You are mid-sentence, nothing particularly interesting has happened yet, and their head just tilts? Very slightly. Like it’s already decided you’re worth leaning toward.

I’ve been collecting them.

1. The people whose chai goes cold because they got busy asking about your interview, your paati, the seepage situation. They will likely also drink it cold without noticing. Lukewarm devotion. The best kind.

2. The ones who remember things you mentioned casually three Tuesdays ago (and likely forgot yourselves) and bring it up like a librarian retrieving the exact book you forgot you borrowed. You said it once, while tying your shoelace. They filed it under you.

3. The ones whose notebooks are mostly arrows and circles because every time they start writing something down they get distracted by someone else’s story. The to-do list is more a portrait gallery. Nothing ever gets done. Everyone feels seen.

4. The friend who says “and then what happened?” in a tone that suggests we might be here a while, and also that they brought snacks mentally, and they are completely fine with that.

5. The WhatsApp typing bubble that appears... disappears... appears again. Someone on the other end trying to find the right follow-up question. Not a reply. A question. There’s a difference and they know it.

6. The aunty at the wedding who keeps refilling your plate before you’ve finished, who has somehow memorised who is lactose intolerant and who eats garlic cheese naan when they’re sad, and who will feed you accordingly without ever saying a word about it.

7. Balcony plants that have contorted themselves into frankly concerning yoga poses just to reach a strip of sunlight that technically belongs to the neighbour. Phototropism, scientists call it. Yearning, I call it.

8. Indies who bring the same stick back, a little more confidently each time. First visit: tentative. Second: committed. Third: they’re placing it at your feet the way penguins place pebbles, which if you don’t know, is a proposal. No ring. No speech. Just: I found this, it’s my best thing, and I’m giving it to you. The expectation of yes is fully built in.

9. Sunflowers. The whole biography of a sunflower is just a head that cannot stop tilting. They do it so completely, so shamelessly, that scientists had to give it a name. Heliotropism. Just a fancy word for I cannot help but turn toward you.

   More writing. Longer than intended. Yours, if you like.

10. Cats who slow-blink at you. Apparently this is the cat version of a hug. They’re not even touching you. They’re just looking at you softly, on purpose. The audacity of that kind of tenderness.

11. My uncle’s dog does this thing where she places one paw on your knee. Then another. Then a full forearm, slow and deliberate, like she’s staffing a hotel reception and service has been slow. You assume you’re doing her a favour. But the moment your hand finds that spot behind her ear and she goes completely boneless, you realise. She knew you needed this. She just made it look like her idea.

(The cat, for the record, would never be this obvious about it. The cat has simply decided to make eye contact until you figure it out yourself.)

12. Climbing plants. Ivy, jasmine, that one vine nobody planted that just appeared one day and now covers half the wall. They don’t grow upward so much as they reach, tendril by tendril, testing each surface, asking is this something I can hold onto? and moving on when it isn’t. Extremely relatable behaviour.

13. River bends. Rivers technically take the path of least resistance, which sounds lazy until you realise they’re just refusing to fight things bigger than them and finding the way around anyway. Every bend is just a river mid-tilt, saying fine, I’ll go around you. No fuss.

14. The way bread dough, when you poke it, slowly fills back in. Patient. Relentless. Holds the shape of your hand for a moment and then lets go.

15. Paths through grass that exist because someone kept going back to check something. Pure proof of return, worn into the earth by repetition.

16. Tree branches that grew around wires instead of starting a fight with them. Decades of negotiation that nobody witnessed. The wire just sits there now, given up, completely hugged.

17. The head tilt itself, when you pause mid-sentence and they lean in just slightly, like they’re gently holding the door open for the rest of the thought to walk through.

18. These people almost always know everyone else’s stories in alarming detail. The cousin’s bad job, the friend’s worse ex, the neighbour’s ongoing feud with a very specific pigeon.

19. Meanwhile their own stories take longer to arrive. Like the uncle at the stall who makes your bhel just how you like it without asking after the fourth visit, but only tells you his name after the fortieth.

Once you see it, you can’t stop.

It’s in the sunflower that burned its entire existence into the act of turning. The dog who tricked you into being comforted. The river that bent rather than broke.

Some things are just built to lean toward something.

So if you run into one today, ask them something first.

Watch what the neck does.

If you made it here, thank you for reading what was originally going to be a short observation about a dog and somehow became a nature documentary about devotion. This keeps happening and I have stopped being surprised.

The dog, for the record, got her scritches. And I, sheer joy. Unsurprisingly on both counts.

More of this, soon. Probably also longer than intended.

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I have a pen. I have a pogácsa. I have, allegedly, work to do. I am sitting two tables away with a clear sightline and I am going to write it down because that is apparently what I do, I am a person with a pen and an eye for things and also no wifi, but we will get there.

Two people. One table. Last one in the room. They arrive at it simultaneously, which fine, small shop, but still. It has the texture of a setup.

There is a pause.

The pause contains: surprise, the very fast social maths of who got there first (inconclusive), and the performance, and it is a performance, of being a person who is completely fine with however this resolves. Subject A does the open palm, please, after you. Gracious or tactical retreat, unclear. Subject B does the counter-gesture. And then they both do it again at exactly the same moment, and for a second they are two people conducting an invisible and completely inefficient orchestra of politeness over one small wooden table with a wobble.

They sit. Across from each other.

Neither says: so we are doing this.

This is called the Unremarked Arrangement and it is, in my experience, how most things begin.

Distance: 1.2 metres.

Each has claimed their hemisphere. Laptops open. Notebooks open. The universal body language of people who did not come here to meet anyone.

The shop does what it does. Dim in the way it’s always been dim, not moody, just unbothered by the concept of overhead lighting. On the walls, painted angels, each with one word underneath. Honesty. Generosity. Tolerance. Above the front window, slightly faded: Expect a Miracle Today. The glass case holds Dobos torte and poppyseed strudel and things that have been here longer than most of the students currently slumped over sticker-plastered laptops. Behind the counter Philip, mid-fifties, suspenders, the expression of a man who has watched ten thousand people discover there is no wifi and has made his peace with every single one of them, wipes something with a cloth. The book jackets on the wall watch everything and say nothing.

A woman in the corner has been reading the same page for twenty minutes. Nobody is getting anything done. The building knows this about itself. The building has always known this.

Subject A opens a laptop. Subject B opens a notebook.

Both reach for the wifi within forty seconds of each other.

Subject A: a small frown. A re-check. The tap of someone who thinks it’s a password problem and not an absence of password concept problem. Then stillness. Three seconds of a person realising the document they needed lives in a cloud this building doesn’t believe in.

Subject B: thirty-seven seconds later. Less quiet. A small exhale. Looks around the room like wifi might be near the window. Eyes find Philip. Philip has not looked up. Eyes find, briefly, barely, Subject A, who is already staring at an offline screen with the focused expression of someone completely reorganising their afternoon.

They don’t speak. Haven’t yet.

But something is between them now that wasn’t before. Shared meteorological conditions.

The table wobbles when Subject B leans on it. They both look down at it, then back up, and something almost happens and then doesn’t, and they both return to their screens.

Distance: 1.2 metres. Holding. No contact. No borrowed objects. Pen: with me.

Distance: 0.9 metres

Subject A gets up and goes to ask Philip about the wifi.

I have been waiting for this.

Philip answers without looking up. Three words, four maybe, I am across the room. Body language reads: there is not. There has not been. There is a philosophical position being held here and Philip is not going to be the one who abandons it.

Subject A comes back.

Subject B has watched this entire small expedition with the face of someone who already knew the ending. Says something when Subject A sits. Can’t hear from here. Something like worth a shot, the kind of thing you say when you want to say something but need it to be casual, to be nothing, to be just two people at a table.

Subject A makes a face. Small. Involuntary.

They are talking.

Laptop half-closed on Subject A’s side. The universal posture of someone who has stopped performing productivity and isn’t ready to say so. Subject B’s notebook open but pen down. The border wall still technically exists. But there’s light under it.

Subject B also needed the internet for the thing they came to do, it turns out. Subject A has a pogácsa on the table, untouched, it turns out.

