Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying. If you want to write for UV, please read this. More about UV here.

We’re Talking About…

August 26, 2010

The weight of silence

By Divya Rajan

Your scarf spoke nine tongues.
I failed to know the purpose, seek the language
of splinters, shards, lazy salsas.
I thought the skies bowed to you even
as they turned mauve. Awe
filled my lungs, I breathed.
Shards slow danced, I felt your smile.
It smelt of something else.
Your ducking shadows traded with liquid limelight.
*******
“You were born to silence”, sang [...]

January 19, 2010

Two Poems

By Janice Pariat

Bertha & I
Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason
with a fire and sadness in my soul.
I pace my room – this attic of madness –
it keeps me sane. I think it keeps me
whole, somehow. There’s no breeze
through the window, just an empty
vastness of night and shadow and
half-lights. And the knock on my door,
well, it [...]

August 28, 2009

They must’ve known my grandparents

By Divya Rajan

I drive by narrow lanes called eda
in colloquial malayalam, the walls hoarded with large
posters of Mohanlal and some teenager heroine
(who won the National Award for Best Actress,
I’m told, for carrying on precariously well
as a mother of an eighteen year old, when
she herself had but known eighteen mango- textured
summers) with wisps of curls over [...]

November 20, 2007

How to Eat A Wolf

Does all lust start and
end like this? Don’t get me
wrong. I loved my wolf.
I held him tethered like
a pussycat. I nursed
the rumble in his belly
with hands gentle as a burglar’s.
He lived on milk
and blood and ocean. He
had violets for his furs.