Finding Your Story is about digging into the things you already carry; memories, questions, observations; and turning them into the beginnings of a story.

We’ll read, write, experiment, share, and give each other thoughtful feedback in a small group of just 6 people.

📚 29–30 August
⏰ 3:30–6:30 PM
✍️ With me, Alina Gufran — author of No Place To Call My Own and editor of Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia

Sliding scale offered to keep it accessible.

DM/Email me if you’d like to join.

Some of the most important shifts in my own writing happened in workshops—not because someone handed me the answers, but because they taught me how to look differently. At the Kolam Writers’ Workshop, the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and in conversations with editors and fellow writers, I learned that writing is often less about inspiration than attention.

That’s the spirit in which I’ve put together this weekend fiction workshop with Anjum Hasan.

Anjum is one of the writers whose work I’ve returned to repeatedly over the years. Her fiction is attentive to the inner lives of people, to place, to silence, and to the ways we become ourselves in relation to others. She’s also an incisive reader of fiction, and I’m delighted that she’ll be leading this workshop, and grateful to her for lending us her time and energy.

Over two days, participants will read closely, discuss craft, and workshop their own fiction in a small, intimate group. We’ll think about beginnings that compel, characters who feel fully alive, dialogue, narrative tension, pacing, and the architecture of stories when it comes to the climate and Bengaluru. More importantly, we’ll spend time cultivating the habits that sustain a writing practice beyond any single workshop.

Whether you’re working on your first short story, wrestling with the opening chapters of a novel, or returning to fiction after a long pause, I hope this can be a space for curiosity, rigor, and conversation.

Applications are now open, and I’d love to read your work.

Dates: 15th-16th August, 12:00-1:30 pm

City: Bengaluru (you don’t have to be based there but your work has to speak to a climate theme that relates to the city)

Themes: migration, class, rivers, ecological exhaustion, urban sprawl

You can find all the details to apply here:
apply here

And if someone came to mind while reading this, I’d be grateful if you shared it with them. Some of the best writing communities begin with a single recommendation.

I hope to see some of you there.

While writing No Place To Call My Own or Leela, I’ve reworked the beginning a hundred times, running it past trusted editors, readers and friends and if I’d given up at the beginning, at the point where the story doesn’t know yet what it wants to become, I wouldn’t have this body of work to learn from.

The First Chapter Lab is a workshop dedicated to that fragile, exciting stage of the creative process. Together, we’ll think about beginnings: how to find an entry point into a story, how to build momentum, and how to move from a vague idea to a living, breathing narrative.

If you’re sitting with a novel, short story, memoir, or simply the urge to write, this workshop is for you.

I’d love to have you join us. Details below.

Reply to this or email me on gufran.alina@gmail.com to register. See you 🌸

Being an only child, I was always good at killing time, and what is life if not an exercise in it? One summer, I remember being introduced to the French New Wave since we lived next door to a video rental store, and the first DVD I rented was Breathless by Truffaut, smitten by the black & white image of Jean Seberg in the striped t-shirt, casually strolling down a French street. This was also around the time I’d discovered a ratty copy of Camus’s L’etranger in the unusually sparse library in my school. I was eleven or twelve and my card didn’t allow me to borrow the book so I stole it. I’ve also stolen many books from the Welham library, as well. Partly as a form of retribution for the punishments being meted out to me, which I’d deemed as unfair, and partly because the ISC English syllabus left a lot to be desired. I’d gotten accustomed to spending a lot of time in my head. In boarding school, just when I was making my first set of friends, I also remember asking them to shut up so I could stare at the rain in peace. Instagram will have me believe this is something to do with my innate Taurean personality; I’m happiest when I can lie about doing nothing, cooking long, savoury meals or getting my hands dirty in the few house plants I fight aggressively to keep alive through Delhi’s brutal summers and fierce winters. Other influencers say it’s something to do with my neurodivergence. Cities overwhelm me. I have routinely broken down in traffic in Bombay, returning from a shoot or just trying to get to a meeting on time, had immense social anxiety and adrenaline kick in in rooms where I’ve instantly felt out of place, always been told I have a strong “sixth sense” or sensitivity that makes me hyper-aware of group dynamics, busy environments, a raised voice or any shift in tone, really. With several years of therapy, I’ve understood that much of this is a result of living in a volatile, traumatic early environment, but it’s also the exact tendency that allows me to write because I have a higher than average tolerance for discomfort; in many ways, I prefer it. I often confuse comfort for stagnancy.

During early Covid, I was sequestered in my first floor Khar apartment that opened out into a quiet, leafy street and I could see directly into the homes of my neighbours, a peculiarly Bombay phenomenon. Didn’t end up seeing much except the hazy rotation of news channels. I’ve moved between many homes in a lifetime; I don’t remember staying in a city for more than three-four years at a stretch and always manage to prop a makeshift desk by a window, any window would do, romancing the various aspects of the street below me. In Bombay, I was exposed to a litany of purebred dogs on their evening and morning walks, and the odd fresh bread or fish seller displaying their day’s wares on the pavement or the back of their cycles. I’ve also had the privilege and malaise of living by myself for most of my adulthood. I’ve routinely had morning coffees by the window, taken evening phone calls with family or friends, made love, but mostly, I’ve stared out to absolutely nothing for hours. I don’t even daydream when I look out the window. If I stare for long enough, the contours of structures, buildings, trees, sheds, fade into a kind of abstraction. If I continue staring, not distracted by the relentless pull of emails, notifications from health apps, social media apps, phone calls, texts, if I really commit to the staring, my brain sort of goes blank, maybe I enter into this state of nothingness, perhaps a state that seasoned meditators often experience and one that can be explained by science.

Once, I was at a friend’s beautiful home by the Beas, lounging on a hammock; it was too sunny to read, my meanderings punctuated only by the tittering of birds, the clamour of the river and a faraway voice carried by the wind. I was experiencing a particularly brutal dilemma that I turned over in my head, stuck in a loop, arriving at the same conclusion time and again. You know, that specific experience that sits like an ulcer on the side of your cheek, your tongue running over it compulsively, despite the sting. I know I’ve managed to mentally talk myself into a corner when my breath becomes shallow and I feel overcome by a bizarre fatigue. I stared into the row of coniferous and pine trees by the river, my eyes following an eagle streaking through the air, its wings silent, eyes fixed, soaring above pine trees popping up in thousands across the slopes, perching on a branche for a moment before taking off again, and for a moment, this eagle and I are the same. I decided to continue staring at the trees and ask them for an answer to my predicament. No, quite literally. I just stared and asked the trees to provide me with an answer. The swaying tree tops soon tuned into an almost psychedelic vision and time stretched and warped until it stopped existing, the trees reduced to twinkling dots in my vision. Once I came out of my reverie, broken by the sound of people or the caretaker coming to water the plants, something strange had happened. The knot that I’d been turning over in my head for days, months, had untangled a bit, the noise faded into the distance, like the passing siren of a truck on a highway late at night.

There are many methods to this; there’s of course, meditation, or the practise of doing nothing. Staring at nothing in particular, I pay attention to my breath, my thoughts wander and I wander with them, but I always return to my breath, gently, much like how I would bring back a restless puppy to its position if I was attempting to calm it. There’s any kind of movement; dance or yoga or deep stretches, active practises, that allow me to get out of my body for a second, but learning how to stare and do absolutely nothing has saved my life.