Subject B’s eyes go to it. Subject A sees this. Small eyebrow negotiation, three seconds, ends with it being torn in half and the larger piece pushed across. No ceremony. No oh I couldn’t. Just the thing, moving across the table.

I put my pen down for a second.

0.9 metres. Maybe 0.85. I am improvising.

Distance: 0.6 metres

The wobble is gone.

I missed how it happened, there was walnut cake, I was briefly somewhere else, but at some point Subject B tore a strip from the notebook, folded it, wedged it under the short leg. Subject A tested the table with one hand. Nodded once. The nod of someone who noticed a thing and will not be saying so, because saying so would be saying something else, something adjacent, something that rhymes.

Laptop fully closed on Subject A’s side.

They are talking in the way where neither mentions the work because to mention it would be to suggest returning to it, which neither is suggesting. I have seen this before. I have, if I am honest, done this before. I am remaining objective.

Distance: 0.6 metres. Close enough that when Subject B reaches for the coffee cup the sleeve moves through air that an hour ago was still unclaimed.

New unit: one borrowed fact. Subject A has said something about themselves that wasn’t asked for. Just offered. Lightly. I watch Subject B receive it. Slight lean. Small oh. Like they’re tucking something into a pocket.

Subject B’s coat has migrated. First partially, then fully, onto Subject A’s chair. Nobody has mentioned the coat.

My pen is on the table between them.

I am watching the pen.

I cannot fully explain why I am watching the pen.

Distance: 0.3 metres

The units are getting away from us and I am going to be honest about this.

0.3 metres. Approximately. The table is very small. They are both leaning forward in a way that is about the conversation and I am respecting that framing.

Things that are units now whether I like it or not:

One inside joke. I don’t know what it is. I know it exists because of the laugh. Not the polite one from earlier. Not the worth a shot one. Shorter. The chuckle that comes out without you choosing to let it.

One almost-interruption, Subject A starts a sentence, Subject B finishes it wrong, Subject A corrects them, they are both right in different ways, this takes four minutes, neither seems to find this inefficient.

One coat, fully on Subject A’s chair. I am not elaborating on the coat.

Two more coffees arrived at some point. Free refills, that’s the policy, has been since the seventies. I didn’t this happen.

Subject B picks up the pen. My pen. Uncaps it. Writes something small in the notebook margin. Caps it. Keeps it.

I think about saying something.

I don’t.

I think I knew, actually. Before this. I think I knew when the pogácsa got torn.

Distance: 0.0 metres

I don’t know when I stopped writing.

Third coffee maybe. Or earlier. Possibly when Subject B said something and I looked up and forgot to look back down. By then the notebook was already closed or I closed it then, I’m not sure of the order, the order had stopped mattering.

You can’t observe a thing you’re inside of. I knew this going in and brought a pen anyway.

The pen is gone. It’s in the pocket of someone who fixed a wobbly table with a torn strip of notebook paper and ate half a pastry they didn’t order and laughed before the punchline and has a coat that’s on my chair and I didn’t write most of it down because I wasn’t taking notes anymore, I was just there, just sitting in it, in a dim bakery on Amsterdam Avenue on a Tuesday, no wifi, laptop closed, the angels on the walls watching with their one word each.

Subject A was not a great scientist.

Subject A had a very nice time.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop has been on Amsterdam Avenue since 1976. No wifi. Limited outlets. Incredible pastry and coffee. Go.

Expect a Miracle Today.

If you have read this far, you were probably hoping for more data. There isn’t any. The observer lost the pen, the notebook, and approximately all scientific credibility somewhere around the walnut cake. She is, however, available for future fieldwork. She will bring a pen. She always brings a pen.

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aur kya dekhne ko baaki hai
aap se dil laga ke dekh liya

I was reminded of this couplet a few days ago, and have always loved how uninhibitedly audacious it is. It’s really not melodramatic or even tragic, but so smug in its completeness it makes you (or maybe just me) yearn to experience that feeling.

In quite a literal translation,

      What is left to see?
      I attached my heart. I saw.

There’s no contingency in it. No Plan B. None of the many fish in the sea, let’s swipe across other options, emotional insurance policy energy. No keeping a little corner of yourself uncommitted so you can leave without too much of a fuss, and just a shrug.

It speaks to me as the clarity of someone who seems to have gone through it all, and come out not confused or lingering or half-sure, but finished? Fulfilled and so certain.

Terminal clarity.

There is a medical term for it. Of course there is.

Paradoxical lucidity. Doctors explain it. Families mythologise it.

The body flickers back on just before it powers down, like that one tubelight in every desi house that refuses to die gracefully. It has been dim for months. Threatening with a low, persistent hum that contributes to household anxiety. Everyone is teetering towards calling the electrician and blaming each other for not having done it earlier. “You said you’d check.” “No, you said.” Domestic politics in fluorescent light.

And then one day, it suddenly begins to work perfectly again. White. Bright. Steady. You forget your irritation. You forget the electrician. You almost trust it.

It flares triumphant for thirty seconds. Bright enough to make you squint. Bright enough to feel back to normal.

And then, surrenders.

A grandmother who hasn’t recognised her children in months suddenly asks for mango pickle. A specific spicy raw mango one. A father who hasn’t spoken in weeks says his daughter’s name properly, with the right intonation, the familiar softness, and she will replay that pronunciation in her head for the rest of her life.

The brain gathers itself one last time.

Doctors explain it with neurons and neurotransmitters. Families explain it with destiny and grace.

I will not pretend to understand the science or the divinity.

But the timing. The timing is what unsettles me.

Why must clarity arrive at the edge?

Why does lucidity wait until it is too late to change anything?

Why not six months earlier? Why not in that so-called messy middle, when conversations could have been had, forgiveness could have been offered, mango pickle could have been shared more than once?

Why must clarity prefer drama?

Slight segue. (It will make sense in approximately three paragraphs.)

My mum always reminded me about how if you hold something very close, you can’t see it very clearly. Quite literally, the vision blurs out. The edges disappear. All white noise, no shape.

So yes, perspective is imperative and helpful. Zoom out. Breathe. We have seen the motivational quotes.

But here’s the more uncomfortable bit: sometimes it isn’t distance that clouds you. It’s being fully in it. It’s participation. When you’re inside something, a year, a love, a decision, your eyesight is crowded.

And then I realise, mildly annoyed with myself, that we’ve already packaged this into a proverb.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” we say, as if it’s cute. As if it’s inevitable. As if we’re not mildly devastated every time we prove it true.

Fully marinating in a reality means that you tend to bargain. You are hopeful. You are tired. You are performing “fine.” You are telling your friends it’s “just a phase” with a laugh that is one octave too high. You rename discomfort as growth. You rebrand restlessness as ambition. You call silence maturity.

You edit reality in real time.

Then it ends.

And suddenly you’re a philosopher. Suddenly you have bullet points. Suddenly you have new-found vocabulary. Suddenly you can narrate the whole arc with devastating clarity.

Oh. That wasn’t ambition. That was fear.
Oh. That wasn’t compatibility. That was convenience.
Oh. That wasn’t busyness. That was anxious-avoidance.

Clarity loves closure. It’s almost rude how articulate we become once there’s nothing left to mess up. Shockingly brave when the future is no longer at stake.

I live to admire our own wisdom (or lack thereof) in retrospect.

Scarcity has a similar habit.

During the pandemic, travel became illegal-adjacent, forbidden-adjacent, complicated-adjacent. Airports, those fluorescent (yes, a nod to the tubelight) purgatories of overpriced, suspiciously moist five-day-old-coleslaw-filled-sandwiches and delayed boarding, become suddenly sacred.

But the turbulence wasn’t about flights. It was about choice. It was about feeling caged. Confined without choice. The loss wasn’t about Paris or Phuket. It was about the reassurance that you could leave. the ability to leave whenever we wanted. That the world was technically available to you. That doors opened.

The moment borders closed, everyone became romantic about movement. About road trips. About “we should totally do that Goa plan.” Friends who had lived ten minutes away for years were now planning hypothetical Iceland itineraries together.

