Last month, in the pacy week leading to our women’s day special, we truly missed the chance to share with our readers something we look forward to each month — every month-end, our team brings you art, writing, or more that inspired us, adorned us with perspective amidst the unflinching news cycles our lives wheel through. So we are bringing two picks this month - writings that anchored us, separately, collectively.
I have been thinking a lot about wars – wars between countries and wars within them. There are wars the Indian state has waged against many of its own people – I saw a video, hazy, transfixed like a CCTV footage of Sharjeel Imam walking back into the Tihar jail yesterday after attending a family event on interim bail. In that imagery, it was evident that he may be imprisoned, but he has not been erased – and in wars that countries wage against their own, it is public memory that holds together this pushback against repression.
This week, I also saw Kasim Khan, the son of Pakistan’s, arguably, most iconic figure Imran Khan, deposing before the UNHRC about his father’s uncertain fate – jailed, by Pakistan’s military regime, in solitary confinement since a 1000 days, in squalor, amidst insect infestation. The Pakistani state has done everything it could – censorship, policing, even ensuring Khan’s name is not mentioned on broadcast – and yet, he lives in public thought. And that leads me to my pick, journalist Osman Samiuddin’s fantastic profile, from January, in Equator, of Pakistan’s ex-prime minister, whose memory and cultural influence refuses to die.
“Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact. There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan,” Samiuddin writes, for instance, about how shortly after Imran was assigned prison number 804, people literally rushed to register car license plates numbered ‘804’. It is as much the profile of a political prisoner as it is a cultural commentary on our neighbouring country – but it is also about how deeply a people choose to remember, against all odds and repressions. Memories, whether of Imran, on the other side, or Sharjeel, closer home, by themselves embody that resistance.
Sushovan Patnaik,
Associate Editor
My pick for February is ‘Mrs. Bhat’s Kashmiri Fish Dinner’, a short story-essay by political anthropologist, poet Ather Zia, published in Guernica Magazine. It is, on the surface, a deceptively quiet story. A Kashmiri woman goes about her business, dealing with curfews, nosy neighbors, and the politics of buying the right fish for an annual dinner. But Zia’s prose is a Trojan horse – within the routine of Mrs. Bhat’s errand with her carefully lined basket, her perfume to ward off the smell of fish, her excuses in case of nosy neighbors, we see the texture of life in a land where the military is always watching, where survival is a performance. Suddenly Mrs. Bhat’s fish basket, wrapped in newspaper and cloth against the evil eye, is surrounded by soldiers suspicious of it having explosives. “I swear by my entire family, I am just a woman, not a fidayee, I will show you what is in the basket,” she begs. The basket, and the woman, become suspects simply because they are in public.
Who does the State choose to suspect? The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, which got the President’s assent this week, operates on a similar grammar of suspicion. It presumes that transgender identity is coerced or induced by ‘force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence.’ It reaches back in time to strip thousands who were legally recognised to have never been transgenders. Like the soldier demanding Mrs. Bhat prove what is in her basket, the Bill demands that trans people prove they exist to a medical board, a District Magistrate, and a State that has already decided what it expects to find.
Is Mrs. Bhat finally let off? And even if she is, does the State’s gaze, once fixed on a body, ever withdraw without leaving a scar?
Ajitesh Singh,
Assistant Editor