Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu Kaza is a writer, translator, performance artist, and educator based in New York City. Email: [email protected]
by Madhu Kaza My reading schedule has little to do with the publishing industry's calendar of launches, prizes and promotions. When I look back on a year's worth of reading I note that much of what I read was not hot off the presses. My year end list of favorite books mostly includes works that…
by Madhu Kaza * Located in the Dorsoduro section of Venice, the Gallerie dell'Accademia hold a collection of pre-19th century Venetian art. [detail of “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” Gentile Bellini. c. 1500] Introduction: What if I walked through the doors of Europe (I am an immigrant, but not there;…
by Madhu Kaza “That girl won't leave any fruit on the trees,” a woman complains looking down from the roof of her home. In the orchard below the girl runs and –once she is in the clear — skips home hiding a guava in her dress. She stashes the fruit under a bunch of bananas…
by Madhu Kaza I sit on a bench and a few doors down he's on his bench. We're on Sullivan Street. It's Thursday, it's July, it's late afternoon, it's early evening, and the heat begins to lift. He's an elderly Italian man. His white hair, white shirt, white shorts, white knee socks, and white sneakers…
by Madhu Kaza On the evening of April 13th I heard the news that the Uraguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had passed away. Earlier that day, after work, I had gone to get a manicure at a salon in my neighborhood; my hands and wrist hurt from typing all day and more than new nail polish…
by Madhu Kaza I was jetlagged during the week in early March 2014 when I heard the news that air traffic controllers had lost contact with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The news seemed at first like a seamless detail added to my mental fog. I had just returned to New York from India where I…
by Madhu Kaza At a Christmas gathering at a cousin's house in Maryland I mentioned to my five-year-old nephew that I don't own a television. I was sitting on a couch with him paging through a book about whales and dolphins for the sixth or seventh time. The men in the family were playing gin…
by Madhu Kaza “Before it happened, it had happened and happened.” Anyone paying attention to recent events, specifically the failure of two grand juries to bring indictments for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner will readily make sense of this line from Claudia Rankine's new book Citizen. In moments of crisis when we…
by Madhu Kaza In the borrowed apartment where I'm living for a while, on the top floor of a brownstone, a stone Buddha sits on a low table in front of a center window. The crowns of trees some thirty feet away float in the window; they belong to the park across the street. Many…
by Madhu Kaza These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart. –Virgil, The Aeneid A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon at a friend's apartment while she held a moving sale. I went primarily to keep her company, and I spent hours in the room where she had neatly…
by Madhu Kaza After I heard the recent news that Gabriel García Márquez had died, and after I'd read the obituaries and tributes, and reminisced about my own early encounters with his fiction, I knew it was time to read another great 20th century writer: and so this week I finally read Mercè Rodoreda's novel…
by Madhu Kaza It’s cold outside. New York City is probably exciting as ever out there, but I’m staying in with my soup and my soup spoon and all of the spoons, with books listing this way and that on the shelves, socks and sweaters stuffed into drawers, stray paperclips on the loose, dust storms…
by Madhu Kaza There's a story I can't get out of my head. Except it's not a story, only the barest, stray thread. One winter morning a little over a year ago I turned on the radio to hear: “At least ten girls were killed yesterday as they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan. The…
by Madhu Kaza I began to read the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle last year after I heard a conversation between two writers who were puzzling over the book. They both agreed that the absence of plot in the novel was not compensated for by a strong prose style. One writer even…
by Madhu Kaza During the month or so that my father spent in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in suburban Detroit, my travel habits changed in peculiar ways. Not knowing ahead of time the duration of my stay in Detroit nor how long I would be back home in New York before being…