I’m not trying to diminish the uncertainty and fear the pandemic caused, that was real, enormous, destabilising. But this travel-associated yearning was its own subplot.

“When this is over…” is how every one of those Zoom friend hangouts started and ended. (We said it like a mantra. Or a threat. Hard to tell.)

Scarcity rearranges devotion.

You don’t fall in love with airports. You fall in love with the possibility of departure.

And once that possibility disappears, you are willing to spend more, sacrifice more, inconvenience yourself much more, just to feel that circle of access close around you again, even for a tiny moment. Even if the flight is at 4:15 a.m. Even if the sandwich is still terrible.

It isn’t the destination that sharpens you. It’s discovering that the door you never bothered to lock might not open again.

There’s a smaller, slightly humiliating version of this.

Your phone at 3%. Or my phone, which is somehow always at 3%.

At 87%, you scroll like you are immortal. You open three tabs you will never return to. You reply to nothing. You watch half a reel and then abandon it mid-sentence. You are casual with time because you assume you have more of it.

At 3%, you dim the brightness like a Victorian conserving candlelight. You close apps you didn’t even know were open. You ration your swipes like they cost you something personal. Suddenly you are disciplined. Focused. Ethical.

It’s hard not to notice that we become our best selves under threat.

Which is slightly embarrassing.

I would love to believe I am naturally intentional. I am not.

I am intentional when the bar turns red. I realise that scarcity doesn’t install values. It exposes them.

And that exposure doesn’t only show up in battery percentages. It shows up in much less technological places.

Like suitcases.

You can tell what matters to someone by what they pack when departure feels real and urgent. What someone chooses to carry isn’t ever what their Instagram bio states.

The old sweater that photographs terribly but was gifted by a partner. The passport. The slightly embarrassing photograph that has survived three phones and two versions of you. The charger, obviously. Always the charger.

Nobody packs the decorative bowl. (Unless they are deeply chaotic. In which case, I respect it.)

I think about minimalism here. The reverent white shelves. The language of “decluttering.” The performance of detachment.

Sometimes it’s taste. Sometimes it’s aesthetic discipline.

And sometimes, if I’m being honest it feels like permanent suitcase logic. Own less. Anchor less. Make departure easier.

Minimalism can be aesthetic, but often also be autobiography I suppose.

And then nostalgia does something even stranger.

I lived in the tiniest box-room in New York City once. So many memories, some cinematic, some frankly claustrophobic, and the very practical recognition that two adults cannot pass each other in this room without negotiation. The water from the sink leaked over on to the three feet of floor space I was granted, there were extension cords in yoga poses, the radiator hissed at me with its opinions with my life choices, you get the idea. Eventually, you leave. Or rather, in my place the pandemic kicks you out (not by choice, would not recommend).

And suddenly, you remember the light coming in during the winter and how it felt on your napping face. The fidgety-ness of a plug point that rarely could handle the weight of your adapter, and the long distance things you were trying to hold on to.

Memory tends to be ruthless and so selective, all at once. Removes all the clunky admin, and just keeps the cuteness and the jasmine.

Clarity arrives delayed but with such kindness. Which is deeply inconvenient, because it proves you were capable of noticing all along (and cutting yourself some much needed slack). You just didn’t.

And I suppose that’s the through-line here, however dramatically I’m trying to frame it.

Clarity does not seem to be a rare mystical state. It seems to be an attention problem. One that sharpens itself only when something is scarce, threatened, closing, ending.

I become disciplined at 3%. I become sentimental after departure. I become articulate once the risk is gone.

It would be nice to believe I am wiser than this.

I am not.

And yet.

I began this whole thing with Faiz as if he had the answer.

      aur kya dekhne ko baaki hai
      aap se dil laga ke dekh liya

What is left to see? I attached my heart. I saw.

When I first read it years ago, I heard triumph. Completion. The kind of sureness that makes the rest of us look like we’ve kept a “just in case backup option” saved under a different name.

But now, after tubelights and suitcases and notices to depart and my deeply unimpressive 3% discipline, I hear something else.

Not certainty. Risk.

Because attaching your heart without a Plan B is not clarity after the fact. It is clarity in advance.

It is refusing the comfort of the parallel tab. It is resisting the tiny, ticking instinct to keep one exit slightly ajar (in case, who knows). It is choosing not to wait for scarcity to rearrange your devotion.

And that, if I am honest, is far more frightening than paradoxical lucidity; which I suppose arrives when there is nothing left to lose. This version demands you risk losing first.

Which may be why most of us (read: me) prefer the dramatic edge. The diagnosis. The closing door. The red battery bar. They force us into sharpness. They compress us into honesty.

Voluntary clarity requires no such theatrics. It asks you to notice the smell of tadka before it becomes memory. To stand in the verandah at dusk without documenting it. To listen to that one family story even though you’ve heard it seventeen times. To say the thing before it becomes a regret you narrate beautifully later. It asks you to attach your heart while the door is still open.

I would love to say I live this way.

I do not.

I am, apparently, a fan of last-minute revelations. Of poetic hindsight. Of being articulate only once the scene has shifted.

But every now and then, I catch the bar at 47%.

And I try.

And maybe that’s all this really is, not terminal clarity, not perfect immersion, just the small, slightly clumsy attempt to notice before the flicker.

      aur kya dekhne ko baaki hai.

Maybe the question isn’t rhetorical.

Maybe it’s an invitation?

In these last few months of trying to write more, I’ve realised I only produce anything half-coherent when I’m either absurdly happy or significantly gutted. If you’ve read this far through my not-entirely-lucid brain, thank you for staying.

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Inside, the colour situation didn’t quite improve, but the air had a palpable shift. A faint chemical tang hovering somewhere between beware and nostalgia. Turpentine. Old varnish. The kind of smell that tells you, rather warns you and strongly insists, do not touch.

There’s always a moment like that. A step you take into a place without noticing, and your body clocks it. New medium. Different rules. While the head still lags behind, trying to decipher the weather.

My voice lowered, oddly even in my own thoughts? I wasn’t talking to anyone. My shoes stopped landing flat and began to slide instead. Breath shortened, then recaliberated, like it had done this before and remembered how. A small, bodily compliance. An unspoken code-switch.

It reminded me of making the first pancake from a fresh batter. That uncertain sizzle when you don’t yet know the heat. Too hot, maybe? Too cold? You hover, watching the surface closely, trying to decode what kind of space you’re working with before committing.

The foyer was beige in that very specific bureaucratic way that pretends to be neutral while having strong opinions. Beige that matches everything. Beige designed to disappear responsibly. Every so often, a blue pillar interrupted the monotony, as if the building was reassuring itself it still had a personality. Nearby, a mural burst with colour, trying very hard to prove that vibrancy lived here too. A for effort.

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Museums do this thing where they pretend to be generous. Open. Interpretive. Feel what you like, they say. All the while arranging everything with alarming precision. Where the light is allowed to land. What gets a frame. What is placed just high enough to remind you of your height. Another thing you don’t clock immediately. You just start behaving differently. Weight shifts. Hands tuck themselves away. Some rooms lean towards you. Others keep their elbows out. Your body picks up the cues long before your brain files a complaint.

It took me a while to notice this pattern:

A sculpture asks you to move. A painting asks you to stay put.

I didn’t decide to circle the sculptures. I simply found myself doing it. One step, then another. Leaning without permission. My head tilting to follow a curve before I realised my neck had taken instruction from stone. One figure had its torso twisted just enough to make my ribs feel uneasy. Half emerging. Half stuck. Marble attempting gymnastics it had no business attempting. No amount of yoga was getting me there.

I stayed longer than necessary, the way you do when something has unknowingly unsettled your internal posture. My breathing slowed. My chest, traitorously, tried to echo the tension. As if it thought participation might help. Maybe that’s somatic empathy. Or maybe it’s just the mild superstition of living in a body that reacts before the mind has time to put up subtitles.

I’ve always learned this way. By trying first. By moving before understanding. By doing it slightly wrong once and letting that be instructional. My hands tend to know things before my head feels ready to claim them. There’s probably a term for it. Kinesthetic, maybe. Or just impatience catfishing as curiosity.