This practise truly crystallises in the mountains. On one such trip, at the heels of a bad break-up, I’d tucked myself at a ramshackle stone and wooden cottage carved into the side of a hill deep in Parvati valley. It’s such a cliche; to travel a thousands of miles away from people to find any succour. It was the middle of December and the valley dipped to -10 at night and a comfortable -5 in the day. Simba, a Himalyan mastiff and his two puppies, a cook and the cottage caretaker were the only company I had for a month. The hillside was covered in sleet making long walks difficult. I contracted pharyngitis because I didn’t quite know how to work the tandoor that warmed the room. The antibiotics gave me a bad stomach, and trying to access the stone bathroom frozen from cold was a production. Most of my time was spent writing in my notebook and staring at the mountains. Electricity, internet and network was patchy and I barely spoke to friends or family. What I did do was watch the same patch of mountain everyday between eight am to three p.m. from the same spot. There’s something disarming about watching a mountain for long enough. I began to notice how the angle of light shifted across its face. The way the birds arrived, briefly inhabited it, and left without consequence. For a month, I stared at the landscape and experienced time with the rise and fall of the sun. Initially, I’d approach these trips with the requirement for clarity, for resolution, instead what found me was far less cinematic and far more urgent; the dissolution of time, days not being segmented into tasks, hours not measured by output. So much of my anxiety in cities was marked by the pursuit of resolution, certainty, direction. The mountains offer none of that. They just remain imperceptibly even as the snow melts, waterfalls and rivulets form, and the land beneath our feet forever shifts. There’s something profoundly healing about this knowing.

Back in the city, it’s near impossible to maintain this state of equanimity. Meditation for productivity, rest for recovery, silence for clarity. And, so I return to my window. I’m lucky enough to have an ancient Gulmohar tree right outside my bedroom window, almost snaking its way into the room. The windows in my living room overlook the canopies of a Semal, Gulmohar and Shehtoot tree, amongst others. The last two years I’ve been staying here, in my attempt to experience a sliver of what I do in the mountains, I’ve become adept at lying on my bed and staring at this tree outside. I’ve never been much of a birder, and perhaps this is indicative of a midlife crisis in the offing, with no markers of traditional adulthood occupying me; not a home to own, nor a car, nor a husband, nor kid; but I drafted a list of the various birds I’ve seen outside my bedroom window; from the common ones like oriental magpies or the red-whiskered bulbul, or the grey hornbill or the flameback woodpecker; the ones I’m rewarded with when I’m truly still. In spring, the wood pigeon, laughing doves, yellow footed pigeon, plum headed parakeets; all pass by the window. Initially, I’d jump up to try and capture a photo, invariably startling the bird into flight. Now, I don’t care as much about that.

When I do spot a bird, I lay very still and watch it for several moments, sometimes close to half an hour— the way its body bobs, the sun glinting on its plume, or how it looks around for insects or rests on the branch, the way it co-exists with the squirrel. In an unnamable away, this is the best part of my day.

The ongoing #lifeofpuja and urban influencers feud and the amount of airtime it’s getting online led me to the question; “who am I?” in the era of the influencer? It feels like this question is no longer asked in private. It is increasingly performed in public, under conditions of visibility, legibility, and continuous feedback. What has shifted in the era of the influencer is not the question itself, but the conditions under which it is shaped and accepted.

Selfhood increasingly feels like it is not only experienced but formatted; into captions, posts, and narratives that anticipate reception. This does not simply produce performance, which has always been a part of social life, but alters the very structure of self-relation.

Managing personal impressions feels newly intensified, not because the act of performance is new, but because it has become continuous, further bolstered by social media and its pervasiveness. The distinction between front stage and backstage, once a useful way of understanding social behaviour, erodes when the possibility of observation extends into what were previously private zones of self-formation. The self becomes something to be monitored, adjusted, and made coherent in anticipation of how it will be received. Which is why you have ex-fashion girlies doing film reviews or start-up bros talking politics a la Nikhil Kamath on Instagram. And while culture shouldn’t remain the bastion of the elite, what is striking is not simply the expansion of who gets to speak, but the conditions under which that speech becomes visible.

Platforms like Instagram, and the much-despised Linkedin, reward continuity, clarity, and recognisability. Over time, this produces a subtle pressure to extend oneself across domains; to remain relevant by being visible, even if that presence requires a loosening of depth or specificity. The question is no longer just what one knows, but what one can sustain as a narrative, expertise becomes secondary to coherence and the ability to speak across subjects is less about interdisciplinary thinking and more about maintaining an ongoing, legible persona. The persona becomes the self.

This is not to say that such movement is inherently superficial. We’ve always thought, felt, and spoken across multiple domains. What seems different is the feedback loop that’s predicting and informing these shift with visibility rewarding repetition and repetition cementing identity. When a certain version of the self gains traction, it becomes easier to continue in that direction, even if exceeds one’s actual knowledge or experience. The risk becomes not simply dilution but flattening where nuance replaces position or a “hot take,” inquiry replaces assertion and the slow, often contradictory, nebulous accumulation of thought is replaced by the need to have a timely response. When you have a view on everything, not because you’ve understood everything but because silence reads as absence, how “authentic” are your views in that case?

In this sense, the democratisation of voice is entangled with a new form of regulation. It opens up participation, but narrows the range of what can be sustained within that participation. The self expands outward, but becomes thinner in the process; stretched across multiple registers, yet increasingly dependent on recognisable patterns of expression.

What becomes difficult to hold, under these conditions, is hesitation, to be able to write or speak within the limits of one’s own experience without turning it into commentary.

Foucault argues that the individual is not a pre-existing essence but an effect of power, produced through regimes of visibility and regulation. In the contemporary moment, these regimes are not simply imposed from outside but actively participated in. The subject curates itself, optimises itself, and, in doing so, becomes both the object and agent of its own regulation. What really led me to try and dissect this was a popular, elitist dating app ad that featured only influencers curated as the “ ideal people one should aspire to date,” as if the very act of being public was tantamount to being worthy, confusing performance for something deeper or more substantial.

The notion that identity is something stable or pre-existing is, granted, false. But if identity is built through repeated acts, then platforms that reward repetition shape what version of ourselves we express; what gets likes gets repeated, and what gets repeated starts to feel like who you are. A successful influencer understands this instinctively. They notice what work, they lean into it and over time, they’re not just performing a version of themselves, they’re bound by it.

A take that’s one-dimensional, black and white, easy to explain, gets repeated. The words can change but the structure remains the same. The parts that are contradictory, slow, unresolved become harder to express publicly— the take is the art. Over time, the self may stabilise, but also becomes more rigid.

***

I’ve mulled over the word content for a while. It arrived sounding foreign, almost technical, and then quickly began to absorb everything in its path— screenplays, essays, videos, distinct forms collapsed into a single category, as if they were interchangeable outputs. In Bombay, I heard producers refer to scripts as content, the way one might refer to inventory. Online, the same structures repeated endlessly— BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Cut, Goop, Refinery29— like different patches cut from the same cloth.

There’s been a lot of chat around authenticity. In an inherently performative space, the very idea of authenticity being debated seems moot. When the self becomes something to edit and maintain, not just for others but also for ourselves as an imagined audience, what happens to the parts of us that don’t translate easily into content?

