the long, crammed alley, lit up by the radiant shops, I searched hard for Hajj memoirs written by women. The shopkeepers looked on vaguely, and were bewildered when I asked them for one. One of them told me that he had had copies of one such memoir but it was sold out now. I was dismayed; would there be second editions of such books, I wondered. And if so, who could these women who wrote them be? A shopkeeper, dressed in a fancy t-shirt and a crochet skull cap, tried to cheer me up. ‘We have a couple of books on Hajj written by men in case you are interested,’ he said ebulliently. I dismissed him with a smirk.
Having been unsuccessful in my first attempt, I changed my tactic. Instead of shops and publishers, I began raiding homes in the lanes of the old Muslim localities. I scavenged through forgotten trunks, dull, dreary cupboards, secret nooks and crannies. Some memoirs were lost forever, some unexpectedly tumbled out of curio collections of a few punctilious family members, who refused to junk old stuff. Sons and daughters revisited their mother’s memory through her Hajj memoir. For some, it was a matter of pride that somebody in their family had written a book, while some had hazy memories of a ragged lost book that they couldn’t seem to trace anywhere.
Begging, borrowing, (almost stealing), I managed to retrieve an exhaustive collection of women-written Hajj memoirs, some dating back to the time when flights were not available and one had to undertake the arduous journey by ship from Mumbai. Most houses only had a single copy, and the families begrudgingly gave me a photostat copy instead.
It is a unique tradition among Muslim women, especially in Assam and Meghalaya (then Assam) to write a memoir about their Hajj experience. Written mostly in their native language (Assamese; one was in Bangla) these memoirs were meant mostly for private circulation among family and friends. Most of these women painstakingly wrote in longhand, got it typeset manually and then sent to the printing presses. These were popularly dubbed as Hajj yatras or Hajj kathas, and instead of being dull notes, they were a series of insightful stories of a rather regimented travel through a strange and breathtaking land.
It was not that every memoir I came across was a literary masterpiece. While some were undoubtedly remarkably well-crafted, others read more like collections of rambling thoughts. The educational credentials of these women also ranged from middle school to a doctorate. Yet, whatever their background, these women were articulate enough to reflect on their experiences, gather their thoughts, and celebrate a collective human experience. For some, the pilgrimage had been life-changing, and they focused solely on the spiritual aspect of Hajj. Others explored and observed the people and places with a more touristy eye. Together, these memoirs add to the richness and diversity of literature written by women.
A prospective pilgrim, therefore, found these Hajj memoirs accessible, and an uncomplicated and easy-to-understand handbook, especially since they were written in their mother tongue. They also became spaces for women to speak their minds and challenge societal taboos, such as discussing menstruation during Hajj. Furthermore, the authors were able to carve out a sisterhood—an emotional connection and a supportive circle among family members, distant relatives, acquaintances and friends. Meant mostly for private circulation, the memoirs created a space within the spheres of domesticity and familiarity, without attracting public glare or media attention. For many families, they were a part of their heirloom.
The contents of these memoirs ranged across a variety of real-life concerns, practical advice, reflections and emotions. They were also a way for women to reclaim agency in storytelling and expand our understanding of the human experience. Their narratives were never entirely spiritual—at one had they spoke boldly of their anxiety about the Hajj rituals and whether they would be able to perform them correctly, on the other, there were more worldly and practical discussions about the unbearable desert heat, the fear of losing oneself or a dear one in the overwhelming crowd, menstruation, the lack of adequate toilets, luggage, food, sanitation, and hygiene. They also talked about souvenirs and memories they had carried back with them. Some of these books even had an ISBN number and a sprinkling of Arabic, Urdu and Persian words here and there, which is part of the daily usage of the community.
It is often seen that religious narratives are appropriated by men. Throughout history, male dominance has shaped religious institutions and social mores. Men often appropriate religious narratives by acting as the principal interpreters and gatekeepers of doctrine. However, women’s voices come through in these memoirs when they talk about taboo topics like purity and impurity during menstruation, while on the sacred journey. A woman is made to realise that she is physically not pure enough while she is menstruating. Lack of reprieve from certain perceived duties and existing rituals put the onus of shame on the woman. The memoirs become complete because they talk freely about these taboo topics as they were meant for private circulation among their female relatives. They were uninhibited about their experiences as they had an audience in mind. Instinctively, maybe they did not expect men to read them or use them as guidebooks.
(Extracted from Her Hajj Story: Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assam by Teresa Rehman. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2026.)
ABOUT THE BOOK
What does Hajj look like through the eyes of women?
In Her Hajj Story, award-winning journalist Teresa Rehman uncovers a remarkable yet forgotten tradition of Hajj memoirs written by women from Assam. A widow completes the pilgrimage after her husband dies and is buried in Medina. A single woman struggles to find a mehram, a suitable male family member as companion, before setting out. A poet stands on the deck of a ship, mesmerised by the moonlit Red Sea. A botanist searches for the deeper fragrance of faith beyond ritual. A social worker carries the prayers of an old-age home to the holy cities. Through eleven compelling narratives— translated from Assamese and Bengali, and interwoven with historical insight—these voices reveal journeys of faith, endurance, grief, wonder, and transformation.
Rich in cultural detail and deeply human, these forgotten memoirs emerge as far more than accounts of pilgrimage. They reveal an extraordinary literary tradition in which ordinary women became chroniclers of history, preserving family memories, practical wisdom and deeply personal encounters with the sacred. Blending travel writing, oral history, ethnography and literary recovery, Her Hajj Story is both a celebration of an overlooked tradition of Muslim women’s writing from Northeast India and a moving testament to faith, resilience and the enduring power of women’s voices.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Teresa Rehman is an award-winning journalist based in Northeast India. For years, she has brought the region’s diversity and distinct ethos to mainstream media through her work with India Today, The Telegraph, and Tehelka, before founding and editing Thumbprint Northeast Magazine. Her books include The Mothers of Manipur (Zubaan Books) and Bulletproof (Penguin Random House India).
