The first time I took an unholy dip in the Ganges, on a chattering cold morning in Varanasi – I was distracted. Not by the milieu of half naked men and their belching middle age, or the debris that Ganga witnessed every morning in the…

I knew that day, that the red lipstick had given her a little nudge, had bestowed upon her some purpose, an inner resistance to the outer fragility, an anesthetic to the disfiguration, a figment of a previously held routine yet untouched by tragedy, a color,…