The Fair
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
Someone There
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
Almost
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
Still Arriving
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
Fifty Two
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
Colour Coded. Still Confused.
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
The Morning I Moved the Jar
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
How it Finds You
There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen Most of us spend our lives trying not to crack. We reinforce. We protect. We build careful walls around the places that have been hurt before. We become, over time, quite good at it.
She Had a Question. She Couldn't Ask.
A Backstory from our journey to building SuperMummy - a YouTube channel with 100mn+ reach in Bharat June, 2018, Rajasthan. Ajmer. Summer. The kind of heat that makes the air feel solid. She came with her father-in-law. Small handkerchief in her hand. Perspiring. Waiting. The ward was crammed. Six people
The Round Mirror
The round mirror in my dressing approves. I smile. I am looking good. And somewhere between the mirror and the door, I wonder when exactly I started needing that. Not the lipstick, not the kajal, not the particular way the light falls at this hour. The approval. We all have
Pick a Lane, or...
Ash on his body. Snakes at his throat. Sitting in the cremation ground where nothing lives. And then — the same one — Parvati beside him, Ganesh on his lap. Dancing. The damru in one hand, the universe in the other. No tradition has ever managed to file Shiv. Ascetic and householder.
Still, He Showed Up
Paris. May 19, 1885. For four days, thousands of people are gathered outside a window on Avenue Victor Hugo — a street Paris had renamed after him, the man they loved. Inside, the one who had written more words than most people read in a lifetime. Victor Hugo is 83 years