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The concrete cracks open, releasing a breath held captive since March. It is the smell of survival— baked earth meeting the first dark arrow of water.
No warning sirens sound, just the sudden, heavy drumming on corrugated tin roofs, the sky bruising into shades of slate and indigo over the Arabian Sea.
At Marine Drive, the tetra-pods break the spray, blurring the boundary between ocean and air. The local trains click-clack through a new, silver world, tracks slicked with the grease of a long summer.
Nobody runs for cover. Instead, umbrellas remain folded like sleeping birds. Faces turn upward, letting the cool torrent wash away the salt of sweat, the grime of the local, the memory of the heatwaves.
A city of twenty million stops, just for a heartbeat, to listen to the rhythm of its own washing clean.
CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SHADOW
You are the only one who walks at my exact pace, stretching out across the concrete, mimicking my posture but keeping your secrets. We walk in a synchronised silence, two versions of the same tired anatomy negotiating with the afternoon sun.
"Why do you stay so quiet?" I ask. But you only lengthen, pulling yourself toward the edges of the walls, as if trying to escape the heavy frame of the body that anchors you to the ground. You are my most faithful witness, yet you refuse to testify.
When the light dies, you dissolve first, leaving me alone in the dark room to wonder which of us is the real entity and which of us is just the displacement of light. You have no voice, no friction, just a quiet, stretching mimicry that reminds me I am never entirely alone, even when I am completely forgotten.
WAITING FOR A GHOST
The ordinary world is too well-mapped, trapped in the flat geometry of the routine, where every hour arrives exactly on schedule, devoid of friction, stripped of mystery. We scrub the static from our television screens and pave over the wild, irregular earth, until the mind begins to starve for the impossible— the sudden, terrifying tilt of the axis.
So I sit in the drafty dark of the attic, listening to the house settle into its bones, actively inviting a presence I cannot explain. I do not crave the safety of a clean answer; I want the cold draft that defies the thermometer, the floorboard that creaks without a footstep, the sudden, rogue drop in atmospheric pressure that proves the veil is thinner than we think.
To wait for a ghost is to reject the sterile grid, demanding a life that leaks beyond the margins. We need the shock of the unverified frequency, the beautiful distortion of a world interrupted, to remind us that we are more than biological clocks ticking down in empty rooms— we are participants in a dark, magnificent theatre longing for the curtain to rip in two.
HAVE WE REALLY SCRAPED THE SKIES?
We built them high to pierce the blue, a cold, reflective, glass array, to show the clouds what we could do, and scrape the boring sky away.
We poured the aggregate and steel to give our pride a vertical spine, and made the old horizon kneel before a corporate boundary line.
But look up at the ninety-fourth: a broker spills his lukewarm tea, and tracks the market going north, while suffocating in the breeze.
The smog is thick, the air is dead, we trapped the wind inside a shaft; we bought a penthouse overhead but lost the sky to overdraft.
We haven't touched a single star, nor made the heavy cosmos blink; we only built a higher bar to sit inside the dark and drink.
The skyscrapers are standing tall, a monument of concrete grey, but we just built a thicker wall to keep the actual sky away.
Akil Contractor is a prominent Indian poet based in Mumbai. He was one of the founding members of Mumbai’s historic Poetry Circle in 1986. Contractor writes across diverse linguistic traditions; his published English titles include After Kalinga and Other Poems (1986), Spirit Song (1986), and Rhyming Verses (2023). Under the pen name Talabgaar, he has also authored two celebrated volumes of Urdu Shayari. His latest English manuscript is Going Nowhere to a Place.
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Think about a time when you felt stuck or stifled with the options that your professional path presented. Do you remember your general thoughts and emotions at the time? What expectations did you have when you started on that path? Do you wish you could go back and change some choices you made along the way?
I’ve felt this “stuckness” many times through the various stages of my career as a generalist, evaluating different paths, most recently when I secured permanent residency in the US after a 14-month hiatus of being unable to work in America. I was faced with the choice of taking my career in a different direction or trying to rejoin the corporate path where I left off.
During such ponderings, I’ve usually been able to break my feelings down into an expectations versus reality equation. While I’m sure that isn’t the most insightful thing you’ve heard, think about why the mismatch between that expectation and reality might have occurred in your own life. It is because the expectations you had of your path in two, five, ten, or twenty years, and the reality of that path, in terms of your own perception of reward and fulfillment, don’t match. Thinking of your life as a predefined path, with milestones and comparisons, makes you constantly ponder over this existential expectation versus reality equation, steeped in arbitrary milestones. The challenge, especially in this modern world obsessed with exceptionalism, is that our paths offer the false promise of infinite possibility and underestimate the reality of finite choices.
The Pressure to be on a Path
Remember that favorite interview question we’ve all asked or been asked: Where do you see yourself in five years?
Now think about yourself, your industry, or the job you did five years ago. Has all of that changed beyond recognition? The job I did as recently as 2016 is now basically done by a button. Software developers, who commanded the highest-paying jobs till only a few years ago, are being rapidly challenged by AI or scrambling to become AI engineers, reduced to supervisory roles. Subscriptions as a primary business model, for example, was only adopted in the last five years or so. AI wasn’t a word in the public consciousness till 2023, and today, we’re told we should let it run our lives, from making us breakfast to writing our resumes and picking candidates for jobs!
So, if companies themselves do not know their paths, why is there that pressure on individuals? Based on my own experience, that interview question itself is ill-advised. Someone who is extremely sure of their path, despite knowing how rapidly their context may evolve, is already a bit stifled.
This stifling, myopic path, especially if you’re not fulfilled by it, again brings with it a sense of constant jadedness and exhaustion. It is that exhaustion, coupled with a perceived lack of agency over your path, that eventually manifests as full-blown burnout. Being flexible and adaptable, and rebuilding agency over your own skills are key to building long-term careers today, especially in a time when the AI, internet, and gig economy is truly enabling infinite possibilities at an individual level.
