NAINA
Kamala Lakshmi Naiker

Nadi Town, as I remember, was always madly busy, especially on Saturdays. People of all races, in their best, colourful, traditional attire came to sell their wares at the market. They came to meet friends and relatives, roam the colonized, one-street town with old colonial buildings badly in need of paint. Many came to eat at our restaurant, (Ramaswamy’s Lodge in town) and after lunch watch matinees in Hindi or English.

There were two

Human Rites and Rituals

Kavita Nandan

Why is it that when human beings strive to reach the spiritual, they never appear more solidly human?

Each time my friend’s son, 21, leans forward to sprinkle a combination of marigold and rice on the brass god, his backside makes an inauspicious appearance; certainly not as pretty as twin suns rising on one of those exotically named planets in your typical science fiction movie.

In the second row, his mother coughs in scores of

Glass-Blowing
Mary Daya

A pumpkin can change the world. I know it changed mine. Just the colour of the pumpkin, how a certain hand plucked it off its vine, halved it with a kitchen knife, scraped its seeds out with a spoon. I was six, awake with the ducks, watching the sunflowers on my grandmother’s dress.  My grandmother’s right hand tapping a spoon to rid its hollow of pumpkin seeds. Taptaptap her right hand went, until my father’s legs walked in and his hand cut his

Sir

(an extract from a novel-in-progress - Aristotle’s Lantern).

Mary Daya

The bargain Pati strikes with Capt. Esau Jacobs is simple. The Catherine May will sail the Lomaiviti waters for a month. She will not touch land. Her sailors will collect rain. The cook will toss manta ray with soy for dinner. He will make the devilfish last four weeks. He will cook anything and everything the boat hauls in. If the manta goes to worm and the thrown lines do not tighten for

Snake in Paradise
Raymond Pillai

The Pajero seemed to be relishing its task, skidding and scrabbling up and down slopes, and jolting through the ruts which had been scoured out by rain. By the time they reached Bechu’s farm Kanchan felt as if she’d been put through a tumble-dryer, but there was no question of backing out now. Do that, and she would blow her chance of convincing Davendra she was tough enough to head the Lautoka office.

Bechu emerged from his corrugated