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The room had it’s own soundtrack. Not silence, but more like everyone trying not to be loud at the same time. Footsteps, similar to mine earlier, slowed down, as if the floor would take offence. Zips closing with unnecessary care. Someone cleared their throat, and immediately looked morbidly apologetic. All of these whispers layering themselves into a single hum of restraint. The museum rewards stillness, but every stillness here is faintly crowded by movement.

And then it happened. That blink.

Where the room disappears. One moment, people everywhere. Bags, coats, peripheral lives.

The next, just me and the object.

Like the Severance elevator, minus the corporate trauma. The rest of the room slipping into the edges. A tunnel made of entirely of attention. A brief trance. Complete unreal focus.

Then someone coughed. A shoe squeaked in the worst possible moment. The spell broke and was stored away politely, relegated to the halls of memory, where all temporary infinities seem to retire.

The painting rooms felt different. Flatter. As if the air had been pressed overnight and no one had bothered to fluff it back up in the morning. Brown walls. Gold frames. That particular kind of respect that smells faintly of dust and supervision.

I caught myself leaning in, searching the canvas for signs of life. A pulse. A twitch. Something that might meet me halfway. Acknowledge me back. Abstract work after sculpture does that. It makes you greedy for a body.

One painting was all water. Figures everywhere. Diving, swimming, leaving. It was hard to tell which was which. From a distance, it looked joyful. Blue and movement and freedom. Up close, it felt like labour. Maybe everything looks graceful until you step closer to notice the strain. Maybe that’s always been the trick.

When the light shifted, the surface shimmered. Just for a second. Moonshine and molly drifted up from somewhere in my memory. Rihanna knew this already long before museums did. That shine that distracts and reveals at the same time. Pleasure that refuses to apologise for existing. Glow as a form of survival.

Light does this. On skin. On marble. On oil paint. It convinces you to stay longer than you meant to.

Maybe empathy isn’t about understanding at all. Maybe it’s just the choice to keep looking, even when your body wants a break.

And then she was there.

Ophelia. The original.

Eyes closed. Flowers still trying their best. A body carefully arranged into something acceptable. Everyone calls her serene. I didn’t see peace. I saw exhaustion dressed up nicely.

My jaw tightened before I noticed it had. That old, familiar irritation. Being asked, once again, to admire a woman for staying still. For not taking up space. She floated under centuries of looking. Men calling it poetry. Gold frames holding the decision firmly in place.

Later, Taylor Swift would borrow her name. A different medium. The same suspension. Still beautiful. Still stuck.

Some women don’t escape. They just get upgraded lighting.

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There’s never really a queue here.

People just… arrive. Hover. Adjust.

It isn’t order, but it isn’t chaos either, just the choreography of people who know when to step forward and when to wait.

The man behind the tawa doesn’t write names or take orders. He doesn’t have to. His eyes flick up once and he knows who’s next.

Eggs crack. Onions hiss. The clang of the karchhi cuts through smoke. Parathas puff up and deflate like mini moons.

His movements are practiced, half muscle, half memory.

The air smells of vinegar, fried bread, and a sweetness you can’t spot but find familiar. Someone coughs out a “double egg”. Someone else wheezes with laughter through a mouthful. Green chutney runs down a wrist and disappears.

When my roll comes, it’s wrapped in soft, translucent newspaper. He passes it across the counter without a word, and I take it the way you take prasad - hot, imperfect, shared.

I’ve always loved how this place runs on trust, not instruction. No lists. No lines. Just the rhythm of remembering.

Everyone eats, everyone leaves, and somehow the circle closes behind them.

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I grew up inside that shape, kitchens that taught pluralism long before textbooks tried.

The pressure cooker interrupted everyone equally; the fan spun on its own stubborn rhythm.

Four people spoke at once, and somehow everyone understood.

“We will manage” wasn’t optimism. It was habit.

The opposite of loneliness wasn’t company, it was sound.

The scrape of steel on steel, the TV leaking news into the dal, the whistle of something left too long on the hob.

Those sounds stitched societies together tighter than any conversation ever could.

Life didn’t happen to you in those rooms. It just… happened around you. Loudly. And that was enough.

Last winter, at a wedding in Kerala, I watched guests toss rice at the newlyweds, tiny white arcs cutting through the sunlight. It was chaotic and tender all at once, grains clung to saris, disappeared into jasmine, glittered briefly on someone’s lashes. For a second, the whole courtyard shimmered, gold, white, human.

A month later in Portugal, it happened again, different rice, same gesture. The bride ducked too late and the grains caught in her veil.

Then in Greece, I saw a video, rose petals and rice tossed together, a shower that looked almost like snow.

Later, curiosity led me down a small rabbit hole. Japan, Ghana, Mexico, everywhere, some version of it: a ritual of flinging grain into the future. It appears in languages I don’t speak, in countries I haven’t seen.

Turns out even blessings move in arcs, bright little parabolas that briefly connect strangers. Circles everywhere, pretending to be confetti.

Maybe we’ve been speaking this language forever, the handful, the toss, the soft landing of hope.

Maybe the circle was our first common language.

And somewhere along the way, we forgot its grammar.

Now, everything moves differently.

Progress is a line. Success, a sharper one.

Empathy’s a curve we keep trying to flatten, like a wrinkle that won’t smooth out, no matter how much heat we press into it.

My inbox calls me “we” in emails that mean “you.”

Kindness comes preformatted, timestamped, optimised for engagement.

We have built homes that mistake quiet for peace, and offices that confuse control with care.

When I was younger, care was noisy, the sort that yelled from the kitchen and still saved the burnt bottom for you first, a small bowl of choru-kura tenderness, made from leftovers and insistence.

Stillness back then meant something had gone wrong, the gas had run out, or someone was unwell. The cure was always collective: add one more clove of garlic, call out from the balcony, turn the fan higher. Keep the air alive.

Now the world calls that chaos, and calls order care.

It smooths your edges till even your smile looks employable.

It calls compliance compassion.

I have realised that we live under a ventriloquism of care of sorts, voices that say we without ever meaning to be changed by you.

When words start sounding too polished, too polite, I look at what still refuses choreography.

Wind that ignores zoning laws.

Fungi that trade sugar beneath the soil without asking who owns which tree.

Birds that share songs no one can patent.

I used to think biodiversity was an environmental idea.

Nope, it’s a social one.

The soil I grew on knew this instinctively, neighbours who argued about omens but still shared coriander, families who disagreed about gods but never about sweets.

Texture was the point. You didn’t have to agree to belong; you just had to stay.

The same grammar lived indoors too, in dining rooms and courtyards. The women all around never saying collective care. They just did it.

When tempers rose, they fed the loudest first, not out of goodness, just to calm the room.

Anger is hunger that’s forgotten it’s hungry.

They moved through kitchens like a small orchestra: stirring, tasting, handing rotis across without looking. Tirelessly turning clatter into conversations.

It looked like dinner; it was conflict management.

Living together isn’t a manifesto; it’s breath, a commons of air we keep forgetting to share. Every day we ration it: noise-cancelling headphones, “do not disturb,” the cult of “keep calm”. We call it peace when it’s just loneliness with better branding.

Then someone finally says the thing everyone was swallowing, and the whole room exhales at once. That sound, that’s the revolution.

A friend once told me he brings snacks to difficult conversations and big presentations at work.

“Low blood sugar ends more conversations than disagreement ever did.”

Salt slows the spiral. Sugar steadies hands. Chewing buys a pause long enough for a sentence to change shape.

That’s biodiversity too: letting things stay unfinished, awkward, slightly off, until the rawness breaks open into recognition.

Maybe all of it, care, argument, dinner, is rehearsal for the same dance: the one that keeps bringing us back to each other.

Because everything truly alive still moves in circles: seasons, recipes, forgiveness.

The world loves a line because it can be measured. But a circle holds more than it promises, not by expanding, but by bending.

Harmony, I’ve realised, isn’t symmetry. It’s generosity with geometry.It’s learning to say we and mean it. It’s letting the argument stay at the table long enough to turn into a meal.

