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
Most of us enter things one of two ways. With a plan. Or with we'll see. The plan is obvious. We'll see is the one that hides. It sounds like lightness. It is usually fear that will not name itself, or courage that has decided to
He comes every week. Sits in the third row. Closes his eyes. He genuinely wants this. The langar is served. Someone has cooked since four in the morning. The dal is thin today. The sabzi, unfamiliar. He takes a small portion. Not that one. Less of this. Nobody notices. Except
We have the image wrong. Still waters, we say. And we picture the quiet one. The person who holds back, who doesn't fill a room, who gives little away. We mean it kindly. There is more there than meets the eye. But depth has no dress code. Some
You know it's there. You put the phone down anyway. Barthes wrote about the one who waits — how waiting is never neutral, how it transforms the person doing it. He was thinking about lovers. He might as well have been thinking about this. The ten seconds before you
I went out for two hours. I came back after five. Somewhere between the first picante and the third round of food, I forgot I had a blog to write. I have written every day for 42 days. I was not going to let good conversation be the thing that
She hears the dogs before she hears the car. They live on the abandoned property at the end of the lane and they have decided, without being asked, to take responsibility for the silence. Before that, birds. Not the ones there used to be — the singing ones, who arrived at
The first cup is optimistic. The second cup knows better. You make it anyway. Not because the day has turned around. Or something shifted or clicked or resolved itself quietly while you weren't looking. The day is exactly what it was. You are exactly where you were. Kettle.
This afternoon I was pricing the furniture. Not all of it. Thirty-two pieces. The deck is called A Life in Objects and it is exactly what it sounds like — photographs, provenance, a short paragraph on each. Mahendra Doshi. Charcoal Project. Antique Dealers. The Edwardian Cabinet and the Gothic altar are