The Venus Flytrap: At The Mercy of Her Bite

Let me just tell you straight up that I have penis envy. Every Rorschach test you could possibly give me will prove it. Like O’Keefe, like Freud, like – Oh! – Hinduism, I can’t get the nethers off my mind. I discern shapes, nature and various abstractions as phallic or vulval. The latter I find [...]

The Venus Flytrap: Waiting For The Dawn

Last week I went up to my roof and lay on my back to pray to the night sky.
I was praying because I had begun to feel desperate about an unresolved situation. Something I had worked on for years and seemed only weeks from completion had been snatched away without explanation, taking with it something [...]

Review: “The Shape of the Beast: Conversations With Arundhati Roy”

First published in today’s The New Sunday Express.
Over a decade after the extraordinary success of The God of Small Things, and somewhere before the publication of what will only be her second book of fiction, comes The Shape of the Beast. This collection of fourteen interview transcripts chart Arundhati Roy’s career as a political activist [...]

The Venus Flytrap: There’s Something About Amy

I can’t remember when or where or how I first came across Amy Winehouse, but she had her hooks in me way back when her success was a cult hit, not the embarrassing phenomenon it is today. It was more than just that smokey, showstopping voice, which would come to win her nearly unanimous acclaim. [...]

Life Is A Biopic

Okay. That’s it.
Bring on the deus ex machina.

Waiting

Last night I lay on my roof and prayed for a sign.
A star fell, immediately.
I’m still waiting.

The Venus Flytrap: In Defense of Insensible Fashion

Some people know they’re depressed when they can’t eat or sleep. I know I’m depressed when I stop giving a damn about what I’m wearing. I’m a huge believer in what Tim Gunn called “the semiology of dressing”; my ostentatious collection of attire and accessories – stacked, scattered or in storage – colour my allegiance [...]

The Word Witch

By now, you know that plans for the book have come to a standstill. And I don’t owe you the story because I have to save something for the memoirs, right? Let it just be said that it was all pretty Twilight Zone. Is all, actually.
However, when production was still in full progress, I did [...]

The Venus Flytrap: Solo In The City

I am not Carrie Bradshaw, and Lady help anyone who thinks so (for the record, the glorious Samantha, the most soulful maneater in the recent history of female iconography, is my favourite). But among the many moments of Sex and the City that struck a chord in me in spite of its protagonist was the [...]