Personal History
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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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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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120 Under 120
On Living Forever With Nothing To Do An AI-generated reconstruction of a lunch that had already ended. At a recent family lunch, three generations agreed on exactly one thing: none of us cared for AI. This consensus lasted approximately fourteen minutes, at which point we realised nobody had photographed the food. We had committed the… Continue reading
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The One in Which Rachel Green Lied to Me
A personal essay on how Friends, a Louis Vuitton tote bag, and two decades of middle-class aspiration shaped a life in India. From navigating the Dadar fast local with a backpack to buying ‘dupes’ on Meesho, a look at the performance of adulthood and the gap between who we are and who we want to… 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
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Episode 10: The One Who Was Always There (Until He Wasn’t)
The recurring character who was almost the main character, until he wasn’t. Some loves don’t take center stage. They light it. Image Credit Some people enter your story as guest stars. Others are series regulars from the pilot episode. The Regular was cast before I even knew there was a show. Our mothers practiced Rabindra… Continue reading
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Dressed for Silence
On disappearing, dressing down, and choosing clothes that don’t speak for you A dress is just a kurta that went to therapy.A personal essay on what I wore, what I refused, and the quiet power of dressing for no one. In my twenties, I wore clothes that let me disappear, loose kurtas that blended into… Continue reading
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