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All Essays & Stories

eighty-three pieces

The Pair at the Backwater
A wetland sound recorder watches a poacher snare one of a pair of sarus cranes. As he records the survivor’s grief, it breaks his professional detachment and leaves a new rhythm in him that he can’t put down. “Everything worth listening for, he told people, had already happened by the time you built the instrument to hear it. The trick was building it anyway.” We can’t take in someone else’s grief and stay unchanged, and the story’s measure of what Anand witnessed is how much it altered him, the listener.
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The Grotesque Has No Address
Where older cultures gave the grotesque a visible place that led people to look at it and move past it, today’s systems push it out of sight to the margins and down supply chains, so that the people who benefit from it never have to see it. “He was not an exception to the system. He was the system, close enough to touch.”

The grotesque isn’t measured in averages. It shows up when plenty and want sit side by side. The real question is whether we’ll face what we’ve hidden and whether our civilisation still has a “centre” to walk towards, something beyond appetite and growth.

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