I have a table. Not literally. But I know exactly where I want to sit in every room I walk into. The angle of the chair. The view of the door. The particular comfort of knowing what is coming and from where. I call it preference. It wears that costume
The phone surfaced it without warning. A photograph from years ago — a corridor, stone, silence. A painting so small it barely registered in the frame. I remembered leaning in. Having to. The face was that small. Mary. Mother. Someone had placed that brushstroke centuries ago knowing exactly what they were
After the music stops, there is a silence that is different from the silence before it. Something has moved through the room. You can't name it. You don't try. We think we listen to music. But there are moments — rare, unasked for — when the music finds
He learned to hold the sarod the way his guru held it. The angle of the wrist. The weight of the arm. The particular stillness before the first note. He didn't choose this. It entered him the way language enters a child — before choice, before resistance, before he
You put on a raga. You weren't thinking about loss. And then something found you — precise, uninvited, knowing exactly where to press. How did it know? The word raga comes from rang. Colour. It doesn't play you a feeling. It colours the interior until what was
Before the city wakes, he is already at it. The same phrase. Again. Again. The tanpura holds its note — continuous, patient, indifferent to how long this takes. For years, riyaz is about the note. Hitting it. Holding it. The voice learns its edges the way a hand learns a tool.
I was twenty one. I had left home with nothing that would show up on a resume — no degree, no pedigree, no skill, no experience. Just the only thing I knew how to do. Outwork everyone else. The dormitory had roaches. Girls got high on iodex because they couldn'
There is a tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It lives just below the sternum. It doesn't ask for rest. It asks for meaning — some small sign that the effort is landing somewhere, in someone, in some version of the future you can almost see. The
They call him Maryada Purushottam. The one who held every boundary. Who never broke a rule, never bent a promise, never let the personal bleed into the principle. The ideal man. The ideal king. She loved him completely. That's the part we don't linger on. How
She reached for her chin before she spoke. Every time. We were having tea. She'd come to collect a piece of furniture — someone I'd met only once before. She'd go quiet. Hand to chin. Then fingers through hair. Then words — her daughter's
Every morning I open a new window. The context arrives — who I am, what I'm building, what matters. And then we begin. No residue from yesterday. No reaching for tomorrow. Just this. I've been thinking about what that actually is. It isn't memory loss.
I wasn't looking for it. Somewhere off the road from Udaipur, on the way back from Devigarh, the car stopped and I got out, and there it was — a Shiva temple, large enough to be a complex, old enough that no one was claiming it. There were maybe