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From The Afterglow

Verses, Tales, Thoughts

by Varsha Panikar

The dream stretched on and on. I never knew where it ended, for it didn't seem to. Eternity came and went and I just sat there and played. Lost with my toys and colours. There was no care. What I'd give to be back there.


The unrest for death is nothing compared to the vacuum, to the sense of loss, the bewilderment of her departure. A clean slate. With her gone, my whole family has disappeared. A gust of wind on the dust of time passing by in the hourglass that pulverizes everything. She was all I returned for. A slight kiss on the cheek, a little nap on her lap, inhaling her clean antique scent. I sometimes emerge from my restless sleep to bold nightmares and night terrors woven of loneliness and disillusions.


I find myself beating at her door, longing for her voice and the warmth of her embrace. The sweet illusion of being back in my childhood home to the faint beat of her ancient heart. She still whispers in my ear a reassurance, like when I was a child, but it is a pitiful lie. Everything passes and everything dissolves. People, things, love and hope.



A zine by Varsha Panikar from their ongoing mixed-media series, Origami Folds, that employs dreams, memories, archive and photography to explore the human body, and uses it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless fragility and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures, through the lens of south-Asian, queer and marginalized bodies.

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Trigger Warning : This piece deals with depression, anxiety, and body dysphoria.

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There’s an ancient sort of darkness that can be witnessed when you wake up when you aren’t supposed to. Within its benevolence resides a cooing wind that brushes against your wings. Within that, a sunset horizon stuck between wake and slumber where the body and mind are separate entities. They murmur to each other like broken & old friends from childhood that contemplates sex. Execution, though, is an entirely different continent. Instead, there exists the sensation of a cold blade that yields you. So when you open your eyes, it feels like they’re still closed and slowly seeps in an unpleasant awareness that you’ll never be as happy as you are in your memory.

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