I first walked into the Taj Mahal Hotel lobby at roughly knee-height, in a pink sweater my mother had buttoned to the top, small pearls sewn all over it. Delhi in December. The tree alone was taller than our house. Lights everywhere — cold white and warm gold, climbing the columns,
Brilliant ideas, like truffles, are rare. And only possible given special conditions. Nobody knows who said this. The quote has been passed around long enough to lose its origin. Which feels appropriate — a brilliant idea whose source has quietly disappeared. Shweta and I were walking on the beach. She was
Benedict Cumberbatch sits casually in his big tan leather chair. But nothing quite casual about it. A man in a black coat walks in. The eyes move — not dramatically, not obviously. Just a quiet, continuous intake. The cat hair on the sleeve. The tobacco stain. The slight hesitation before the
April, 2000. Worli, Mumbai. I had been gunning for this job for years. Actually, not the job — the boss. Meenakshi Madhvani finally gave me a break. One condition: keep the client, keep the job. Lose the client, lose everything. First presentation. I decide to wear a saree. I want to
Pallavi sends me a reel. A gentleman explains three types of love through three women — Paro, Kunti, Parvati. It's elegant. Well-intentioned. And it irritates me in that specific way that things do when they are almost right but missing the point entirely. Each woman is measured by what
A friend gave me a gift last week — a box of postcards. One hundred classic covers of Vanity Fair magazine. She handed it to me with the kind of smile that says: this is so you. I laughed. Because she's right. If I'd seen it in
There is a face in my bathroom wall. It has been there since we moved in. Slightly to the left of the tap. Two knots in the wood panel that became eyes sometime last year and have not stopped watching since. I have never mentioned it to anyone. The word
A blind king sits in his palace. Far away, a war is being fought. The greatest war his world has ever seen. His sons are on that battlefield. Everything he has built, everything he has loved, everything he has feared losing — out there, in the dust and the arrows and
There is a word in Japanese — mono no aware. The pathos of things. The ache that lives inside beauty, not after it. The Japanese didn't treat this as a problem to solve. They built it into their aesthetic. Into their architecture. Into the way they looked at cherry
Tomorrow is the 27th of March. My father's death anniversary. This year it lands differently. I turn 52 this year. He was 52 when he died. And the first thing I feel — sitting with that number — is that I feel young. Which means he must have felt exactly
Seng T'san said this in the 6th century and I've been thinking about it. Which is probably the problem. "If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?" He was a Zen monk. Third Patriarch. 6th century
This morning I learned that my pots have a name. Martaban jars. Martaban is a port town in Burma. Chinese traders shipped these jars through it so relentlessly — to India, to the Philippines, to Indonesia — that the jars stopped being called Chinese and started being called Martaban. Named not by