As the sun sets at the Attari-Wagah border between India and Pakistan, the two countries execute a quick parade. Every day, a border closing ceremony involves soldiers in full regalia from both sides marching in a choreographed demonstration that includes the highest kicks you have ever seen. Spectators applaud, but when tensions run high in … Continue reading
In a small room down a warren of streets in Kithulwatte in Colombo, Fathima Rifka is making her own sanitary napkins by hand. This is the 24-year-old’s first job. One year in, she has been promoted to the position of a trainer, and has begun to teach other women from this low-income neighbourhood how to … Continue reading
It’s easy to assume that once you have stood on the summit of Everest, the world laid out before you, that no other climb will offer quite the same challenge. However, hanging from ropes on the icy face of Aconcagua’s glacier in South America, their bodies shuddering uncontrollably with cold, their fingers at risk of … Continue reading
RIP, Devil Dance. This week, in our Q&A with author Shehan Karunatilaka we take a moment to grieve for the much-anticipated manuscript that earned him a place on the shortlist for the 2016 Gratiaen, and gain some consolation in word of two new books and the possibility Chinaman might live again as a mini-series for … Continue reading
Southern Province, Sri Lanka – Lochana is 10 years old. Every morning, he gets up and lights an incense stick, which he places in a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw parked outside the family home in Sri Lanka‘s coastal Southern Province. The vehicle is a bright shade of pink and as the fragrant smoke fills the interior, Lochana says a … Continue reading
Vraie Balthazar remembers thinking: “This can’t be normal.” Her periods had taken on a kind of life of their own. She would bleed not just three or four days, but seven days. Her sanitary napkins needed to be changed every two hours. She would layer them together, two-pads deep, to make a kind of adult … Continue reading
Standing at just 4’11, Thilini Gunasekera is used to being dismissed. It happened when she wanted to join the Air Force and study aeronautical engineering – she didn’t meet the height requirement. It happened again when she stepped into a classroom full of men to study how to become an automobile mechanic – except this … Continue reading
