Chitra Ramaswamy’s second book explores what home means in an individual life and the role family and language play as fundamental elements in its evolution, as much as the physical place we find ourselves living. She opens up the shifting relationships between homeland and motherland, between the actual place we are situated and an elusive sense of origin, of connection with an elsewhere which is indirect—imaginal even—tugging at the mind and heart.
Burden Goldilocks produces prophesied curls, Snow White becomes a pearly corpse, Thumbelina never grows beyond her moniker. “What’s my name?” The Queen speaks the legendary word and Rumpelstiltskin, crooked imp, boils. Hops on stilt-thin legs, hide splitting. Repel-stilt-skin. I gobble fairy-tales like chocolates, plump with self-appointed expertise. Evil girls pretend to be princesses, masquerade as Read More
I have a box of memories. It’s a square brown box – one of those used for moving to a new house, ‘memories’ scrawled on one side in black ink. For years it moved with me and my partner from flat to flat, accumulating a little more in weight each year as we collected little Read More
Mirror Love I stare at the stolid girl in the mirror. Her long, dark, hair hangs awkwardly over a warm face with blue eyes. Exactly like her mother’s. As the years go by, she looks more like her mother and less like the little girl who walked around hand-in-hand with her daddy, dancing with her Read More
If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. (Virginia Woolf) [1] Blue I can paint my earliest memory in blue – my memory of the jam jar I dropped at my parents’ feet after being so certain I Read More
Know my name A name is a fickle thing. For me, it’s a way for people to get my attention; for others, it is me. For my part, I don’t think of myself as ‘Craig’. I answer to it, but I don’t like it. I’ve heard it remarked that it is a ‘good Scottish Read More
I say to my daughters never trust March for its joy comes in a quarter but takes full month’s charge January 13, 1991 The Soviet Union president demands the restoration of the USSR constitution in Lithuania. When the Lithuanian government disagrees, tanks and trucks with armed soldiers fill city streets. The Lithuanian prime minister Read More
In June 2018 I interviewed Philip Lopate, who is probably the most famous living essayist in the world. On camera.* It was something I’d never done before, and to say I was nervous is an understatement. I shook hands with him the day before and heard him deliver his keynote for the ‘Taking ideas for Read More