And somehow, I always end up back at the kathi roll stall. The cook folds dough in his palms like he’s remembering a prayer. He doesn’t measure, he feels. Someone shouts an order; no one writes it down.

The roti begins as a circle, soft, whole, forgiving, and then, because that’s how food travels through the world, it’s rolled tight, wrapped in paper, handed across.

Progress, apparently, has always been this: something once round, folded for convenience.

I take the roll, still warm, grease blooming through paper. It leaves a crescent on my palm.

Around me, no one queues. Someone passes a plate forward for someone else.

No one needs to say we. It’s already understood.

Still hot.

Still round.

Still ours.

By the time I’m done, the stall’s half-shut and I’m still standing there like I’ve got deep thoughts about onions.

The cook nods the polite nod of someone ready to go home.

I nod back, like we’re in on something profound.

Maybe we are.

Or maybe I just really like kathi rolls.

Either way, I’ll be back next week pretending like it’s philosophy.

This essay was first published in Hammock Magazine, a story told by a water pump that’s seen generations come and go, schemes arrive and fade, and families change without really leaving.

For anyone who’s ever lived in a place the map couldn’t quite find.

Read it here.

Everyone says they miss community.
But they also love leaving messages on seen.
They love brunches that end with “we should do this more often.”
They love plans that live and die quietly in group chats.

I keep showing up,
to birthdays, to dinners, to the maybe-plans
that sound like hope spoken in subscripts.
People say I take these things too seriously.
Maybe. But I don’t know how to do it halfway.
If I care, I bring snacks, playlists,
and the unrequested enthusiasm of someone
who still believes friendship is a verb.

Someone once told me I get too bummed when plans fall through.
As if caring were bad manners.
But that’s the thing,
it’s me showing up to light the fire, not just bask in it.
It’s me saying, I’m here. Truly.

I try to be a villager.
I carry napkins, refill glasses,
remember who likes the window seat.
It’s how I say I care, in fine fidelities,
the kind that often looks like logistics from afar.

The best villages overlap a little.
Your festivals on my calendar,
my leftovers in your fridge,
the comfort of knowing our lives brushed,
even briefly, like sleeves in a crowd.

And still, sometimes, they don’t.
Sometimes someone you hold as home
never learned your address.
You understand it, always,
but it leaves a hollow-shaped sting in the ribs,
whispering almost.

The rest is practice:
not letting absence turn to distance,
not letting distance rename itself peace.
The decision to stay soft in a world
that rewards the first to leave.

Maybe this, too, is being a villager,
the waiting, the tending,
the small hopeful wave from just outside the firelight.

Anyway. Here I am,
city girl with three calendars
trying to build a village out of WhatsApp groups and cold brew.
Still showing up.
Still bringing snacks.
Still hoping someone brings plates.

Things I’ve saved this week:

• a receipt from a restaurant I didn’t even like (but apparently I’m archiving my disappointments now)

• a photo of light through a spoon (looked meaningful, wasn’t)

• someone’s typo that said “I’m fine-ish,” which honestly felt like the truest thing ever written and belongs in scripture

There’s a dent on my phone from when I dropped it on purpose.
Power move. Outcome: bruised toe, humbled ego.

A voice note titled “ok so quickly” that’s fourteen minutes long and contains a rant about adulthood, a yawn, and the sound of onions frying.
I will, of course, send it anyway.
I am nothing if not generous with chaos.

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Someone once said I keep memories like they owe me rent.
That’s inaccurate.
They’re squatters. They’ve unionised. I’ve lost legal control of the property.

My brain, for instance, hoards birthdays.
Every single one.
I can recite the entire 8th-grade roll call like a Gregorian chant.
I forget where my pencil box is but remember that Rohit Sharma, was born on 6th November 1992. He left school in 8th-grade, never spoken since. What is my brain.
Nani ka nuskha was that badaams improve memory. Clearly I have over-dosed.

Other things I’ve been foraging:

• Postcards from cities I’ve never been to (some gathered, some emotionally inherited)

• Wrappers that looked shiny enough to mean something in the moment.

• Mini essays I’ve written over the years but never shared, too long for texts, too honest for drafts. And now, apparently, perfect for this Substack. Growth? Regression? Hard to tell.

• Moments I should’ve left quietly, but instead stood there like a penguin from Madagascar, “smile and wave, boys, smile and wave.”

• People I’ve been kind to who mistook it for flirting.

• Crunchy autumn leaves that exist to make me feel like I’m in a slow-motion montage no one asked for.

Maybe collecting is how I practice noticing.
Or maybe it’s how I keep delaying letting go.
Hard to say. I’m bad with verbs.

I once tried deleting old notes from my phone.
The app crashed.
Even my technology refuses closure.

There’s a single earring on the park bench by my house.
It’s been there for weeks.
I’ve started saying good morning to it.
I’m 85% sure it winks back.

Sometimes I think I’m a sentimental crow dressed as a functional adult.
Other times I think I’m doing fine because I label my spice jars.
Neither feels entirely true.

I’ve been ghosted more times than I’ve updated my resume, which says a lot about both my heart and my LinkedIn.
I still lead with kindness. Not because it works, but because I don’t know the settings to turn it off.
I know it’s foolish, but that is me.

I once read magpies bring gifts to people they like, bottle caps, keys, bits of foil.
They think, this looks shiny, you might need it.

So here’s mine:
A slightly dented essay, full of receipts and birthdays and badaams.
If you find something glinting inside it, it’s definitely not wisdom.
Just a relic from my cluttered nest.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve gathered this week.
You can look.
Just, please don’t tidy.

It sits at the city’s edge, beyond the photocopy vines, the paan pollen, the call of the bucket-seller. The air outside hums with life; inside, another ecosystem waits. The first breath of air-conditioning escapes, curling through the heat like a tame fog.

Somewhere a stray wrapper lifts off the street, fluttering toward the doors like an omen.

Step closer.

The smell hits first: cinnamon, warm cardboard, glue, and that faint metallic tang of newly unboxed things. It’s not the scent of domestic bloom. It’s something wilder, like sawdust after rain, or bread that’s risen too far. Ambitious, fragrant, doomed.

The automatic doors sigh open like gills, breathing out a puff of processed air. Inside, the light hums in a strange, artificial noon. No sun, no shadows, just the artificial calm of a place that never sleeps.

(Note: observer’s pupils dilate. Adaptation to fluorescent daylight begins.)

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The first wanderers trickle in, a family arguing about shoe sizes, a couple tethered loosely by fingers like they’re touring a habitat, one man clutching a pencil and a map like tools of survival. The wheels of their carts squeak in tentative unison. Someone already looks lost. Statistically, one always does before Sofas.

And just like that, the migration begins, slow, circular, low-level frantic. Each foraging for a lamp, a shelf, a sense of belonging gone feral.

Listen. The biome stirs.

A lone trolley limps across the laminate plain, one wheel crying out in ritual complaint. Somewhere in Sofas, a human sneezes, a territorial warning, perhaps. From the distant Decoration Marshes comes the high-pitched call of a juvenile testing its lungs. In Smart Homes, a microwave door shuts with the petite punctuation of a heartbeat.

Above it all, the fluorescent canopy thrums, a chorus of electric cicadas rehearsing their endless noon. The air vibrates faintly, warm with recycled oxygen and air conditioned faith.

Observe now. The herd moves as one, obedient to the yellow arrows, painted pheromone trails of trust. They do not question. They do not stray. Once, it is said, a solitary female turned left toward the Lighting Shrubs, drawn by the shimmer of filament. She has not been seen since. Some say she adapted. Others, that she became one with the lamps.

The Lighting Shrubs. A forest of suspended suns, each bulb glowing like a bioluminescent creature performing courtship. A male claps twice at a lamp, tentative, reverent. It blinks once, unimpressed. Another extends his hand beneath a pendant light, reading his palm lines in the manufactured glow as though the lamp itself might tell his fortune.

Somewhere above, a small wire hums, the biome’s heartbeat continuing.

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Then come the Home Textiles & Rugs Dunes. Mounds of polyester and pull, crackling with static. Juveniles tumble, burrowing, testing softness with wild abandon. The elders hover above, pinching fabrics between thumb and forefinger, murmuring incantations: thread count, density, firmness. They touch each swatch the way archaeologists brush at fossils.

