Illustration by Samya Arif @samyarif
“The rules are quite clear,” wo whispers. “Woman falls asleep under tree, jinn can enter. And the path is clear—through the woman’s long hair. You seem to be woman, yet your hair…”
Her hand involuntarily reaches for the fuzz of her rapidly growing-out undercut. “So then?”
I am far from home. Knee-deep in the salt pond, with a shovel and a barrel, the sun flaming upon my head like fire, raising blisters on my skin. I sense a boil bubbling on my feet as my eyes crawl beyond the treeline at the mound of a hill, waiting for the sun to set. Our time is here. Our only chance. The barber witch of the woods has whispered her secrets into all our enslaved hairs, but I alone stand and wonder what my role is.
Across the endless night a lone match head travelled, lit at one end. It was like a star had been given life and fled its fixed position in the heavens. It was beautiful. And as it continued its lazy arc across the cosmos it came into clearer focus, growing to the size of a fingernail…
To his right, a nala yawned, splitting the Meena Bazaar road in two. Trash oozed from the concavity as rivulets of sewage trickled past it. Plastic bags of green, blue, red, pink, white, and black covered the cleft. He sensed them crinkle in a corner, right near the cemented bricks that fenced the nala from the road, and a rat emerged from underneath, sitting atop bloated polyethene.
With a jerk Jiji realizes the golden feather has almost burned through, and it flashes emerald, jasper, sapphire. It rejects them all and fixes on a final color – an opalescent white, searing her vision. She winces, opening her eyes in time to note the whiteness of its demise.
His eyes fell on the boy’s face and feet, the only parts of his body visible from the sheet. His feet were leathery like everyone else’s in the village, but they seemed cleaner, shapelier and generally well-tended. They were also pointing in the direction opposite to that taken by normal feet. Khudadad had never seen anything of the sort before, and he wondered if he was really watching a Djinn
The trolls washed against Devi 1.0 in thundering armies, calling into question her very existence, for daring to be—she was an insult to the real goddesses that bless the glorious nation of India by mimicking them, this quasi-Parvati, this impostor-Durga, this coded whore trying to steal followers from the true deities
Where mobs have mindlessly surged, saner heads have also stood ground and prevailed. We see activists, writers, thinkers, scientists, and philanthropists within and without South Asia come together to create new opportunities for progress and sustainable development in every field.