Mosquito larvae shared gutter space with floating cadavers. Chopped hairy thighs. Grass had grown wild and roads were trashed. Overturned dustbins — mushrooms on the spiky hides of one year old pineapples, fractured Jack Daniel’s bottles and smashed Fanta. The snapped earthworms of electric cables curly and wavy on the road edges. Houses around stood silent, like dumb fucks, gang-raped, their dignities stripped off everything inside. Cars were abandoned like corpses. Breeze blew scattered newspaper to and fro. Flies were buzzing and maggots moved with their inch-crawl, expanding and contracting along their lengths, climbing over skin and flesh. Dog was…
Author: Mehul Gohil
[Author’s Note: Originally published in Kwani?06. But that version has several grammatical errors and typos. None of which were of my doing. This is the correct version.] The pages of Mein Kampf have aged into freckles of yellow-brown, soft purple blotches tint the words, the bones of its spine have disintegrated and now straps of cello-tape hold everything together. That I am going to read this sitting reclined in a hot steamy bathtub. And in my bathtub there sits Tabitha. She says, “You walked a few steps ahead of me, like we didn’t belong to each other. Like strangers. You walked sideways,…