Telling My Family and Friends That I Was Going to Study in Israel I received an admission letter for M.A. in Conflict Resolution & Mediation from Tel Aviv University, Israel, in  the background of the 11-day war – a bloody and bruising altercation between Israel and Hamas in May 2021. The timing of it could not have been more ill-fated and awkward. I already had certain inhibitions about breaking the news about studying in Israel

I came across Intizar’s Husain’s Basti in my third and final year of graduation in English Literature. It was one of the novels which was a part of the subject called Partition Literature. However, upon reading it, I found out that it does not allude to one specific event or confines to any specific time. It is neither about the tragic 1947 India-Pakistan Partition nor the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. As the title suggests, Basti means