It is not really about textiles, of course, but about command. The air smells faintly of fabric softener and something else harder to name: safety, maybe, or submission.

The air shifts again, warmer now, thick with the musk of staged belonging.

We have entered the Show-Apartment Savannahs.

Tiny, perfectly regulated ecosystems, each enclosure calibrated to mimic human nesting rituals. Bread forever sliced, towels forever folded, showers forever dry. The illusion of living, preserved in climate-controlled air.

(Note: specimens display mild euphoria upon discovering hidden storage.)

Pairs move through these habitats in slow, ritual choreography.

They murmur the ancient question, “Could we live here?” as though testing the air for viability.

From the vents above, ABBA drifts faintly: The Winner Takes It All. A pair looks up, briefly concerned the song knows something they don’t.

They touch drawers that glide like well-trained pets, mirrors that forgive, cushions that never sag. One laughs too loudly. Another checks a price tag as if decoding a prophecy. Younglings dart through connecting hallways that lead nowhere, shrieking with delight. Every enclosure ends where it began, a perfect loop of domestic possibility.

Further in, the biome cools. The chatter thins to a hum. We have arrived at the Home-Office Wetlands, once a shallow pond, now an ocean.

Chrome-legged species bloom here: swivel chairs, standing desks, noise-cancelling headsets. Nomadic individuals drift from perch to perch, testing stability. They all seem to display a faint coffee scent and the glint of chronic eye strain.

“Maybe this one will fix my back,” one whispers, reverently pressing a lumbar curve. The floor gives a polite creak in response.

Through the ductwork above, Freddie Mercury sighs Under Pressure, his voice condensing softly against the ceiling tiles.

Beyond the Wetlands rise the Wardrobe Cliffs. A sheer wall of mirrors, glinting with infinite potential.

Some travellers linger too long, hypnotised by replication, their reflections multiplying until the self becomes a crowd. The air here smells faintly of cedar, wood polish, and hesitation.

Then, the terrain opens, humidity returning like breath. The Feeding Clearing. The biome’s heart and stomach both. Temperature rises; patience drops.

Metal trays glide in ritual procession. Forks scrape. Steam fogs the glass. The scent of meatballs mingles with the sharp tang of survival. Small ones dart between tables like startled sparrows; elders stake territory with bags, trays, elbows.

A spill of lingonberry seeps across the counter, red, dramatic, ignored. Someone mutters, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

From a speaker above, Taylor Swift murmurs agreement, her voice tinny, benevolent. The herd keeps eating, pretending not to hear her warning.

Migration resumes through the Storage Plains. Cardboard fauna stretch endlessly, flat, numbered, waiting to be chosen. Pairs move in practiced synchrony, pushing their carts like pack animals.

Soft incantations rise: Did we measure? Did we check the space? One nods. The other lies. Conflict blooms, wilts, and re-roots somewhere near the trolleys.

And finally, after hours of orbiting, the Checkout Valley. Silence descends. The ritual begins. The barcode scanner, apex predator of the biome, feeds in steady beeps. Each tone a soft benediction: you have survived. You have bought. You may now assemble.

Night falls over the blue-and-yellow biome. The fluorescent insects hum their lullaby. Yellow arrows gleam faintly on the floor, still glowing, waiting for tomorrow’s herd to follow them home.

Outside, dusk. Inside, the Assembly Ceremony begins.

Two adults crouch among planks and Allen keys, knees creaking, spirits thinning. They move cautiously, like small mammals assembling shelter before nightfall. The instruction manual lies open on the floor, a sacred text rendered in pictograms. No words, only gestures.

One rotates a plank the wrong way up. The other insists gravity is at fault. Between Step 7 and Step 8, syntax dissolves into muttering. A small hex key skitters across the floor, spinning in its final moments like a dying insect.

Silence follows. Then, truce, or perhaps evolutionary fatigue. Slowly, something takes form: a skeleton, imperfect but defiantly balanced. Leaning slightly east, as if bowing to the gods of compromise.

Someone lights a tealight they don’t remember buying. The air fills with the faint scent of wax and moderate celebration. They step back, heads tilted, gazing at the finished artefact, part furniture, part proof of domestic stamina.

For a moment, no one speaks. The nesting bipeds known as “couple assembling flat-pack” exhales in unison. The biome has done its work.

Not sure what this was. A nature documentary? A cry for help? A weird writing experiment that got out of hand. Seemed rude not to share.

Anyway, if you see me in the wild, please return me to Aisle 6. Gratitude and sheepish curtsies to Sir David Attenborough and IKEA for letting me study my own species.

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Once, someone I hadn’t known very long asked, a little hesitant,

“Can I start sending you voice notes? I hope it’s not too weird.”

(The answer: never weird. Please proceed.)

On their first note, there was kettle hiss, traffic, a smile hiding in the story, maybe a child, a pause long enough for me to hear them breathe.

I listened twice because I’m a glutton for tone.

They said they didn’t like typing because they could never get the tone right. “You’ll understand me better this way.” I liked that. I liked the thought of someone trying to sound right for me. It felt oddly romantic, not roses and CD-burning era romantic, but “let me get my intonation right before I hit send” romantic.

The kind of intimacy autocorrect can’t ruin.

And it made sense. There’s something about hearing a person’s tumble out in real time. No curated punctuation, no tidy edits, voice notes still have crumbs. They didn’t know it then, but I’m built for that kind of talking. A hopeless voice-note romantic, possibly the reigning queen.

My messages are small epics: fifteen-minute monologues titled “ok, so quickly” recorded while frying eggs, walking the dog, whispering like it’s a spy mission in a public loo. I can’t stop myself; I love narrating. I love knowing someone might listen to the mess of my day the way I listen to others. That’s probably why I write too; these are basically voice notes that tripped on a cable, knocked over their tea, slid off the counter, and unknowingly fell face-first into an essay.

Super embarrassed, but still yapping.

And yet so much of what passes for closeness now depends on signal strength. I’ve become fluent in this new dialect of affection:

🩵 for “thinking of you,”

🔥 for “love the fit,”

🫣 for “are we flirting?”

I know what everyone’s eating. I know who’s back with their ex. I know whose plant died. I know who’s in Bali again. (Why is someone always in Bali?) I can tell someone’s a matcha person or an iced-latte person, but not what they do for work. We orbit each other like cheap satellites: visible, constant, never touching.

Even the security uncle at my gate is in on it. He’s learning English from an app that rewards him with stars for every phrase. “How are you today?” he asks, eyes bright, before proudly tapping the green tick on his screen. “Good,” he beams. “I am fine too.”

Sometimes I think he’s got this whole connection thing figured out better than the rest of us, at least his app gives him stars for showing up.

When I was a kid, there was this playground game called Connection. Everyone stood in a circle, holding hands. One person squeezed, and the squeeze had to travel all the way around. You couldn’t break the chain. You had to feel it. I think about that sometimes when I’m online at 2 a.m., talking to no one and everyone at once, all of us waiting for a squeeze that never quite makes it back.

Most nights, my phone is the squeeze. Also the circle. Also the playground. It hums on my chest like a weighted blanket. Comforting, heavy, a bit too warm. It holds me, sort of. When I finally put it down, the weight disappears, and for a split second it’s bliss. Then it’s panic. Like, wait, where did everyone go? Why does my sternum feel drafty? Why am I suddenly aware of the ceiling fan?

It’s that strange kind of comfort that keeps you company and keeps you small at the same time. Like a fog that hugs back. Or like a relationship you secretly know is bad for you but that you still check in on, just to see if it’s typing.

Weird segue, but stay with me.

There’s this practice in farming called the Three Sisters. Corn, beans, and squash, they just… work. Corn stands tall, beans climb it, squash chills at the bottom keeping things cool. Mutual care, but make it photosynthetic.

Meanwhile, I can’t keep a group chat alive without someone rage-leaving.

Plants: 1. Humans: 0.

If Instagram were a farm, we’d all be beans climbing each other’s stalks, dropping heart emojis like compost. Cute, exhausting, slightly damp.