While human beings need structure in their lives, society starts laying out that structure for us from the moment we barely attain consciousness, not leaving too much room for exploration. Remember that question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I’m guilty of asking this question myself to my nine-year-old niece. She insists she wants to be a vet, which is adorable. I think I wanted to be a cricketer back then. Those questions gave me and my niece structure to explore our personalities, but had I stuck to that path, given the context of my life (my state didn’t even have a team back then), I probably wouldn’t have made a career out of it!
As a 16-year-old, I could have never imagined living in four countries, traveling to over 60 countries marrying an American woman, and attaining financial independence, all before or around 30 years of age. And I am so glad I had the openness to explore divergent paths while still committing to a fairly traditional corporate path. Metaphorically speaking, I knew that I wanted to sail west in the Atlantic, but I was open to landing in Brazil, Mexico, the US, or Canada. That openness has enabled me to start afresh, after 11 years at Google, through this book, and through a coaching and workplace culture consultancy, WideWorldView.com, while continuing to positively engage with the corporate world.
While predefined paths are great to give our expeditions structure, we still need to adjust our sails as per the direction of the winds and currents. As a society, we are too eager to forcefit people into paths, generally very early in life. Thinking about your life and identity as one thing or one path stifles you from exploring all other potentially more fulfilling identities. Despite the rapid changes in societal structures and expectations, the corporate ladder is still largely not set up for individuals to be able to adjust their sails to changing winds, without making radical shifts in course. What if these paths that society puts us on and we often unquestionably follow weren’t meant for us at all?
What if we followed those paths because we constantly felt a stifling opportunity cost? What if those paths were designed to stifle innovation and exploration at a personal level? And what if the expectations our paths set for us were never based in reality? Who made us feel that these paths were the only ones we had? The answer is largely rooted in our modern education system, which is designed to prioritize “getting a job” over self-discovery.
ABOUT THE BOOK
You know the feeling: chronic workplace stress along with a nagging sense of ineffectiveness. That’s burnout. Burnout Highway demystifies this increasingly collective suffering by exploring the larger context that runs all our lives—the systems within which we make decisions, the milestones we were taught to desire, and the feelings of fulfillment we thought they would provide.
From pursuing grades and achievements to landing ‘dream jobs,’ the India Shining generation was promised a clear and straightforward path to success. However, this journey can feel exhausting, especially with India ranking among the countries with the longest working hours and the highest rates of burnout.
Anmol examines how societal conditioning, corporate ladder dynamics, and economic pressures influence our work and presents readers with a systematic framework for navigating the challenges of burnout while fostering the development of fulfilling and emotionally sustainable careers. This is an invitation to prioritize work that aligns with your values and addresses your emotional well-being, ultimately helping you break the cycle of burnout.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anmol Diddan is an advocate for emotionally sustainable careers and the founder of World Wide View. Raised Sikh in the complex geopolitics of the Northeast, Anmol spent his early years in Shillong before moving to Mumbai at sixteen to study Economics; an experience that exposed him to both the promise and pressure of ambition in modern India. His thirst for learning through experiences led him to a global career in behavioural and cultural research, working with Google across India, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. Now based in New York City, he draws on his dynamic background to explore how the intersection of economics, psychology, and culture affects all our lives, with a focus on wellbeing in the modern workplace. He works 1:1 to help professionals tackle burnout and career transitions, all across the world.
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He smiled, ruffling his son’s capped head. He knew that the lenses children were born with eventually writhed and crumbled to dust with age. That had been the fate of his pair. Though when and how, he didn’t remember anymore. If only Moji[1] was still around, he thought, she would have spread out the detailed list in front of him.
Instead, he replied, “Ghosts and the living do not stay together.”
“Like dirty and clean laundry?”
He nodded.
“But I think you had not seen the ghosts growing up. They didn’t want you to see them.”
“I don’t think I ever told you a bedtime story about growing up with ghosts around me.”
He chuckled. He reminded himself of his son’s skill in repeating stories that he had heard a few nights ago, refracted through his lenses. But wasn’t that common for kids?
He had learnt the art of storytelling from Moji, who each night would cradle his tiny head on her lap and tell him stories she had grown up hearing while embroidering shawls by the lamp. He narrated the same stories to Fabienne, Kashyap’s mother, years later during their freezing nights in Fairbanks. Perhaps Kashyap had picked up the trait then, for when he grew a little older, he not only insisted on completing the stories his father began but also firmly believed that his parents continued telling stories with changed climaxes, in their bedroom. In those nights of exchanging stories, little by little, Fabienne was shrinking her plot points until, after one such invigorating session, she was nowhere to be seen.
“It’s just that you don’t remember anymore, Daddy,” complained Kashyap, tightening his clasp around his father’s gloved hand.
“You and your stories,” he scoffed, lifting his five-year-old son into his arms.
Their white breaths – his deep and his son’s short – swirled into each other’s before disappearing in the crystal air. He gripped the rotting capping rail of the fence with the other hand.
As a child, the fence had scared him with its enormity. Sometimes he crouched behind it, fixing an eye to a hole in the wood, when he returned home late from fishing rainbow trout in the river or playing cricket in the chinar groves. Now its height reached only an inch above his waist.
“Are we going to get inside, Daddy?” Kashyap’s exasperation reddened his ears, like Moji twisting them in the hideout behind the fence.
The cold stroked his ears. He did not lift a finger to scratch the inflammation. He simply stared at the home of his ancestors, what reminded of it further hidden under the snow. Moss on the walls. Grimy. Rickety. Unwashed soot. Unfixed windows. Battered porch. Clogged chimney. The skeleton of a juniper at the back.
Something tugged at the little hairs in his nose. Something burnt his eyes. Maybe a fly ash of yesteryears.
“Daddy?” Kashyap lightly kicked his ribs.
He clicked his tongue and continued staring at the ensemble of wood and brick through the strings of delicate snowflakes showering on the house, showering on them.
“Daddy,” he said with the softness of the snowflakes.