I think this is why I write fiction; or one of the many reasons I do. Apart from the narrative logic of the story (also an afterthought most times), expecting the narrator to locate themselves, make themselves legible, conscious of identity, politics or position, to explain what they stand for clearly and consistently, to be recognisable, relatable, seems like a true failure of the imagination. A character can contradict themselves without being aware of it, can act without fully understanding why, can actively want things to not align, change behaviour depending on context, memory or mood and remain elusive to explanation. A narrative, when done right, doesn’t collapse with this ambiguity (for lack of a better word); it, instead, persists.

For me, the best writing, and best life, is a product of an interrogation of the self that isn’t presented or stable. A self that’s in motion; partial, contradictory, invisible, without the invisibility being treated as a failure.

***

With the work that comes with talking about the book, there’s an expectation of legibility, to locate the work within identity, politics or position, to espouse certain beliefs and disparage certain others, on the author.

Therapy, in a different way, can carry a similar impulse; to trace patterns, name motivations, and arrive at a mutual coherence. These two processes ask for articulation, for a kind of clarity that makes the self easier to hold, but fiction often moves in the opposite direction. There are rarely neat conclusions, characters want things seemingly at odds with each other, there are no key takeaways and no clean losses or wins. People rarely evangelise. In attempting to construct the fiction, the writer attempts to touch reality.

***

The newfound zeitgeist around astrology, astrological compatibility, tarot readings, (that I’m a sucker for), echoes a similar sentiment; a desire to make the self legible through systems that promise structure and meaning. They offer a language through which uncertainty can be named, decisions can be framed, and contradictions can be softened into something digestible. It’s not that these systems are new, but the way they are now circulated and consumed feels different. They arrive pre-interpreted, easily shareable, already formatted into content. Your chart becomes a set of traits, your relationships mapped into compatibility scores, your inner life translated into carousel posts.

In that sense, they function not unlike the broader logic of the feed. They take what is loose and contradictory, and often unresolved, and render it into something that holds. You see that Aries have a temper and that Geminis can’t be trusted and that Scorpios are vengeful enough times that it becomes essentially true.

And yet, the appeal is understandable. In a moment where the self feels stretched across multiple expectations, these systems offer a way to gather it back, to feel momentarily coherent.

Baudrillard posits hyperreality is where the simulation doesn’t just imitate reality— it replaces it. What’s presented is no longer a version of life, an exercise in image-making, but rather the form through which life is experienced. When I ovulate, I watch baby videos. When I consider adopting a dog, my feed is full of dog reels. There’s no need for the real thing; a representation suffices. We don’t just perform, we start to live within the performance. The distance between what is lived and is shown collapses, not because they are the same, but because one takes precedence over the other.

Fiction does not escape this entirely, but it resists it differently. It doesn’t require contradictions to be flattened into a single position. The proximity to reality exists because there’s no desire to organise it too quickly. This kind of ambiguity is harder to sustain outside work. The same ecosystem that rewards the complexity within a story often expects writers to be coherent and easily placed. The writing can be messy, but the writer cannot. Online, for me, a reversal occurs. The more unstable and layered the fiction becomes, the more stable I expect myself to be online. Where that pressure loosens in my private life of writing, the chokehold of a social media presence and therapy tightens its grip.

If the simulation has replaced the real, then the task is no longer to recover some authentic self beneath it, but to notice how quickly we begin to live within what is shown. Fiction doesn’t restore that reality but it does make space for what escapes it.

Not just shimmer for a few pages but hold under scrutiny, self-doubt and the long middle stretch where you’re no longer enchanted by your own idea.

So much of writing, I’ve learned, is not about talent but about stamina. About building characters whose inner lives generate plot. Shaping narrative so that what happens feels inevitable — not because it is predictable, but because it is psychologically true.

On 21st & 22nd March (12–2 pm), I’m hosting a small, two-day intensive called Building Stories. It’s a craft-focused workshop for writers who want to deepen their relationship to structure, voice, and narrative movement.

Across two sessions, we’ll work through generative exercises (drawing from writers like Zadie Smith, Tony Tulathimutte, and Ali Smith), close-read passages for technique, and workshop one piece of fiction or nonfiction in a careful, no-pressure peer circle. I’ll also offer personalised editorial feedback, and a post-workshop reading list & writing tools.

More than anything, I want this to be a space where writing is taken seriously; not romantically or casually but with rigour and curiosity. You’ll leave not just with new pages, but with rituals to sustain the work when motivation inevitably falters.

The cohort is capped at 10 to preserve depth. A sliding scale is available to keep the space accessible, and 10% of proceeds will go towards the Smile Foundation.

If this feels like the right moment to recommit to your work, you can reply to this email or DM me here or on IG for details.

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When I first started putting Earthbound together, I was wary of spectacle. Climate fiction, especially in its Western iterations, often arrives dressed in apocalypse. Cities drown. Governments fall. Fire eats skylines in cinematic sweeps. The scale is operatic, the ruin grand. But in South Asia, catastrophe rarely announces itself with theatrical timing. It accumulates. It seeps into soil, into language, into the small calibrations families make without naming them as adaptation.

I did not want an anthology that performed crisis. I wanted one that traced its sediment.

What does climate change look like in a region where precarity did not begin with carbon graphs? Where drought and flood are cyclical inheritances, not speculative futures? Where environmental instability folds into caste hierarchies, labour economies, migration histories? The challenge was not to imagine disaster but to write through its normalisation— to resist both melodrama and numbness.

Anthologies are often described as collections, but, to me, they are structures. They have internal weather systems. Every inclusion alters pressure. Every omission leaves a contour. The mechanics are less romantic than people imagine. There were open calls and direct invitations. There were drafts that arrived sharp and declarative, eager to explain the crisis, and others so interior they risked severing themselves from the environmental thread entirely. Some stories required structural overhaul; others required restraint— protection from being over-edited into coherence.

The editorial work became a matter of calibration. How much should the climate event dominate the narrative, and how much should it hover? When does a story become didactic? When does ambiguity turn evasive? I paid attention not only to plot but to knowledge systems— whose understanding of land was being privileged, whose labour was visible, whose loss was aestheticised.

Sequencing the anthology became its own argument. I resisted clustering rural stories together, resisted creating neat geographies of suffering. Instead, I allowed tonal shifts to lead. A quiet relational piece sits beside a formally ambitious one. A story rooted in indigenous terrain leans against one set in an urban periphery. The book moves unevenly because the crisis does.

One of the most striking patterns across submissions was the refusal of dystopia. Very few writers leaned into total collapse. Instead, they wrote about inheritance. About land as memory. About intergenerational strain. Climate anxiety emerged not through spectacle but through recalibration; altered migration routes, failing crops, new forms of intimacy and distance. The catastrophe was rarely explosive.

This feels specific to the region’s literary lineage. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Sundarbans are not backdrop but volatile presence— ecological and political at once. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People renders industrial disaster through the body, grotesque and intimate rather than abstract. Even beyond explicitly “climate” texts, there has long been an attention to land as agent rather than setting. The newer generation of writing complicates this further, refusing the binary of victimhood and resilience and resisting tidy redemption.

Earthbound does not claim to define South Asian climate fiction. It cannot. There is no singular narrative to define. What it offers instead is multiplicity— voices shaped by gender, geography, language.