Anyway, my new dating motto is “be the bean.”

Cling when needed, feed the soil, retreat when overwatered.

The café I’ve gone to almost every day this past month never remembers my name, but its Wi-Fi does. Love that for us. A loyal situationship. My phone logs in before I do. Maybe this is digital muscle memory. Maybe it’s codependency. Hard to tell before coffee.

I love how eye contact now has become its own extreme sport. We’re too used to switching tabs. You can’t “command + T” a person mid-sentence, though god knows I’ve tried. Offline, there’s no escape hatch, no notifications to rescue you from your own sincerity.

And my favourite three little dots, the modern equivalent of heavy breathing. You watch them appear, disappear, appear again. Every heartbreak I’ve had could be summarised by someone stopping mid-dot. At least plants wilt politely.

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Do you remember radio static? That soft hiss between songs that made you feel like the universe was tuning itself. I used to stay up late trying to study math but really just waiting to hear someone dedicate Pehla Nasha to someone named Reema. I still don’t know if Reema ever knew. I hope she did. Static was proof that connection was meant to have fuzz.

And then came the sourdough era. Everyone had a jar of beige goo with a name. “This is Groot, he’s bubbly today.” People traded starters like love letters. We flirted through fermentation.

Which, honestly, is the best metaphor for modern romance: needs warmth, collapses if overhandled, smells sometimes.

At this point I think the radio, the plants, and the dough have it figured out. They just exist. We add filters, captions, and five emojis trying to sound casual. They rise; we overthink.

Last night, I tried meditating (a generous word for lying flat like a dosa of guilt). Halfway through, my phone pinged. Just one name on the screen. Someone I hadn’t spoken to in months. My heart hicupped; jaw unclenched, reclenched. It’s wild how one sound can feel both like a hand reaching out and a slap awake. That’s the duality of it, isn’t it? Perfect summary of the last decade.

Connection today is absurd. Matching online shopping carts. Midnight “you up?”s sent from different time zones. The closest thing to touch is a joint Spotify queue or a shared Google Doc named something like “lol random.”

Peak romance is someone adding a song and pretending it’s not a message. (It always is.)

Really, connection seems to be all just static pretending to be a song. The game’s still going, somewhere in the background: hands linked, one squeeze lost in transit.

Anyway. This was meant to be an essay. Feels more like one of my voice notes now. Messy, way tooo long, full of the sound of the tap running while my brain makes its usual spirals. Bad signal.

I wish we were all actually sitting in a circle playing Connection, waiting for the squeeze to come back round.

Squeeze received :)

Thank you for reading. Signal strong, heart full.

Not the rotis, not the bites.

She sat cross-legged on the divan, just off the dining room where the adults ate. The kids sat here. Kids both twenty years older and much younger than me, all lumped into the same orbit. One large plate with rotis and channa, all mashed together in the most flavourful perfect bite. A circle of us kids orbiting like restless planets.

She pressed the roti-channa into little balls, dipped them in the gravy, and dropped them into our waiting mouths. None of us ever got the same portion, but no one kept track. She just knew. Wordlessly, somehow, she knew when to stop.

It was the most detached and the most open way to be loved: to be fed without tally.

Food was and has never been just food.
It was people.

My masi’s rajma, another’s gajar matar, unfailingly made if I visited in the winters. An uncle’s Rogan Josh still spoken of years later, cooked with experimentation and so much devotion. Journeys that built themselves around the promise of dishes waiting at the other end of the country. Family love announced in recipes, carried in dabbas, tucked into your plate before you asked.

Around it all, sound.

The scrape of spoons against steel. Cousins yelling over one another. A hand reaching for the last piece of marrow of the yakhni, only to be smacked away. Eating wasn’t only food. It was a headcount. A way of saying: you are here, you are seen.

I grew up with other inheritances too. Tappes, Punjabi folk songs at weddings, sung loudly enough to drown out the bride’s tears. Some were mischievous, teasing the groom, or needling the new in-laws. Others were heartbreak in slow motion. Madhaniyan was one of them. Sung from the bride’s perspective, she calls out to each of her loved ones, verse by verse.

At its core: do I belong where I was raised, or where I am destined?

Even as a child, I felt its ache. Though mostly I was distracted by the scene around it, aunties teasing each other mid-song, someone starting on the wrong beat, the spoon hitting the dholak slightly off tune. That was the beauty of those songs: they weren’t meant to be polished. They were raw, communal, as if the whole room was conspiring to carry something larger than itself. Women, mostly, holding a bride steady as she crossed into a life she didn’t yet know.

Now meals and memories arrive differently. A bowl eaten alone in front of a glowing screen. Dinner paused for a photo, the plate more carefully lit than the conversation. Mangoes in November, flown in and served in antiseptic cubes. The fruit is sweet, yes. But memory doesn’t do it’s thing.

A mango in November is just fruit.

A mango in June is the whole season: the clouds building, the air heavy with stickiness, summer holidays, juice running down your arm while someone yells not to stain your clothes. The pimples that suddenly appeared, blamed on “too many mangoes.” Mangoes stored in ice buckets. Mangoes eaten one after the other, until summer itself tasted like them.

And yet food resists forgetting. The faintest whiff of ghee still pulls me back into a childhood kitchen. The smell of momo places me at a cousin’s table in Secunderabad, recovering from Chicken Pox, lathered in Lacto Calamine, sulking, but still greedy for more.

Recipes are archives disguised as instructions, the body instinctively remembering the people who once fed it.

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The other night, over dinner, someone revealed their life’s obsession: curating the perfect first bite. Sauce, spice, crunch, softness, each stacked carefully like they were auditioning for a talent show on the fork. Then, before I could protest, they leaned over and fed it to me. Apparently, if the first bite sings, the rest of the meal can wander, crash, even flop, and it won’t matter. The opener carries it.

It was strangely convincing. They do this for a living - cook, feed, coax joy out of the most unfriendly vegetables, so maybe they are right. But I keep circling the thought.

Who needs forever when a single forkful can carry you through a week?

Just little arrangements that land. Just scraps, really. A bite passed across the table. Someone laughing so hard they choke on water. A recipe card written like the ink was running out, oil smudge shaped like a small continent. Things that sound flimsy, but end up carrying you through, the way fridge magnets hold up an entire childhood on scraps of paper.

And then I wonder what happens when even that first bite gets outsourced. Already there are menus written by data, apps predicting what you might crave on a Wednesday at 6:23 a.m. Imagine an algorithm plating your “perfect” mouthful, down to the exact ratio of chilli to salt. The bite would be flawless. Sterile. Like kissing through glass.

When I first lived away from home, I started a box. Not some elegant keepsake, just a plain wooden dabba that looked like it should hold socks. Into it I slipped recipes from anyone whose food I loved. My mother’s dahi waale aloo. An ex lover’s parippu manga curry, written on office stationery with a coffee ring in the corner. A friend’s chilli chutney that she perfected by experimenting across half of Delhi’s momo stalls, annotated with arrows and “add more salt if you’re feeling it, ok?”

Over time, the box got heavy. It spilled over with scraps from people I still speak to and people I probably won’t ever see again. I don’t cook most of them. I don’t even try. But the dabba sits there like a strange time capsule, its contents proof that belonging can be written down in smudged ink, folded into paper like debts, IOUs, or secrets you meant to return but never did. The algorithm’s bite might be perfect, but it’s the messy, garlic-smudged ones that actually stay with you.

Because that is what food teaches you, in the end. That we are always receiving. A plate nudged your way. A bite someone insists you try. A song hummed off-key into the air long after the wedding season has packed up its shamiyanas.

To belong is not only to hold, but to be fed, fed beyond counting, fed past refusal, until it seeps into you like ghee into warm phulkas, filling even the hairline cracks.

I think again of Madhaniyan. The bride’s question stretching across time: where do I belong? Raised here, destined there. Today the question feels slipperier. Do we belong in the kitchens we inherit, the cultures we pass through, or the glowing rectangles that now serve up recipes, reels, even reminders to drink water like some stern neighbour?