“Yes, Kay.”
“Do you want to hear a story?”
“Go on,” his voice, frozen in a trance, answered.
“The story starts with a family heading to the house of the fairies. A boy of my age. A father of your age. A mother…no, not a mother.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know any story with a mother in it.”
He added after some time, hesitantly, “Do you know stories of mother, Daddy?”
“Umm hmm.”
“Do you know stories of your mother?”
Even with the eddying of meditation in his blood, he curled his lips in a smile—before his neurons could conjure the scene of Fabienne’s terror-stricken face, begging him to keep his history, his story, from their son.
“What story do you want to hear?”
“Her story.”
“My mother, my Moji, came many years ago to this house as a young bride. This was the house where my Mole[2] was born. He had lived his entire life in the valley. Moji was from the Silver Mountains – up there. She had never seen the valley until the wedding. He had never been to the mountains before.”
“And then?”
“That’s the end of the story.” He lied. His promise to Fabienne lurked at the end of his tongue.
“You’re a terrible storyteller, Daddy.”
He laughed. “How would you have told the story, then?”
“I would not have kept my audience in the dark. What does Moji look like? Does she have my hazel eyes? Or your red cheeks? Does she have wrinkles now? Is her nose really tiny?”
His moji’s humming—a soft rustle—of ‘door ballaai tsajiyo[3]’ streaming in from the susurrating faraway wind dispersed his son’s shrill words haywire in the current. Before his eyes, on the thickening snow, feeble, disconcerted images pulsed. Moji’s green irises. The raisin mole on her lips. Her ears chained to pairs of elongated dejhoor[4]. The emerald on her nose. The scarlet scarf fastened around her head.
When his son’s swollen fingers, behind fleece gloves, tucked at his beard, he blinked his eyes, but the water-painted figments remained. He was unaware for how long he had been gaping at the glowing and dimming on the unruly, stark white snow.
“Are there any photographs of her inside?” his son’s voice reached him as if from across the mountains.
He paused. He plucked his reddening eyes from the snow to the dark porch. Was still moji, red and peeling from the burns, crouching? The orange flames rising from somewhere in the house were deafening her mute cries and devouring the bricks and wood. The embers and their smoke had already charred the chords in her throat. He had stopped right at the fence. The black orbit, where her mouth had been, was still muttering, asking him to flee.
He shouldn’t have left to run her errands, he cursed. Either he and moji would have burrowed their way out under the fire or, hand in hand, said their last prayers amidst the flames licking their cheeks. But moji had been under the weather for a few weeks, and mole had disappeared into thin air the previous full moon. His coworkers at the post office or the baton-wielding patrolling policemen across the streets and the lakes were equally clueless about the whereabouts of his shoestring after he had left for home, sliding the pen into his pocket.
He closed his eyes and opened them again. Only moji-shaped soot remained at the porch. The blackened sepulchre blended in with the twilight setting.
He gasped. His spine shuddered. His son in his tightened grip shuddered too.
“Can we go back, daddy?”
“What?” He had not heard him.
Kashyap repeated.
“Sure. Fifteen steps and we shall be indoors.”
“Let’s go home, daddy.”
He turned to his son’s crumpled face in his arms. He whispered, “Open doors remind me of mommy.”
Apology handheld dread in his son’s eyes. He had so far mirrored his father’s whine about visiting the home of his childhood as they sat in an aircraft from the other side of the globe and drove through the sea of paperwork and up the mountains. But the open door shattered him. It vividly brought back the evenings he relentlessly tired himself with the stories mommy had told him and invented newer ones when they exhausted in boring him enough. The same words, the same scenes flowed. Had mommy’s letters ever arrived by mail, as in a chapter taught at school, his stories would have charted new ground too. They would have been of a different composition. He believed daddy would understand.
His eyes didn’t utter a word. He tucked Kashyap closer to his warm chest and wrapped him in his arms. As he trod away, Kashyap dug his chin into his daddy’s square shoulder. Somewhere around the backyard of the house, red-smeared white petals of a tulip were unfurling under the snow. Had the ghosts from daddy’s childhood planted the seeds?
[3] A lullaby sung by Kashmiri mothers to ward off evil: Literally, “let evils stay far…”
[4] Long chained earrings worn by married Kashmiri women
Oindrila Ghosal is an emerging author and also a doctoral student at Tata Memorial Centre – Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer, Navi Mumbai. So far, her short stories, “The Harlot’s Veena”, “The Asylum” and “The Jungle Within Me” have been published in Kitaab.
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Story by Lakhvinder Virk, translated from Punjabi by C. Christine Fair
Translator’s note
This story comes from Lakhvinder Virk’s first collection of Punjabi-language short stories titled, Colors that Were Not Red (Rang Jo Suuha Nahin Sin), which was published in 2024 by Ojj Parkashan in India. Punjabi literature, despite the presence of important giants such as Amrita Pritam and Ajeet Cour, is still dominated by male voices and male interiorities. Even when male authors ventrilolocute for female characters, it often feels voyeuristic. Upon reading this story, I was immediately struck by its distinctive voice and storyline. This story is distinctive both because of its adventurous female protagonist, who is willing to explore her own sexuality and negotiate the boundaries of marriage, but also its theme of a husband who seeks an open marriage. In India such concepts are even more rare and controversial than they are in the United States. Upon encountering this story, I was awed by Virk’s brave willingness to engage a subject matter that is so verboten in India. While other stories in her collection of short stories flirt with similarly provocative themes, I believed “Open Marriage” was an important story to translate. While the specificities of this story are rooted in upper-class Mumbai, India, the challenges confronted by the young female protagonist are universal. How do women everywhere negotiate unreasonable demands and behavior from a husband who was heretofore presented as loving and caring? When has the Rubicon been crossed? When does a woman leave a marriage that is destroying her? How much is too much to tolerate? This story presents its own answers.