Editing the anthology altered my own relationship to the crisis. It made me aware of scale— of how the planetary and the intimate constantly misalign. Fiction struggles in that gap. Too expansive, and the human dissolves into abstraction. Too narrow, and the political evaporates. The strongest pieces found a way to let the global remain present without overwhelming the pulse of a single life.

There were mechanical decisions that carried ethical weight. Endings that closed too neatly were reopened. Imagery that romanticised devastation was pared back. Moments of despair that tipped into paralysis were balanced against stubborn continuance. Climate fiction cannot afford sentimentality, but neither can it sustain despair as its only register.

What emerged was not a thesis but a chorus.

A chorus that acknowledges uneven futures. That recognises that the future is already here, just distributed unequally. That insists the crisis is not elsewhere, not later. It is sedimented in crops that fail, in cities that flood, in bureaucracies that delay relief, in the negotiations inside families deciding whether to leave or stay.

Fiction cannot recalibrate monsoons or halt rising seas. But it can adjust attention. It can refuse spectacle and instead document texture — the smell of drying soil, the bureaucratic language of displacement, the exhaustion of adaptation.

Perhaps that is what editing, at its most ethical, becomes; an act of listening under pressure. Not to produce a singular narrative of crisis, but to assemble a field of voices that resist being flattened into one.

Developing Earthbound reminded me that climate writing from this region does not need to mimic global North dystopias to be urgent. Our urgencies are already embedded in land, labour, inheritance, and the intimate recalibration of everyday life.

You can support the work by buying a copy here.

One of my favourites of the year— a forensic, surgical portrair of curated lives— stylistic with a quiet decay. Latronico’s prose is cool, dispassionate measures every Ikea chair, and monstera leaf and oat milk flat white to reveal a profound emptiness beneath the aesthetic veneer. Anna and Tom drift through Berlin and Lisbon like ghosts of millenial ambition, forever pursuing perfection that eludes them. I found myself complicit in the couple’s curated drift, lulled by their clean lines and exits. Reading it like was watching my innards laid for display.

My appetite for dystopic novels, that truly began with J.G. Ballard, Kobo Abe, Shirley Jackson, has continued with the likes of Jenny Offil and Han Kang. Tilt is in a similar vein. A novel by by Emma Pattee that stays tightly with its unnamed, pregnant protagonist as she moves through a day shaped by an earthquake in a grocery store, and it’s this closeness that gives the novel its force. Pattee captures the specific mental texture of maternal vigilance— how every choice feels freighted, how the body becomes both liability and responsibility at once— without tipping into sentimentality. The writing is controlled, sometimes almost too careful, but that restraint mirrors the character’s own need to stay functional in a world that feels slightly, ominously off-kilter. What makes Tilt work is not its sense of plot but its fidelity to a state of mind; fear managed quietly, collapse held at bay through attention. It’s a novel less about resolution than about endurance and what it lacks in narrative drama, it makes up for in a mood of sustained unease— sense that the ground has shifted irrevocably, and that adaptation, rather than resolution, is the only available response.

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte sits squarely within a contemporary literary moment preoccupied with internet subjectivity, grievance, and the aesthetics of discomfort, but it doesn’t always escape the traps of that terrain. Tulathimutte is at his sharpest when anatomising how rejection hardens into ideology; how irony, self-awareness, and online fluency become tools for avoiding responsibility; but the collection occasionally confuses exposure with critique. In an era saturated with autofictional confession and so-called “male malaise” narratives, Rejection risks overindulging the very voices it seeks to dissect, allowing excess and performative cruelty to crowd out deeper ethical pressure. The prose is technically impressive and often very funny, but escalation sometimes replaces insight, producing spectacle rather than rupture. What the book captures well is a cultural mood— the circulation of resentment as personality, the monetisation of wounded ego— but its distance from these figures is uneven, leaving the reader unsure whether they are being asked to interrogate the moment or simply endure it.

Reminiscent of Moshfegh’s self-aware protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Zaher’s narrator is mannered and mildly self-aware, more dissociative than deadpan about her recherché wealth and “exotic beauty”. While she teaches underprivileged boys at a middle school, and has dispassionate sex with her Russian-Jewish boyfriend, Sasha, her main preoccupations remain cleaning herself, perhaps to either exonerate herself from an identity she tries hard to escape, or to perhaps assimilate into a world that’s both “the curse and the key”. The third act veers towards an unprecedented, slightly batshit return to the self in the “woman gone feral” genre. This slight of hand, if by someone less deft would come off as pretentous, but Zaher leaves us with a meditation on nature, civilisation and beauty, justice, class and belonging— all while resisting easy moralising. What emerges is a novel that uses plot not to redeem its narrator but to expose how political conditions produce certain selves—adept, compromised, and painfully legible to the world that made them.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a novel I read with a kind of quiet recognition. Its attention is trained not on rupture but on drift— how marriages, especially in the context of migration, are shaped by paperwork, language, routine, and the small accommodations we make without realising their cumulative cost. Savaş is very precise about this emotional register; the misunderstandings are minor, the disappointments unspoken, the intimacy intact but slightly off-centre. Nothing dramatic happens, and that’s exactly the point. The book understands how contemporary relationships erode through politeness rather than conflict, how love can persist even as alignment thins. I found its restraint disarming; it doesn’t ask for identification so much as acknowledgement. What stays with you is the feeling of having watched something real unfold—two people trying, sincerely, to live a shared life while slowly discovering how differently they inhabit the world.

Enter Ghost felt, to me, like a novel written in full awareness of the limits of literature— and yet committed to it anyway. Set around a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, it understands performance not as metaphor but as daily condition; the constant rehearsal of safety, belonging, speech, and silence under occupation. What struck me most was Hammad’s refusal of uplift; art does not redeem, return does not resolve, and liberal ideas of universality fracture under unequal power. In this sense, the book sits firmly within a Palestinian literary tradition that has long resisted sentimentality, from Ghassan Kanafani onward, insisting instead on precision, restraint, and moral clarity. Reading it now, when Palestinian life is once again being flattened into spectacle or abstraction, Enter Ghost feels urgently relevant; it restores texture, difficulty, and interiority to a reality so often spoken over.

A tightly paced, often suffocating novel about a relationship shaped by power, obsession, and repetition, set against the slow moral unravelling of East Germany. Erpenbeck treats intimacy and ideology as parallel systems; the imbalance and control within the central relationship echo the pressures of the state itself. This structure is intellectually sharp, but at times feels overly rigid, reducing the characters to vehicles for an idea rather than fully unpredictable people. Still, the novel’s refusal of comfort is also its strength. It offers no nostalgia for the GDR, no emotional release, and no redemptive arc, insisting instead that history seeps into desire and corrodes it from within. Read now, Kairos fits into a wider literary interest in how ideology operates inside private life; not as belief, but as habit and endurance. Its severity may feel punishing, but that claustrophobia is a deliberate choice.

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Here’s a list, in no particular order;

Flesh is David Szalay at his most clinically unsentimental; a novel that anatomises masculinity not through psychology or confession but through the slow accretion of gestures, transactions, and bodily encounters. Szalay’s prose is pared to the point of austerity, refusing interiority as a form of ethical stance; what emerges instead is a chilling portrait of a man shaped less by desire than by momentum, drifting through sex, power, and capital with an almost bureaucratic blankness. The book’s intelligence lies in its structural patience; each section compounds the previous one, exposing how agency thins out over time, how moral responsibility is outsourced to systems, habits, and inheritance. If Flesh can feel emotionally withholding, that is precisely its argument—intimacy here is not redemptive but instrumental, and the body becomes a site where history, class, and violence quietly sediment. It is a novel that does not ask to be liked, only understood, and its severity feels both bracing and damning. It has made me want to read Szalay’s entire body of work.

