From fast-vanishing Irani restaurants pervaded by ‘the semolina sigh’ of mawa cakes to songs ‘dipped in the nasha of aged Shiraz’, these poems reach for an elsewhereness, and still wash up against the shores of some simple truths: ‘that some things are best left on windowsills’, for instance, or that ‘everything’s precious, until it’s airmailed away’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam These…
