Three zines, three forms. A personal one, a fan one, and a story one. Each uses the format differently but they all share the same logic: make something small that says something real.
Zines are a form built on directness. No editor, no pitch, no minimum word count. You make it, you fold it, you put it out. The constraint is the medium: a small format that has to say something worth keeping.
Each of the three approaches that freedom differently. The perzine exists to say something true about living between two places. The fanzine is pure enthusiasm compressed into pages about a hobby I genuinely love. The story zine is the most crafted, using the format as a scrapbook for a moment I never witnessed but feel like I know.
8 pages on identity, belonging, and the specific texture of living between India and the US.
12 pages on escape rooms: the design, the logic, the feeling of getting out with a minute to spare.
12 pages reconstructing my parents' wedding from photographs, memory, and the details you only get from asking.
The perzine moves through a single day split between two worlds. India wakes up to a 6 AM alarm and the rhythm of the house as white noise. The US wakes up to an 8:30 AM buzz and the particular silence of keeping headphones in. One morning starts with a silent buzz, the other begins with a scream of steam. Mumma's chai and snacks made with love on one side, coffee-to-go on the other.
By night, the streets in India are only just waking up. In the US, night is a quiet pause. The zine closes on a spread between both flags: "I belong to it all" on one page, "somewhere in between" on the other. Not a resolution. Just an honest place to land.
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Escape rooms are an underrated art form. Someone designed every object in that room to be noticed in a specific order, to carry just enough information without giving anything away. Locked is a fanzine about that craft: the puzzle design, the theatrics of the set, the specific anxiety of the countdown clock, and the way a good room makes you feel briefly like a different, smarter person.
Twelve pages because escape rooms always give you exactly enough time, and not a minute more.
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My parents got married in the monsoon season. I was not there. But I have seen the photos: the wet ground, the marigolds, the way the light looks different when it is raining and someone is getting dressed at the same time.
A Monsoon Wedding is built from those images and from the details you can only get from asking. It is an attempt to reconstruct a day I did not witness into something that feels like a memory. Not a family history. More like the version of a story that lives in the gap between what you know and what you can imagine.
A zine is not a book. It does not have to argue anything or resolve neatly. It just has to feel true while you are holding it.
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