Audition by Katie Kitamura revisits the aesthetic and ethical territory that she revealed more compellingly in Intimacies, but with diminishing returns. Once again, we are placed inside a female consciousness structured by restraint, ambiguity, and performance, where intimacy is negotiated through silence and power circulates obliquely. Yet where Intimacies allowed its narrator’s professional and moral precarity to generate genuine tension around complicity and distance, Audition feels overly enamoured with its own withholding. Ambiguity here hardens into a stylistic flourish; motivations are blurred not to deepen complexity but to preserve a cultivated coolness that ultimately flattens affect. The audition metaphor— identity as rehearsal, intimacy as role-play— is conceptually neat but overworked, and the prose’s severe control begins to read as defensive rather than incisive. What emerges is a novel that is intellectually polished but emotionally evasive, circling familiar questions of legibility and power without risking the destabilisation that gave Intimacies its unsettling force.

The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel by my favourite Fitzcarraldo Editions, is a sharp, unnerving novel that examines how proximity— rather than intention— shapes moral responsibility. Nettel is less interested in plot than in the quiet, corrosive effects of observation; what it means to watch dysfunction, illness, and cruelty up close without intervening, and to mistake passivity for innocence. The collection’s genius lies in its refusal to pathologise or redeem its characters; instead, it tracks the slow normalisation of harm within intimate spaces, especially family, with clinical precision. At times the restraint can feel emotionally cool, even severe, but this distance is purposeful; Nettel is exposing how easily ethical failure hides behind routine and rationalisation. The central concern of The Accidentals is its insistence that damage is rarely spectacular; it is often incidental, accumulated, and quietly shared by those who believe themselves to be merely passing through.

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat traces the perilous passage across the Strait of Dover but what lingers beneat the taut narrative is the weight of history; the irony of men and women, once colonised and dispossessed, now forced into flimsy dinghies headed towards the very shores that extracted their futures. Its narrator is far from blameless— her evasions and rationalisations expose a deeper moral cowardice, mirroring Europe’s instinct to deflect responsibility and recast complicity as helplessness. Ultimately, the novel poses the question; what does it mean to witness suffering that’s a consequence of systems from which one benefits, and still retreat into abstraction? Reading it now, I can’t help but think of Gaza where where Western powers again watch displacement, blockade and death unfold, their silence echoeing the same refusal of accountability that keeps small boats drifting in the channel.

Water Days by Sundar Sarrukai is a quiet, contemplative work that resists the urgency and spectacle often demanded of climate writing, choosing instead to dwell in memory, slowness, and everyday encounters with water. Sarukkai approaches water not as crisis or metaphor alone, but as a lived presence; shaping childhood, labour, caste, and ways of knowing that modernity has steadily eroded. I had the incredible opportunity to chat with him about his work at The Bookshop earlier this year.

Anybody who knows me knows I love reading about love— platonic, romantic, familial, of all vintages. A Leopard-Skin Hat is a slender, disquieting novel that treats intimacy as something fundamentally unstable; tender, obsessive, and quietly destructive all at once. Serre writes in a deceptively simple register, stripping the narrative down to repetition, fixation, and emotional asymmetry, so that love begins to feel less like connection than like a form of private mythology. There is also something faintly abject here, in the Kristevan sense; intimacy curdles into discomfort, care slips into obsession, and the boundary between tenderness and harm remains deliberately porous. By refusing explanation or moralisation, Serre resists the impulse to diagnose her characters, instead laying bare the contradictions of intimate bonds.

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Before watching Homebound, I thought I’d managed my expectations—after all, it’s a Dharma production. But I clearly hadn’t braced myself enough for the sheer deadening of nuance, or for how completely devoid of imagination and rigour the writing would be. And of course, it makes perfect sensel while the film’s central premise gestures toward a friendship across caste and religious lines, not one person on the writing, directing (save Neeraj), or acting team actually belongs to either community. That absence explains everything. It’s something I’ve almost trained myself to overlook, having spent years working within Bollywood, but what really gets my goat here is how the characters of Chandan and Shoaib are reduced entirely to their caste and religion—as if their whole existence begins and ends there.

For Chandan, the two most defining details of his life are that he belongs to a Scheduled Caste, and that he dies walking home as a migrant during the Covid lockdown. That’s all we’re allowed to know or feel about him. Shoaib, meanwhile, is afforded slightly more dignity, but even his arc is clumsily handled. The scene at the office party—where his boss taunts him for supporting “the other” cricket team—betrays a total lack of lived experience, research, or imagination on the writers’ part. Prejudice is rendered so overtly, so crudely, that it feels almost cartoonish. By painting Shoaib’s colleagues as one-dimensional bhakts, the film flattens the real texture of bias; the subtle, insidious microaggressions that mark daily life for Muslims in India, the quiet negotiations of fear and hesitation that come with something as simple as introducing yourself by your name.

Throughout the film, every instance of prejudice against Shoaib is loud and performative—designed for the audience’s outrage—casting the perpetrators as aberrations rather than the norm. But the lived reality for Muslims today is far more complex, and infinitely more exhausting. The overt Sanghis who wear their hatred openly are, in some ways, less insidious than the polite liberals and self-styled centrists who uphold and benefit from the same oppressive systems. Their allyship is often shallow, situational, and entirely convenient. To refuse to tell that truth—to settle instead for a hollow performance of empathy—is, in my view, a grave disservice to the lived reality of Indian Muslims today.

Which brings me to my next question; whose gaze is this film really pandering to? I’ve often said that India only seems to have an appetite for stories of minority suffering—there’s almost never room for minority joy, success, or simply a life that isn’t entirely defined by one’s Muslimness or Dalitness. A story about a marginalized community is only considered “authentic” when it’s treated as a site of spectacle, when terrible things happen to its characters so the audience can be convinced that terrible things do, in fact, happen to them. On one hand, you could argue that this kind of storytelling serves as education, but on the other, it raises uncomfortable questions; whose liberal guilt is it designed to soothe? And whose worst assumptions does a narrative like this quietly reaffirm?

What also unsettled me about Homebound was how self-congratulatory it felt—an upper-class imagination masquerading as empathy. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a “woke” LinkedIn post; performative, polished, and painstakingly careful not to implicate itself. The camera, the script, even the production design—all seem to say, look how sensitively we are portraying the marginalized! But beneath that veneer of concern lies a complete erasure of agency. Chandan and Shoaib are not people; they’re props—devices to trigger liberal guilt, to remind the savarna audience of their “awareness” while reassuring them that they’re still the good guys for merely watching.

The gaze never truly leaves the drawing rooms of the privileged. The film begins there, ends there, and even when it ventures out—to construction sites, congested lanes, or Chandan’s village—it observes from a sanitized distance, as if the world it depicts might contaminate the aesthetic neatness it so carefully curates. Even the final bird’s eye view shot of Chandan lying dead on the road, overcome with heat and exhaustion, is milked for its empathy brownie points; reduced to the mere, and futile, feeling of pity. This is the problem with representation that doesn’t render lived experience—it looks right, but it feels hollow. The anguish is orchestrated, the politics ornamental.