Lakhvinder Virk
Open Marriage by Lakhvinder Virk
The sound from the phone caught both of their attention. It was likely text message. Indeed, Siddarth got a message on his phone. He did not pick up his phone to look. Tania’s gaze was fixed on the television screen. Because it was Sunday, both were free, and they planned to watch the film Animal on Netflix. They ordered out for food and began watching the movie.
On the TV. screen, there was a scene: the hero, having lied to his wife, formed a physical relationship with another girl. When the wife found out, she was inconsolable. She cried and left the house, taking the children with her.
Siddharth picked up the phone and went to the bathroom. But the sound of the message on his phone kept nagging Tania.
Tania tried to focus on watching the film. “Is it such a big deal if a husband is involved with another woman? He still loved his wife,” she thought to herself. “If what is being depicted is real, then so what?”
*
Siddarth and Tania were married two years ago. Siddarth was the CEO of a multinational company in Mumbai, and Tania was the general manager in a branch of the State Bank of India. They had an arranged marriage through a matchmaking app. After marriage, the husband and wife would clean the kitchen together as well as other household chores. Because Tania shifted from Delhi to Mumbai, she had to work hard to understand the new place and new environment. Siddarth helped her thoroughly in this process.
One day Siddarth asked, “Tania, did you have a boyfriend before marriage?”
“I am not so narrow-minded. Don’t worry. Come on. Tell me.”
“In truth, no.” Tania was collecting herself.
“This isn’t possible, dear. Don’t lie.”
“No Siddarth, it’s the truth.”
“This means that you don’t trust me, Tania. These days, there’s nothing bad about having relationships. Moreover, in our society, if you don’t have a relationship, it means that there is something wrong with you.” Siddarth wanted to know about Tania’s past.
“I never got the free time, Siddarth. I just focused upon my career and studies,” Tania answered, looking away. She was afraid that Siddarth would read her emotions.
“Tell me about yourself,” Tania asked.
“Yes. I had many. I had my first girlfriend when I was in the sixth grade. Before marriage, I had thirteen girlfriends.” Siddarth answered proudly, counting them on his fingers.
“Oh my god! At such a young age,” Tania said in bewilderment.
“Young?” Siddarth looked at Tania as if she had come out of the jungle and knew nothing about the world. “Some of my friends had several physical relationships by the time they were in the tenth grade. I even had a friend who was caught with his girlfriend in the school toilet. Both of them were kicked out of school. In this regard, I was slow. My friends would make fun of me because I was clueless. Then somehow, during my graduation, I mustered the courage with my fourth girlfriend,” Siddarth explained while laughing. Tania was looking at him, astonished.
“Delhi is also an open environment like this. How is it possible that you did not have a boyfriend? Yaar[1], these days one has to do a lot of things due to peer pressure. Among my friends, if someone didn’t have a girlfriend, they would kick him out of the group. I don’t believe you didn’t have a boyfriend. Come on. Tell me,” Siddarth insisted.
“It’s not necessary that every girl has a relationship.”
Tania had two boyfriends. One was in the twelfth grade. When Tania saw him, she fell in love with him. But this was a childhood crush that ended in a few days when he became friends with another girl. The second was when she was doing her MBA. She fell in love with a classmate. She was fairly serious in this relationship. She wanted to marry him, but when she raised this matter with him, he responded in rage. Tania was outdated to him. “I’ve never even thought like this. What does marriage mean?” he had said.
After that, they could never be normal again, and they broke up.
Tania wanted to tell all of this to Siddarth, but she was afraid. She had always heard that a boy could do whatever he wanted, but a boy wouldn’t tolerate hearing this from girls. Her mom said that talking about such things could lead to a divorce. Thinking about all of this, she kept quiet.
Siddharath brought Tania into his embrace and said, “This is normal, Tania. We go out of the house, it’s natural that we’re attracted to members of the opposite sex. If I can, why can’t you? I am not an old school type.”
Even though Tania didn’t want to, she hid the truth. After this, Siddarth did not raise the issue again.
One night after dinner, when all of the work was finished, Tania came into the bedroom. Siddharth was reclining on the bed, reading a magazine.
“Do you know about open marriages?” Siddharth asked, signaling her to come near him.
“Open marriage?” Tania asked out of great curiosity, sitting beside him.
“I am reading some stuff about open marriages and…So be it. I myself am thinking about this,” Siddarth said.
For a moment, silence spread between them.
“What is an open marriage?” Tania stood up and started putting on some lotion. She had put on a nightie in Siddarth’s favourite color, but Siddarth had paid it no attention.
“An open marriage means that within the marriage, there are some commitments, but both partners can form relationships apart from the other,” Siddarth explained. “It’s not cheating but understood as a different aspect of intimacy.” He was looking towards Tania and saying, “In doing this, the couple’s bond can deepen and they never get bored.”
Before responding, Tania was quiet for some time, thinking about this.
“It seems interesting but….is it practical? Moreover, it could bring stress to the couple. And consequently, the marriage will get very complicated.”
Siddarth shook his head, “I know that this isn’t easy, but if one talks openly and honestly with each other, it seems to me that it isn’t so hard.”
For some time, a silence spread between them.
“Tania I don’t want our marriage to become old and conventional, and after some years we fight and become distant. Many of my friends are in open marriages or are into wife swapping. Actually, I didn’t want to get married, but my parents pressured me and I got married.”
“You mean you can have a girlfriend, and I can have a boyfriend. Right?” Tania asked in astonishment.
“Yes. It’s necessary to keep our marriage alive.”
“But how will this work? This seems very awkward to me.” Tania was stuck, conflicted.
“Go back deep into history, there is polygamy in our culture,” he began to explain to Tania. “In our country, there are multiple such examples in which Kings had hundreds of marriages. Apart from this, they had other relations. The queens had relations with the various slaves living in her palace. Were these not open marriages? We boast about that culture. I also want to follow that culture. It’s not impossible.” Siddharth wanted to convince her through whatever means.
Tania, flabbergasted, sat there in silence listening to him speak.
