Feature Story
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.…
The Woman and the Sword!
A sword is not a garland. No one hands it to you. You have to want it.This is what makes fencing, of all things, an unlikely site of feminist meaning in India — a country where the sword has al…
What the Mountain Keeps!
There is a boot on the trail near the summit of Everest, bright green, still bright after twenty years.Every climber who passes it knows exactly whose it marks. Green Boots" is the remains of Indian …