Transverse

உள்ளச்சம் tackles the terrain of queer visibility in contemporary urban India with nuance, exploring how even seemingly progressive spaces can harbor deep-seated expectations of invisibility. The central tension between Murali and Arjun, a gay couple, between their desire for authentic public existence and their community’s demand for discretionary silence captures a painful reality that many…

பாற்கடல் gradually and delicately unveils the offerings of a supportive family through the intimate lens of a young wife’s letter to her husband. Set within a joint family, the narrative begins as the husband is compelled to depart on an official trip on the very eve of Deepavali, leaving his new wife sad and mad.…

நடைமேடையில் சுருண்டு படுத்திருக்கும் நாயை, தன் தாடையால் சுட்டினான். “அது சிகப்ப பாக்காது, நம்மைப் போல இசைய கேக்காது. ஆனா நம்ம உலகத்துலதான் அதுவும் இருக்கு.” Is a dog’s life any poorer than a human life just because it can’t perceive what a ‘normal’ human can? Ed Yong’s work in An Immense World explores this question. Yong reminds us that there is…

Su. Venugopal’s சொல்ல முடிந்தது opens with a man on his deathbed and ends with a request for permission to mourn that death. Between these two moments lie thirty-five years of silence – and within that silence, a slow, unexamined moral failure. Raguram is forty-nine. He has worked at the same mill for decades, married, raised…

In Chandra Thangaraj’s அறையில் புகுந்த தனிமை, the silence of a 2011 Chennai afternoon is not merely a mood; it is an active, predatory force. For the twenty-seven-year-old unnamed female protagonist, depression is portrayed not as a clinical list of symptoms, but as an urban claustrophobia so dense it renders the world in terrifying shades of…

Chandra Thangaraj’s வால்நட்சத்திரம் stays with a woman reluctantly returning to her ancestral village after her father’s death. Haunted by childhood trauma – witnessing her beloved Latha akka’s suicide – and now tormented by mysterious voices and photographs showing things she never saw, she makes a second journey to confront whatever won’t let her rest. The…