“Then after some time when there are children, nothing can happen anymore. At the very least, until then, we should enjoy our life according to our wishes.”
For some days, this argument went on between them. In the end, after hearing the various arguments, Tania agreed with Siddharth, and they decided to have an open marriage.
Whenever Siddarth had a new girlfriend, he discussed it with Tania. If he went to see a film or went on a date, he definitely told Tania. In the beginning, Tania did not like this. She felt jealous, but this feeling gradually faded. Siddarth kept on asking Tania whether she had a boyfriend. Tania, in those days, was very busy at the office. She didn’t take a liking to any man.
“You are so lazy,” Siddarth teased her, laughing.
“I have made a third girlfriend and tomorrow I am going on a date with her.”
“Well done,” Tania said with great flair. They both began to laugh.
The next day, Tania looked very closely at the men working with her, but none struck her fancy.
For the last few days, Tania had begun taking yoga classes. On that day, she went to her yoga lesson after work, and she saw a new face in the class. He was about 30 years old. He was a tall, attractive young man. Tania’s attention kept floating towards him. As soon as the session finished, people began gathering their mats.
“Hello.” The young man said to Tania, sitting on the same bench where Tania was sitting, and putting on her shoes.
“Oh. Hello, I am Tania.” Tania extended her hand and immediately felt that her hand was the hand that had touched her shoes. She pulled her hand back.
“Gavi.” The young man extended his hand, smiling. “My hands also touched my shoes. It’s no big deal.”
Tania really liked his style. “This is the first time I am seeing you?” Tania asked.
“I have just joined. Actually, I just shifted from Chandigarh a few days ago,” he replied.
“Oh nice. Chandigarh is a happening place. I wonder how people from Chandigarh can live in a congested place like Mumbai,” Tania said as they were heading towards the parking.
“You are right, but this is my first required posting outside of the state. No doubt, Chandigarh is a very beautiful and peaceful city, with zero crime. But you have to leave it for career growth. Chandigarh is a city of retired people. After retirement, I will definitely shift to Chandigarh,” Gavi looked toward Tania while smiling.
“In which department are you?” Tania asked.
“I am an Indian Police Service Officer.”
“Oh Wow!” Tania said happily.
“And you?” Gavi also wanted to learn about her.
“I am a general manager at the State Bank of India.”
“Good post.”
“Thank you. My flat is just here, and where do you live?” Tania asked as she was opening the car door.
“My flat is a five-minute drive from here.”
“Nice to meet you. See you soon.” Saying this, Tania sat in the car.
“Same here.” And as he said this, Gavi closed Tania’s car door.
After some days, Gavi and Tania became good friends. They sat side by side doing yoga. Sometimes, after class, they would stop to drink organic juice, and they would make small talk. Because he was newly arrived in the city, Gavi had no friends, but because of Tania he felt no loneliness. Tania also felt a lot of affection for Gavi. When she was with Gavi, she felt very special herself which she had never felt with anyone else.
On a vacation day, they planned to see a movie.
Tania had a message from Gavi on her phone that they would leave their homes at 10 o’clock. First, they would see the movie, then they would have lunch together. Siddarth read this message.
“You are dating someone?” Siddarth asked over dinner.
“Not exactly dating, but something like that. It’s nothing like this. We are good friends.”
“Hmmm. So you are going?”
“Yes. We made a plan.”
“Listen. I don’t like this,” Siddarth said, twirling his fork on his plate.
“What?” Tania asked with inquisitive eyes.
“This open marriage…Let’s close it.” Siddarth said.
“So…You have been enjoying the open marriage. I am just going to see a movie, and you want to close it?” There was bitterness in Tania’s voice.
“Yes. I want to close it. I cannot now live in an open marriage. You yourself were saying that marriage would get very complicated. Now I think the same.” Siddharth announced his decision.
“OK. No problem.” Tania agreed. “But it should be closed from your side too.”
“Yes. Done.”
Tania messaged Gavi that she was busy and, for this reason, she couldn’t come. After that, on several occasions, Gavi tried to make plans with her, but Tania made some excuse or another. She began to ignore Gavi.
For some days, Siddarth was working from home. One day, Tania finished her work early and returned home quickly so that she could spend some time with Siddarth. She took the duplicate key from her purse, unlocked the door, and went inside.
From inside, she heard a girl’s voice filled with anger. “Bastard. Scumbag. Have you no shame in having relations with me even though you are married? Did you tell me that you are married? I didn’t know anything. Either divorce your wife and marry me, or give me 2 Crore Rupees. Otherwise, I am going to the police station.”
Tania was astonished hearing this.
She went to the bedroom from which this noise was coming. She saw Siddarth begging this girl to forgive him. Tania didn’t know what she should do. She felt pity for Siddarth as well as anger.
Seeing Tania, the girl left quietly.
Siddarth told Tonia that he had been in a relationship with her for the past five months, and now this girl was blackmailing him. “She kept some videos and photos of our private moments, which she is threatening to make viral,” he added.
Tania didn’t know how to help Siddharth.
During this dilemma, she went to her evening yoga class. When the class finished, Gavi asked her why she was so sad, “What happened. Is your health okay? You are absolutely ashen. What happened?”
Tania needed a friend at this time. She went with him to a nearby coffeehouse. While drinking coffee, Tania told Gavi everything. It was like icing on the cake that Gavi was a friend but also a police officer.
Gavi listened to the entire thing and said, “Don’t worry, Tania. These kinds of groups, which ensnare people, are very active these days. They take their photos. Make videos. Then they blackmail them. Sometimes, these people don’t personally meet the victim. They do sexting and then record the phone sex. On this basis, they blackmail them. This is an elaborate net that has been cast. Our entire department is searching for these people. Don’t you worry. I will help you as much as possible.”
“Thank you so much, Gavi. I had no idea what I should do.” Tania felt as if a burden would be lifted.
The next day, Gavi called Tania and Siddarth to the police station. Sitting them in his office, he took the First Information Report and began to take action. It turned out that the girl was a member of such a group. The police wiretapped the entire group and arrested them.