There’s also a remarkable timidity in how Homebound approaches its own themes. The filmmakers seem terrified of being impolite, unwilling to sit in discomfort. Every moment that could have held subversive potential is neutralized by sentimentality or exposition. The dialogue spells out what the visual language refuses to explore. We’re told, not shown, that there’s injustice, inequality, and violence—but rarely made to feel it. And in that refusal to feel lies the true failure of this film; it mistakes sympathy for solidarity.

As a Muslim viewer, what I find most grating is not the overt prejudice shown on screen but the erasure of our complexity. Where is the humour, the intelligence, the banality of our daily lives? Why are Muslim men always written either as the hyper-visible victims or the threatening others? The middle ground—the space of quiet existence, of subtle resistance, of just being—continues to elude mainstream Hindi cinema. It’s as if Muslim life must always be explained, justified, or redeemed through tragedy.

Homebound is not an aberration—it’s a symptom of a larger creative malaise in Bollywood, where identity is a trope, not a truth. The film’s politics feel borrowed, its empathy outsourced, its conscience neatly packaged for film festivals and instagram reels. It’s not the lack of representation that stings, but the illusion of it—the way the industry continues to mistake tokenism for courage.

And perhaps that’s the crux of it—the way mainstream Hindi cinema now treats social commentary as an accessory, a kind of moral branding. Every few years, a film like Homebound emerges to remind us that Bollywood still cares about “issues.” It dons the language of progressiveness without shouldering the burden of truth. The result is a parade of films that are neither brave nor honest—just self-aware enough to avoid outright critique, yet too afraid to disrupt the status quo. I can think of many films in the recent past that follow this trend; Article 15 (2019), film about caste oppression that centers, quite predictably, an upper-caste saviour. It borrows Dalit pain to stage the moral awakening of a Brahmin policeman, reducing systemic violence to a noir-tinged backdrop for upper-caste guilt. Bheed (2023), despite its striking black-and-white aesthetic and ambition to chronicle the migrant crisis, it remains curiously detached. Once again, the perspective of the suffering is mediated through a savarna lens that aestheticizes poverty rather than interrogating privilege.

The tragedy isn’t that these stories are being told poorly; it’s that they’re being told instead of the ones that should be. The Muslim, Dalit, or working-class storytellers who could speak from experience remain outside the system, while the industry continues to congratulate itself for looking in their direction. Until that changes—until the people whose lives are mined for “representation” are allowed to hold the pen, the camera—films like Homebound will keep recycling empathy as aesthetic.

There’s also, unmistakably, the shadow of the Western gaze looming over Homebound—that familiar hunger for stories from the “global south” that confirm a particular image of India; fractured, chaotic, forever defined by poverty, religion, and oppression. It’s the kind of gaze that rewards films for their “rawness” and “grit,” so long as the suffering remains palatable and picturesque. Homebound seems acutely aware of its festival audience, curating pain in a way that translates easily to subtitles and sympathy. The result is a film that doesn’t just other its subjects for Indian viewers, but also exoticizes them for Western ones—performing marginalization rather than embodying it.

In the end, Homebound doesn’t challenge the viewer; it comforts them. It allows the privileged to cry safely, to post their grief online, to feel absolved without having to question their own complicity. It’s precisely this kind of filmmaking—well-intentioned, well-produced, and utterly devoid of moral imagination—that keeps Hindi cinema from evolving.

In this series, I’ll be talking about the books I’m reading and the ways I’m finding myself in them again.

The Destroyed Room, Jeff Wall, 1978

Alberto Moravia, the great 20th Century European stylist and one of my primary influences, once described the modern condition as a permanent state of discomfort; desire continuously thwarted by social convention, alienation eating away at intimacy, and bourgeois rituals masking a void. Recently,, these themes resurface with striking clarity in two contemporary works: Anne Serre’s The Leopard-Skin Hat and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, both shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. Though their registers differ—Serre turning inward toward the opacity of intimacy, Latronico outward toward the flattened rituals of cosmopolitan life—both inherit Moravia’s project of diagnosing modern alienation. They extend his legacy into a world fractured by globalisation, shifting sexual politics and social media.

To place Serre, Latronico, and Moravia in dialogue is to trace a genealogy of disquiet. From Moravia’s Rome of indifferent bourgeois families, wrapped in their neuroses, to Latronico’s Berlin apartments curated like Instagram feeds, and Serre’s elusive landscape of psychological deterioration and the true (un)knowing of the other, I encountered variations on a question that literature returns to obsessively: how do we live with others when the forms we inherit—marriage, intimacy, labour, even authenticity—are corroded? Lukács’s concept of reification developed in his work, History, Class, Consciousness (1913) and Barthes’s mythologies of desire (1957) provide useful scaffolding here, as do psychoanalytic theories of estrangement, in particular the concept of defamiliarization by Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky.

But what ultimately links these three writers is less theory than tone; a cool clarity, a refusal to console, and a recognition that the modern self is shaped not by resolution, but by fracture.

The intimacy of estrangement

The Leopard-Skin Hat is a novel of near-obsession that resists confession. Two friends, Fanny, and the unnamed narrator, orbit each other for decades in a relationship that is not quite friendship, not quite love. What fascinates is less the content of their bond than its unreadability: the narrator himself cannot quite decide what this attachment is, or whether it is sustaining or corrosive. Desire flickers but never crystallizes. The novel’s surface is deceptively light, but beneath it churns a profound meditation on intimacy’s unknowability.

“For a time, she was less bewildered and distraught. Her life even seemed to come together, her emotions to fall back into place. As if doing a little harm could do you some good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill—certainly not— but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you begin to resemble the rest pf the world, the ones who live who somehow manage to live.”

The leopard-skin hat functions as an object-fetish, a Barthesian myth. It is at once trivial—a stylish accessory—and freighted, the totem through which Fanny’s presence is remembered and narrated. Like Moravia’s use of symbolic objects in Boredom (1960) (where artistic objects fail to anchor meaning), Serre turns the leopard-skin hat into a stand-in for a relationship that cannot be fully articulated. The hat is fetish and absence at once: it testifies to desire’s opacity.

Julie Kristeva’s notion of abjection hovers: Fanny is both cherished and repulsive, magnetic and alien. Unlike overtly confessional autofiction, Serre refuses to resolve the tension. She dramatizes the paradox that intimacy, particularly between friends, is shadowed by estrangement. One senses in her work an echo of Moravia’s The Conformist (1951); the impossibility of totalizing the other, the way the closest relationships hover at the threshold of misrecognition.

Where Moravia often exposed the emptiness of heterosexual arrangements, Serre pushes further into how friendship bonds resist categorization. She offers not representation but opacity, a refusal to simplify. The effect is haunting; the reader, like the narrator, remains suspended in uncertainty. Intimacy here is not revelation but perpetual deferral.

Much of this estrangement is in part due to Fanny’s unnamed psychological disorder (schizophrenia is alluded to) but she resists pathologization as much as the narrator does; instead the narrator completely humanises her, her ‘madness’ presented not as deviance but as an apt response to an unfathomable society. Serre refuses the medical gaze that would reduce Fanny to a case study. Instead, she allows her to exist in her full, contradictory humanity: erratic, magnetic, wounded, yet never stripped of dignity. In this sense, Fanny embodies a counterpoint to bourgeois normalcy—her instability exposing the fragility of those social conventions that pass themselves off as coherent. Where the world insists on diagnosis, Serre insists on relation, reminding us that what appears as madness may also be a lucid refusal of the false logics of modernity.

