memoir
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The Math of Weight Loss
Manipal Hospital, 2019. Before. The first thing they do, when you are fat and you walk into a doctor’s office, is weigh you. Before asking why you’re there. Before your name, almost. The number on the scale is taken as the answer to every question you haven’t asked yet. Five years ago I went in… Continue reading
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Akka, Amma, Boomer
The first time someone called me Amma, I was buying coriander. This felt about right. Nobody becomes Amma doing anything dignified. You don’t walk out of a boardroom and get addressed as Mother. Unless the boardroom is full of twenty-year-olds, for whom Mother is now the highest compliment going. Said over coriander, it is not… Continue reading
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For Medical Advice
Three doctors, three cities, one losing argument with the internet. It is six thirty on a Wednesday evening and I am number four in the queue at Doctor V’s clinic. I have a work call at seven thirty. The clinic is a ten-minute walk from my house. I have done the maths, because this is… Continue reading
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My Scientific Temper Has an Astrology Clause
Or, how an evidence-based woman ended up checking her birth certificate at 11:07 p.m. on a Tuesday Recently, while doom-scrolling Instagram somewhere between a friend in Bali, a former colleague announcing she was truly humbled to accept a leadership role, and an aunt forwarding a Good Morning graphic featuring three roses and a sunrise, I was shown… Continue reading
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To Have Known a Love Like Bombay
My earliest memories of Bombay are stitched together with delays, derailments, and the kind of chaos that becomes funny only twenty years later. The first time I travelled to the city, my mother, my aunt, and I boarded a train from Chennai, a simple journey, three days of sightseeing planned, my Maama waiting for us… Continue reading
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The Lives I Didn’t Live (But Asked AI To Render Anyway)
AI-generated image: my mother and me at the Taj Mahal, a trip we never took. Forgive me, for I have mid-journeyed. I asked the machine to bring my grandmother back, not as she was when she died.. frail, sharp, and opinionated, but as a young woman standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, a place… Continue reading
Primalsoup 