During this, the way Gavi took care of Tania drew her even closer to him. She felt as if she had always needed a wise companion like him. She saw in Gavi’s eyes love and honour for her, something she had always wanted to see in Siddharth’s eyes. But apart from emptiness, there was nothing in his eyes.
*
Siddarth returned from the bathroom and became engrossed again in watching a movie.
Siddarth had taken his phone to the bathroom. She was very bothered by this. For the past few days, she was feeling that Siddarth was hiding something from her, whereas they both had agreed that they would not hide anything from each other.
“Should I ask him straightaway?” Tania thought to herself, but she thought it better to wait a bit. He may tell me himself. Is he still?…”
“Tania, tomorrow I am going to Pune for two days, for a workshop,” Siddarth told Tania while looking at his screen.
“Okay. Alone?” Tania asked.
“Of course. Can I take friends to a workshop?” Siddharth said in irritation.
The film was over, but in Tania’s mind, the phone’s notification kept playing. She could not stop thinking about this.
In the evening, when Tania was in the kitchen working, Siddharth’s phone was on the dining room table when a message came. Tania saw that Siddarth was taking clothes out of the armoire and packing them.
Tania picked up the phone, but it was locked. She was very baffled. Previously, Siddarth did not lock his phone. She tried to unlock it. After some efforts, she managed to unlock the phone. She saw that a message had come on WhatsApp. When she opened the message, she saw a girl in a transparent nightie. The girl wanted to confirm that she should bring this nightie to Lohkhandwala if Siddharth liked it.
Tania, seeing this, was stunned. She messaged Gavi, “Can I stay in your house tonight?”
“Why not. But what happened?” Gavi quickly responded.
“I’ll tell you when I get there.” After messaging Gavi, she went to her armoire and took out clothes and necessary documents and began to pack them in a bag.
Seeing her do this, Siddarth repeatedly asked her where she was going? Why is she packing?
Tania did not answer. When she was leaving the house, she left the key to the flat on the shoe rack, and Siddarth grabbed her arm.
“Where are you going? What happened to you? Why aren’t you talking?” Siddarth didn’t understand what was going on.
“Wherever I may be going, I am definitely not going to Lokhandwala,” she said looking straight into Siddarth’s eyes.
Hearing this, Siddharth knew he was busted. He said nothing, and his grip loosened.
Lakhvinder Virk obtained her PhD from Punjabi University, Patiala in the department of linguistics and lexicography under the supervision of Professor Joga Singh. She lives in Chandigarh and serves as the head of the Punjabi Department in JDSD College in Kheri Gurana, Banur in Punjab. Her first book of short stories, Colors That Were Not Red, (Rang Jo Suuha Nahin sin) was published in 2024. This story was published in that volume.
Christine Fair did her Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is currently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. Her translations have appeared in LIT Magazine, Muse India, Orientalia Suecana, The Bangalore Review, Borderless, The Punch Magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and The Bombay Review.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
If language were a haircut, “saloon” got a buzz cut and a blow-dry and came out as “salon.” That change in spelling is the visible tip of a larger style transformation: one rough, male-only ritual space has been trimmed, straightened, scented and repackaged into a gleaming, multi-service, mostly woman-centred retail experience. Along the way, the loud, fragrant, argument-heavy mini-parliaments of small-town India — the saloons — have been politely ushered into warranties, playlists and polite small talk.
Barbers in India are almost as old as conversation itself. The profession of the barber — the nai or hajam — is embedded in pre-colonial life: scalp massage (champi), shaves, tonsure at rites of passage, and quick fixes between chores. These services were usually delivered in open-fronted shops or under trees, with tools that were portable and livelihoods that were local.
The “saloon” as a distinctive, Western-flavoured, male gathering place began to consolidate during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Port cities and colonial cantonments — Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) — saw the rise of dedicated shops selling not only shaves and haircuts but also imported tonics, straight razors and a distinctly public atmosphere shaped by newspaper reading, debate and gossip. Over time, that form blended with older local practices and spread inland. By the mid-20th century, the saloon — a recognisable, chair-lined, mirror-fronted social stage — existed in towns from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Gujarat’s chawls to Assam’s market roads.
So ancient barbering traditions fed into a colonial-era intensification of the barbershop as public forum; by the 1950s–70s, the saloon as we remember it was firmly a part of India’s social furniture. The precise start date is a quilt of custom and commerce rather than a single founding ceremony — and that is part of the saloon’s charm.
Walk into a saloon in Nagpur, Nellore, Shillong or Surat and you’ll notice an uncanny resemblance. The reasons are simple and human:
Low price point: Saloons survive on quick volumes and walk-ins. That encourages many chairs, fast turnover, and layouts that invite waiting men to talk rather than sit quietly.
Ritual services: Shave, cut, champi. These are short encounters that thread customers through the same communal space repeatedly — ideal for gossip to collect and ferment.
Social role: The barber doubles as ear, counsellor, news-disseminator and crossword referee. That role is culturally consistent across regions: a saloon’s psychic geography is the same whether the tea is masala or lemon.
The result is that a saloon in Kutch and a saloon in Kerala will differ in language, politics and local jokes — but both will produce that same satisfying racket of opinion, repartee and advice. They are India’s unofficial, peripatetic fora for public life.
Enter the salon: padded seats, curated playlists, appointment-booking and a menu so long it reads like a restaurant wine list (colour, rebonding, keratin, facials, pedicures, threading, and sometimes a minor festival of LED lights). A couple of business realities did most of the heavy lifting:
Women’s services earn more and recur more often. Regular facials, hair treatments and beauty routines translate into steadier, higher bills. The money follows the customer, and the space follows the money.
Franchising and professional training created standardized staff who follow brand scripts — which tighten conversation and reduce the barber-confessor vibe.
Unisex salons consolidated footfall, but that consolidation shrank male-only territory. Men who once had a semi-public living room now sit in chic, quieter spaces that discourage loud, extended debate.