The architecture of Perfection

If Serre examines intimacy’s enigmas, Latronico dissects the rituals of a class obsessed with image, minimalism, and aesthetic coherence. Perfection follows a young Italian couple who move to Berlin in pursuit of a life purified of mess. The novel paints a forensic, surgical portrait of curated lives—stylistic with a quiet decay. Latronico’s prose is cool, dispassionate, measures every Ikea chair, monstera leaf and oat milk flat white to reveal profound emptiness beneath the aesthetic veneer. Anna and Tom drift through Berlin and Lisbon like ghosts of millennial ambition, forever pursuing perfection that eludes them. I found myself complicit in the couple’s curated drift, lulled by their clean lines and exits.

The novel is a study in reification, in Lukács’s sense; social relations become things, gestures become surfaces. The couple’s desire is mediated through ‘spectacle’: their lives are performances staged for the gaze of others and themselves. Their pursuit of “perfection” reveals itself as a hollow ritual. Objects—chairs, white walls, photographs—take on mythic weight, echoing Barthes’s account of how consumer culture generates signs emptied of substance.

The link to Moravia is immediate. Where The Time of Indifference (1929) exposed the ennui of Rome’s bourgeois families in the shadow of fascism, Perfection (2025) updates the diagnosis to late capitalism’s “creative class.” Both depict characters trapped by rituals that promise meaning but deliver voids. Moravia’s characters feigned passion while operating from indifference; Latronico’s chase authenticity while suffocating in inauthenticity. The surface has changed, but the structure—the bourgeois void—remains.

“And it is a happy life; or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukranian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland, plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands, plus another cut for the online payment system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg, plus the city tax imposed on Berlin.”

In Perfection, alienation is no longer a by-product of repression but the logical outcome of consumer choice. The couple’s freedom to curate their lives only deepens their estrangement from each other. The novel becomes a parable of neoliberal intimacy; abundance yielding emptiness, connection mediated through surfaces. Globalization operates not as expansion but as contraction; a narrowing of life into seamless surfaces and lifestyle choices, where the very promise of boundless connection breeds a claustrophobic sameness

Alienation, desire & the bourgeois void

What links Serre and Latronico, even with their different tones, is how they share Moravia’s gift for cutting straight to the bone. He could strip away all ornament and expose the skeleton beneath bourgeois life. That same clear, almost merciless gaze appears in Serre’s elliptical prose and in Latronico’s pared-down precision.

In Moravia’s Rome, disconnection is the rule; in Serre and Latronico, the same failure takes on new forms—whether in friendships that only grow more unknowable the closer they are examined, or in cosmopolitan couples whose flawlessly curated lives hollow them out from within.

In all three, desire never matches its object. It is either excessive or insufficient, always misaligned. Lovers in Boredom or Conjugal Love, Serre’s Narrator, and Latronico’s Anna & Tom alike find themselves undone by wanting something that can never quite be possessed.

Whether it’s the rot of a fading aristocracy, a friendship that never settles into a name, or an apartment that looks like a lifestyle ad, the emptiness persists, reshaping itself with each new era.

Moravia in the 21st Century

Serre and Latronico each take Moravia’s psychological sharpness into their own landscapes. Serre turns it inward, looking at the riddles of intimacy and showing how even love between friends—seemingly outside the old scripts—remains touched by distance. Latronico turns it outward, into the architecture of contemporary life, where curated perfection conceals a hollow core.

Both suggest that Moravia’s questions—about alienation, desire, and emptiness—are still alive, only dressed differently.

Polina Barskaya Kaluzhsky

The funny thing with returning to writing after a hiatus as long as a year is that even if I’m ready to write sooner than expected, the attendant embarrassment keeps me from turning to the page. You’d think that, after a book deal, carving out the time to write would be easier, that the pursuit would be less riddled with guilt or a hunger that’s usually driven my writing in the past, but the truth is that writing in a bedroom in a hidden corner of Goa, cycling through hurricanes, various raves, the routine dramas of a relationship, navigating the incessant back and forth of what it means to cohabit with someone, the comfort of familiar faces and unlikely friendships born out of extenuating circumstances that allowed all of us to gravitate towards one another and create a bubble away from the world burning, cushioned by our privilege, cradled in the lap of nature, where it becomes easier to look away from my phone screen, and onto a horizon that stretches out endlessly, are truths that no longer exist. The world seems to have rapidly moved on from the pandemic, although economically and socially, we still bear witness to its effects. Writing about anything at all seems trite, especially since the horrific events that have transpired since October last year, and the televised genocide we’ve been subjected to; the images percolating in my brain, interspersed with ads for boob tape and discounted egg freezing. Every word I write, that any of us write, will be coloured by this reality. Still, I’ll try my best to condense the last year and what my preoccupations have largely been. 

Life has hurtled forward at an astounding speed. I’ve returned to Delhi after seven years and amongst the many joys, a few incidents stand out in stark memory. The world asks you to shrink in so many ways everyday— especially if you’re a Brown woman, especially if you’re an Indian Muslim woman— you moderate what you wear, you choose between how much cleavage is okay to show depending on the pin code you’re heading out to, how much leg is allowed, you only are given access to places if there’s a man accompanying you, how much more confident you feel if there’s a man next to you, how much more protected. My entire life, despite my instinct to rebel— against the idea of being a model daughter, girlfriend, wife— is often reduced to my identity as a woman in the most unexpected moments. As I write this, I sit in the third floor apartment I’ve recently sublet with two French girls in a posh locality of New Delhi, with its curated parks and the forest behind and the ceiling to floor glass with the sun beaming through the trees right into my room. Last night, a man I’m seeing came over dressed in his an outfit from the place he hails from. I’m not sure how “Muslim” he presents, all I know is that he looks gorgeous— tall, his broad shoulders, he strides into rooms with the kind of quiet confidence that irks people, he’s charming without being effusive, he can make people feel comfortable without revealing too much about himself, he has moments of self doubt which he has learnt not to project others— traits I like to believe I share with him. I walk with a similar confidence, in defiance, a reminder of how our mere existence has irked people across the country. What’s more frustrating or infuriating than a well-dressed, articulate, intelligent Muslim talking with the confidence of belonging here? Of having earned the seat at the table? We’re in the throes of an early day romance and our cute banter is cut short by a portly man standing on the first floor of the house, who questions us about why we’re entering his house. I tell him I live there and flash the key to him— posturing an innocent confusion I’ve mastered with years of having lived in Delhi and Dubai. He sizes up my friend and I, and then says he’ll take it up with my flatmate tomorrow. I walk in with my eyes to the ground, and my friend follows me in.