I’ve tried, more than once, to mash roti and channa the way my Nani did, soft, savoury, pressed into little balls and dropped into open mouths. But it never tastes the same. I don’t even enjoy it anymore. It’s as if the flavour went with her.

I don’t know how many weddings I’ll still end up in, how many songs I’ll mumble through, how many recipes I’ll actually bother to pass on. I don’t know which flavours will manage to stick through the scramble, or who will ever dig through my dabba of scraps. I guess I’ll never know. Maybe no one will. And maybe that’s the recipe’s joke on me.

Like a song that stops mid-verse. No one sure why. A couple of aunties glance at each other, then look down. Someone fiddles with their bangles, someone else pours water into a steel glass too loudly. The dholak just sits there, useless. For a second it feels like the whole room forgot its lines. And yet the tune won’t leave, still hovering in my head long after, like it’s waiting for someone to pick up the spoon again.

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So maybe this piece was about food. Or memory. Or just the ways I (shamelessly) keep sneaking bites off plates of people I love.

Or maybe it was just me setting the table, hoping someone would sit down. If you’ve made it here, I hope you feel well fed.

A tiny glossary for the italicised words.

Because, words, like spices, need their own masala dabba. This is mine.

Nani: maternal grandmother, also unofficial boss of the house. Knows exactly how much you’ve eaten without looking.
Divan: low wooden couch/bed, the true VIP lounge for kids’ dinners and illicit naps.
Roti: flatbread, round-ish on good days, abstract art on others, especially when made by me.
Channa: chickpeas, but always more exciting when squished into masala.
Rajma: kidney beans that taste like every single Sunday afternoon. Needs rice, or cold bread, otherwise what’s the point.
Gajar Matar: carrots and peas, winter on a plate.
Rogan Josh: Kashmiri mutton in red chilli gravy. The best of feasts.
Dabbas: tiffin boxes. Mysteriously multiply in every desi kitchen. Reason, unknown.
Yakhni: broth that pretends to be light, but is secretly so indulgent.
Tappe: Punjabi wedding folk songs: part roast, part lament, part inside joke.
Dholak: hand drum. The moment it comes out, you know things are about to get real.
Momo: dumplings, cousins of dim sum, but spicier, messier, and more fun.
Lacto Calamine: pink lotion that tried to fix every 90s skin crisis. (Did it work? Debatable.)
Dahi waale aloo: potatoes in yoghurt gravy. Tangy hug in a bowl.
Parippu Manga Curry: Dal found in the kitchens of Kerala with raw mango (and sometimes I have prawns sneaking in). Sour, spicy, unforgettable.
Shamiyanas: wedding tents, entire universes stitched out of canvas and fairy lights. Always, overnight.
Phulkas: puffed rotis, have a habit of quickly disappearing.

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She was sharp with her grammar and ruthless about us enunciating our words, but she also left me with a gift: the wonder of alliteration. She showed it to us one day like a trick, words tumbling together, and I latched onto it hard. I wrote entire pages of teenage musings stuffed with strings of words that sounded alike.

For months I crammed alliterations into everything. Secret diaries full of “sad, sullen Sundays,” short essays that read more like tongue twisters than critical thinking. I think it was partly a game, but also an anchor.

When the braces cut the insides of my cheeks, when crushes never noticed me, when acne clung stubbornly to my face, and even later, when the braces came off but left behind the small gap between my teeth that still gives me a slight lisp - everything felt raw and awkward. Alliteration was my small way of ordering the world, of finding delight in patterns when little else made sense.

Even now, I catch myself leaning on the rhythm of words. Of egrets and elephants. It’s nothing, really, and yet it’s enough to make me stop, smile, and feel briefly anchored, a reminder that patterns can still hold me when little else does.

One such glimmer arrived on the Heath. A tiny brown dog bounded up out of nowhere, tail wildly wagging, tongue lolling. Before I could react, he leaned his weight into me, then flopped onto his back, waiting. I laughed and scratched his belly as he settled into my lap, fur matted, paws brown from all the running around, the grass pressing damp against my knees. For a few minutes, it was as though we had always known each other.

And then he was gone. No collar, no name, no human companion, no sign of where he had come from or where he went, bounding off before I could even realise.

Later I thought about how that moment held me, a hug from a stranger with four legs, muddy mittens, and no intention of sticking around. He left as quickly as he arrived, probably off to chase a squirrel or sniff out his next adventure. But the weight of him stayed with me. Not friendship, not family, not permanence. Just a silly, brief anchoring, like he’d dropped a twig into my lap for the nest I’m still trying to build.

When you’re a child, belonging works differently, and feels easier. The nest has often been built for you: parents, cousins, aunties, neighbours, teachers. A loose weave of hands that holds you without asking. You just sit in it.

But as you grow older, the seams start to come apart. Some hands slip, bits fall off, and you realise the nest has to be made again, and this time you’re the one weaving. And it takes longer. Finding people who will hold you is slower, harder. You try to stitch yourself into routines, friendships, work. The world moves fast, people keep their calendars full, and sometimes you wonder if there’s space left at all. Sometimes the fabric just doesn’t hold.

I found one such stitch by a pond.

On one side, people poked at what looked like small pebbles with sticks, some sort of genteel sport that seemed to belong in a Jane Austen novel. On the other, a cricket championship was in full swing, loudspeakers rattling, supporters waving flags, commentary booming across the field.

And in the middle, the pond sat still. That’s where we noticed the bird.

“Crane,” I said, too quickly.

“No, can’t be. Maybe a pond heron. Or something else.”

“Egret,” I tried. They shook their head. “Not here. Maybe a little stork?”

“At this distance it could just be a duck or a pigeon,” I said, squinting.

We laughed and went on like that, names thrown out like breadcrumbs, some half-serious, some ridiculous. All the while, the bird hopped and dipped at the water’s edge, unbothered by us.

We could have missed it, distracted by cricket commentary or the strange Victorian sport. But for those few minutes, all we cared about was naming this one bird. As if pinning the right name on this bird would stitch us more firmly into a place that still felt foreign. The truth is we didn’t know. The truth is maybe it didn’t matter. But for a moment, the guessing itself was a thread.

I think that’s how belonging works in a new place. You reach for references, you stitch together the unfamiliar with scraps of the familiar. Even if they don’t fit. Even if the bird doesn’t answer to any of your words and flies away before you’re sure.

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And then there was the safari jeep. Eight of us jolting through the forest, binoculars raised at first, cameras ready. But as time dragged on, and the jeep slowly crawled forward the way they always do on safari, slow enough not to scare whatever might be watching us back.

As time stretched, attention slipped. Someone checked their phone. Another asked what was for dinner back at camp. The forest blurred into background.

That’s when we saw it. A dull brown mass in the trees, almost invisible. I kept watching. Slowly, it revealed itself: the shift of a leg, the curve of a tusk, the sway of a trunk. A tusker.

No one else in the jeep noticed. And then, for the smallest second, he lifted his head and looked back. The air felt heavy, the chatter fell away. He was there, I was there. That was enough.

And then he folded back into the forest, disappearing into the trees until they were just trees again.

In the last few weeks, these are the twigs and seeds I’ve somehow ended up pocketing.

• The weight of a dog in my lap.

• The squabble over a bird neither of us could name.

• The tusker half-hidden in the trees.

Tiny, ordinary things that could so easily have slipped past me, but maybe they are enough.

Maybe they are what start to line the nest.

I think back to my English teacher sometimes. How she drilled us in patterns of sound. Back then it was just play, a way to distract myself from braces and breakouts. Oh, and that gap my braces could never fix, which still whistles when I’m not trying and sprays s-words when I am. Not exactly ideal, but maybe a thread. Floss, really, if we’re staying on brand.

But maybe she was teaching me something else: a discipline of sorts. The ability to take tiny, awkward things and let them stand as anchors.

Maybe belonging isn’t about permanence.

Maybe it’s always this: fragile, provisional, stitched from twigs and other small bits that don’t look like much, but you gather and collect, and don’t throw them away.

Call this the first bundle of twigs in the pile. Here’s to seeing what else I find.

More to come, soon.

Thank you for being here.