The practical upshot: the saloon’s boisterous mini-parliaments were replaced by stylists with laminated menus, muted background music and an etiquette that favours privacy over political salvoes.
What we miss (and what we gained)
We miss the moralisers, the wisecracks, the boisterous consultancy of unpaid experts who knew which councillor was friendly with which shopkeeper and which wedding was scandalous; the loud education in rhetoric and local affairs; the bench-seat apprenticeship in how to perform masculinity in public.
We gain in expanded choices for women, more professional hygiene and techniques, new livelihoods for trained stylists (especially women), and spaces where people can pursue personalised care without the social cost that used to attend public rituals.
It’s not a zero-sum game — but it does reorder who feels proprietorial about public grooming spaces. The new economics say: she who pays more — and pays more often — gets the say.
Not all saloons are extinct. In smaller towns they still hum. In cities, they’ve evolved into hybrid forms:
Old-school saloons persist where price sensitivity and cultural habit remain strong: walk-ins, communal benches, loud conversation and a barber who’ll recommend both a haircut and the correct candidate for local office.
Nostalgic barbershops in urban pockets lean into the past with “vintage” decor, whiskey-bar vibes and sports on TV — except now they charge a premium and call the barber a “grooming specialist.”
Some entrepreneurs stage “men’s nights” or open-mic gossip hours in neighbourhood shops, trying to recapture the civic pulse while keeping the modern business model.
If you want the old saloon spark, look for places without appointment apps, with too many phones in sight but none in use, and with a tea flask on the counter.
What’s lost isn’t only a loud, male-only gossip pit; it’s a training ground for public argument and a place where local memory was kept live and messy. The saloon taught people how to spar without a referee; the salon teaches how to look good while being politely neutral. If you mourn for the saloon’s barbed banter, you can grieve — but also take action: host a “Salon for Men” in your local café, revive a community noticeboard at the barber, or convince your neighbourhood salon to schedule a weekly “open-chair” hour for community talk (and maybe offer tea).
And until then, if you miss the salty, pungent chorus of small-town democracy, go to any saloon that still has a kettle on the stove and a barber who knows the mayor’s schedule by heart. Sit down, get a shave, and watch a mini-parliament assemble around you. You’ll leave clean-faced, better informed, and maybe a little animated — exactly how democracy used to feel.
From Public Domain
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Charudutta Panigrahi is a writer. He can be contacted at Charudutta403@gmail.com.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Gower Bhat discusses the advent of coaching schools in Kashmir for competitive exams for University exams, which seem to be replacing real schools. Clickhere to read.
In winters, birds migrate. They face no barriers. The sun also shines across fences without any hindrance. Long ago, the late Nirendranath Chakraborty (1924-2018) wrote about a boy, Amalkanti, who wanted to be sunshine. The real world held him back and he became a worker in a dark printing press. Dreams sometimes can come to nought for humanity has enough walls to keep out those who they feel do not ‘belong’ to their way of life or thought. Some even war, kill and violate to secure an exclusive existence. Despite the perpetuation of these fences, people are now forced to emigrate not only to find shelter from the violences of wars but also to find a refuge from climate disasters. These people — the refuge seekers— are referred to as refugees[1]. And yet, there are a few who find it in themselves to waft to new worlds, create with their ideas and redefine norms… for no reason except that they feel a sense of belonging to a culture to which they were not born. These people are often referred to as migrants.
At the close of this year, Keith Lyons brings us one such persona who has found a firm footing in New Zealand. Setting new trends and inspiring others is a writer called Harry Ricketts[2]. He has even shared a poem from his latest collection, Bonfires on the Ice. Ricketts’ poem moves from the personal to the universal as does the poetry of another migrant, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, aspiring to a new, more accepting world. While Tulip Chowdhury — who also moved across oceans — prays for peace in a war torn, weather-worn world:
I plant new seeds of dreams for a peaceful world of tomorrow.
Fiction in this issue reverberates across the world with Marc Rosenberg bringing us a poignant telling centred around childhood, innocence and abuse. Sayan Sarkar gives a witty, captivating, climate-friendly narrative centred around trees. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao weaves a fable set in Southern India.
A story by Nasir Rahim Sohrabi from the dusty landscapes of Balochistan has found its way into our translations too with Fazal Baloch rendering it into English from Balochi. Isa Kamari translates his own Malay poems which echo themes of his powerful novels, A Song of the Wind (2007) and Tweet(2017), both centred around the making of Singapore. Snehaprava Das introduces Odia poems by Satrughna Pandab in English. While Professor Fakrul Alam renders one of Nazrul’s best-loved songs from Bengali to English, Tagore’s translated poem Jatri (Passenger) welcomes prospectives onboard a boat —almost an anti-thesis of his earlier poem ‘Sonar Tori’ (The Golden Boat) where the ferry woman rows off robbing her client.
We have plenty of non-fiction this time starting with a tribute to Jane Austen (1775-1817) by Meenakshi Malhotra. Austen turns 250 this year and continues relevant with remakes in not only films but also reimagined with books around her novels — especially Pride and Prejudice (which has even a zombie version). Bhaskar Parichha pays a tribute to writer Bibhuti Patnaik. Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan explores ancient Sangam Literature from Tamil Nadu and Ratnottama Sengupta revisits an art exhibition that draws bridges across time… an exploration she herself curated.
Farouk Gulsara — with his dry humour — critiques the growing dependence on artificial intelligence (or the lack of it). Devraj Singh Kalsi again shares a spooky adventure in a funny vein.
We have a spray of colours from across almost all the continents in our pages this time. A bumper issue again — for which all of the contributors have our heartfelt thanks. Huge thanks to our fabulous team who pitch in to make a vibrant issue for all of us. A special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for the fabulous artwork. And as our readers continue to grow in numbers by leap and bounds, I would want to thank you all for visiting our content! Introduce your friends too if you like what you find and do remember to pause by this issue’s contents page.
Wish all of you happy reading through the holiday season!