Previously, we’d been having some silly skirmish about him not calling me the day I sustained a corneal wound but soon, this affront has dissipated my anger. We feel united against a country, and a world, that rallies for our erasure. The man from the first floor threatens my flatmate and calls the house a brothel and says if they don’t sort it out, he will. Eventually, not much comes off it, and he apologises and now I’m in the same balcony, looking over, strategising my movements, minimising myself, making sure I’m not noticed and I can go about doing things without scrutiny— in my own home, in a place I currently pay rent for. Just yesterday, I sat in the same balcony after I’d done my room up and looked out at the grim Delhi sky and enjoyed that delicious feeling of solitude, of being alone and not being lonely, of finally having arranged a life that’s entirely mine— not my boyfriend’s or my ex-boyfriend’s or my father’s or the many other male figures in my life who’ve come and gone. Another interesting thing to observe is how this blatant disregard for others, especially women, this sort of obnoxious and arrogant entitlement to women’s bodies and time is largely concentrated in the hands of upper class, cis-het Hindu men. None of this information is new, or surprising, yet every time I have to contend with such micro-aggressions, I think of the many ways this chips at who I’ve built myself to be— and to what extent the idea of the self is important, or versatile, or fluid, or has the space to encompass contradictions.

Before I moved to the Capital, I told myself I’ll live next to a park or a forest and go on walks. When I look out of my balcony, that sliver of space inlaid with marble I crouch on, I see no women walking about. 

Stories of the Partition were mostly narrated by the men of Partition— Manto, Ludhianvi, Faiz, Iqbal— the lens was turned to the world, to the violence on the streets, whereas the women— Khadija Mastoor, Rasheed Jahan, Ismat Chughtai— the women wrote of what they could see from their balconies, of how they passed the hours waiting on news about their men. Yesterday, when I chatted with an ex on a video call, I notice a lady in her sixties on the balcony across, watching me keenly. I’m not sure what she feels— disdain, envy, longing, judgment; perhaps a mix of all this.

Life has a terrible way of moving in cycles, in patterns, where if you spend enough time with yourself, you’re able to discern the edges of. Sometimes, you’re on the outside, observing this pattern and continuing on anyway, and sometimes you’re on the inside, unable to even register the tenor of what’s coming to pass. It’s so much easier to look at things in hindsight and understand how this moment spoke to a moment in your life a decade ago. Astrology holds reasons for this, as does psychology, but there’s no real way of knowing if there’s any deliverance from certain cards that you’re dealt. A friend tells me about how somebody at the Press Club who claims to be a player, and that when he saw us have a drink together, he insinuated it was a date. He tagged it as an ‘incel’ comment. Somebody asks a friend at a party if I’m on Ozempic because why do I look like this? I go to an afterparty and I notice I’ve started dressing androgynously, I wear glasses now, I believe the lie that if I hide my sexuality or sensuality, I will be taken more seriously in the circles I navigate with a faux confidence and a sense of simmering detachment. The publishing queers adopt me and tell me I have too much of a personality to not be queer, and I’m glad once again, that in this phase of my character arc, I have been accepted.

A close journalist friend of mine says that people who aren’t nepo babies or are estranged from their families, or didn’t grow up with a lot that most people in the circles I move in take for granted, have a sense of fire and hunger that can’t be competed with. No amount of pedigree and access can account for the sheer and white-knuckled will to survive. No south Delhi school education or Gymkhana membership can account for persisting in a country with a last name that’s akin to a slur. I’ve seen that firsthand— the privilege acting as a caustic potion that slowly poisons you from within, when you’re so far removed from reality, your biggest concern during the pandemic being not being able to go on International holidays, when the national holiday declared for Ram Mandir Inauguration affects the stock market and consequently, your fiscal capabilities, and perhaps, this is stating the obvious, but the real dissonance comes from the roles which are ascribed to us, the roles we take on. Who I am in a living room in Conoor with the legacy, and the baggage, of a debut novel to be released versus who I am when I lie on the couch of my best friend in Saligao. Or, when I bury my neck in the neck of a partner I shared a home with for four years versus the neck of a lover I’ve known for a month versus somebody else’s husband. What I choose to talk about when I sit at a beach shack in an erstwhile secluded beach turned hipster haven in north Goa with my coterie of friends, and what kind of an intellect or conversation I lead with at dinner parties in the Capital. I do feel that a writer of any vintage, over the course of their lifetime, will inhabit many such opposing and complementary worlds, and sometimes the sheer privilege of being able to live across multiple cities, and the attendant displacement that comes with moving between places, circles and people with an ease that’s both deceptive and mercurial, leaves me breathless.

Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant talks about a sense of ‘cruel optimism,’ wherein a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. As the social-democratic promise of the postwar period has retracted, people have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. This is evident as it plays out as the news from Palestine populates my social media, amidst saffron flags and misleading headlines across BBC, CNN and such.

Shifting to Delhi, away from the bubble of Goa, has come with a sense of possibility and novelty, a certain Beckett-isian charm that can’t be denied. Every writer fashions themselves to be of a vintage— with endless time and solitude to squander, a room to call your own, the freedom and space to distill the world and make that a sort of interrogation into the essential pain of the self. Damon Galgut says “what happens in the nation, happens in the family” and nowhere is this more true than today’s India. The French girls I no longer live with have adapted to the fissures in our society— the damsel in distress routine, the emotional blackmail, reducing ourselves to feminine wiles to get our way like we’ve regressed to the 50s. The sheer irony in what I do, the books I write, the brand of feminism I subscribe to and perpetuate, the way my tone changes when I talk to the Didi at home, or to the artist I meet at a Chattarpur gallery, or to the attractive lawyer I briefly co-habit with or the girl with the coloured hair who perceives herself as slightly odd. 

I wrote the novel while the world was on fire, bolstered by a loving partner, the support of friends who never asked for too much, who implicitly understood when I needed to be left alone, and when I needed to be held, the tree outside my window that survived three monsoons, the morning call of the birds in my garden— luxuries that have altered my DNA— created somebody who isn’t threatened by the idea of slowing down or merely existing, who doesn’t need people’s constant counterpoint to finesse my own thoughts, who can write with the abandon of someone content in the knowledge that their work will never be read.

Being a writer who’s perpetually online, I’m subjected to the rhythms of pop culture that make less and less sense to me with each passing day, like a “brat summer” while Bangladeshis storm the parliament, videos of beheaded babies in refugee camps populate my feed and most people my age scramble to make rent in the cost of living crisis or continue living with their parents. I’ve taken to taking prolonged naps because the usual rituals that sustained me and my mental health make little sense in an increasingly absurd and dystopian world. Writing has rarely ever been altruistic pursuit, and in the face of everything, feels wildly self-important, so continuing in that vein, I want to talk about the time between March 2023 to now, shifting back to the Capital, the book deal, and how it changed everything, while changing nothing at all.

The life of a writer is usually beset with obstacles; my internal weather never seems to align with the temperature outside, I write because I feel at odds with the world, and it’s one of the few ways to try and make sense of the crushing weight and futility of existence that’s only often alleviated by spending time with friends on their couches, swims in the ocean, walks in a forest or gazing at a sunlit mountain top. When I first shifted to Delhi, I had grandiose plans of finishing the first draft of my next novel by the time this one released, I was amidst editing an anthology on climate fiction, I was perpetually cold sequestered in a friend’s apartment, but it felt like some kind of a purification, a purge of some sort, a punishment in some other ways, or that the fact that my internal emotional landscape that always feels so unsure and insecure, could be justified in the cold harshness of Delhi— not a peek of the sun, no smiling face, just the loudness of everyone’s loneliness staring you in the face, colouring every interaction. I’m not even sure what I want anymore— perhaps, I never was. My therapist told me to remember the feeling the mountains evoke in me, what I felt when I saw the light turning, my anxiety’s always lower in the cold, but a pervasive sense of being removed from the world persists. