When you open your baby mouth there is no tongue
just universes clustering on and on –
a chasm of diamonds
to dive into.

I have a secret –
I stalk real Indians in Westfield Mall
to snatch at a lilt of Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati –

The Kolkata crow, the pig of the skies,
squawks lazy abuse through the hazy afternoon
at a tarmac road too hot to hop on.

Nobody switched off their phones for your funeral –
the mobile was new, like the century,
with none of that decrepit etiquette –

Many of the short stories I write are life stories. I love life writing and like much of my work, this story is about cultures intersecting and the hilarity and poignancy of our search for human unity. I wrote this one about a trip that my mother and her servant made to visit us in Australia a few years back – first published in Australia’s literary Southerly Journal.

The Sahara waved her dunes around you like a skirt and sucked you in freed your mind from solid form made you relinquish a world you could hardly recall to put on her arid, barren renunciant's robes –a twenty-year-old ascetic with sand in your locks guided by a vision of a bearded, beaded man from yet another continent that wasn't yours. 

The note below is included in an incredible collection of 270+ heartfelt letters written by women from around the world to their former selves in Postcards from Tomorrow. The project is the brainchild of the indomitable innovator, Kim Chandler McDonald, and money raised goes towards Lou’s Place, Sydney’s only drop-in centre for women in crisis.

Writing has always been my elemental passion – one that has morphed into various other practices and allowed me to think and thrive in many ways. In 2019 I collaborated with the incredibly talented dancer and choreographer, Ariella Casu, as her dramaturgist in her stunning performance of Arise for Sydney Dance Company.

This is a short piece of life writing that contributed to national conversations around violence against women, euphemistically described as ‘Eve-teasing’ in India. In many ways it’s a confession, told from a time I was abused whilst visiting a temple, and it outlines some of the challenges around reporting abuse in India. If you think this story is fiction, I’d forgive you – it is utterly bizarre – and events unfolded and escalated in more ways than could fit into the word count allowed by The Monthly (which had to halve my text).

I wrote The Final Christmas as a literary accompaniment to The Seduction of Silence, a story of five generations of an Indian family. A spiritual and emotional journey that traversed 100 years, three continents, this life and the next. The Seduction of Silence flourished with untold stories that couldn’t fit between the jacket sleeves produced by HarperCollins and Penguin, my publishers.