Tamil Life
The doorbells
don’t work
but no one goes away….
Read the rest of Manushya Puthiran’s poem here.
Wells. Wishes.
More girl-child foetuses found in wells.
Bad Neighbours
Superb story by Edward Jones in the New Yorker:
Even before the fracas with Terence Stagg, people along both sides of the 1400 block of Eighth Street NW could see the Benningtons for what they really were. First, the family moved in not on a Saturday or on a weekday but on a Sunday, which was still the Lord’s Day, even though church for many was now a place to visit only for a wedding or a funeral. Perhaps Easter or Christmas. And those watching that Sunday, from behind discreetly parted brocade curtains and from porches rarely used except to enter and leave homes, had to wonder why the Bennington family had even bothered to bring most of their furniture. They had a collection of junk that included a stained queen-size mattress, a dining-room table with three legs, a mirror with a large piece missing from one corner, and a refrigerator dented on two sides. One neighbor joked to his wife that the Bennington refrigerator probably wouldn’t work without a big block of ice in it. During the move, the half-dressed little Benningtons occupied themselves by running to and from the two small moving trucks, carrying in clothes that had busted out of cardboard boxes during the trip from whatever countrified shack they had left behind. Over the next two weeks, it became clear that the house at 1406 Eighth, with its three bedrooms, would be home to at least twelve people, though that number was fluid. The neighbors could never get a proper accounting, and they would never know who was related to whom.
What was he smoking Dept
Shekhar Kapur answers a few questions.People talk of the Big Bang. If there was a beginning, there must be an end. But there is no linear time, so where is the end? I call it the Big Laugh. Someone laughed ‘ha, ha ha’ And between the first and the second ‘ha’s, came a few billion years.
“Most Indian women…”
…start developing wrinkles as early as the age of 30,” according to a half-page Garnier ad in the paper today. It doesn’t say when men start getting wrinkles.
