I was lying on my side when I finished it.   Not the dignified, upright posture of a “serious reader.” Just me, the phone slipping slightly in my hand, one knee drawn up, the fan making that familiar uneven sound it makes when it’s been on too long. Evening had already crossed into night. My first thought wasn’t insight. It was quieter.   So this is why my days feel unfinished.   I didn’t think of time. I thought of energy. Specifically, where mine had been leaking without my

There’s something about prisons that unsettles me — not the concrete, the locks, or the barbed wire, but the silence. That heavy, echoing silence that follows you like a shadow, whispering stories you’re not supposed to hear. When I picked up Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, I thought I was signing up for a cold, procedural memoir — a peek behind the bars of India’s most infamous jail. Instead, I found a mirror — cracked, smok