Articles by Karuwaki
My Second Home!
I arrived in Cochin in 2021 carrying the wrong map. Everyone hands you the same one before you go south — backwaters, God's Own Country, a postcard with a houseboat on it — and I took it …
The Mountain We Go to Worship!
Rasuwa has been torn apart.The route pilgrims take toward Kailash Mansarovar was hit by a flash flood. Roads gone. Bridges gone. Settlements buried under mud. The mountains, which usually seem to st…
Baklava: An Empire You Can Eat!
Cut it on the diagonal and you get diamonds. Cut it straight and you get history — thirty, forty sheets of dough thinner than a rumour, stacked and drowned in syrup until the knife needs rinsin…
The Quiet Sicily: What the Arancino Knows!
Geography made Sicily a doorway before it made it a home. The largest island in the Mediterranean, it sits close enough to touch both Italy and Africa, and everyone passing between the two has stoppe…
The Fish With a Foreign Policy!
No fish has diplomatic relations. Hilsa does.It belongs, taxonomically, to the herring family — Clupeidae, not the more exotic-sounding name it sometimes gets mistaken for — and was once …
A Poem Called Ilish!
My father told me about this poem the way he told me most things that mattered — sideways, at a fish market, while haggling over the weight of a hilsa. I don't remember the price he settled on.…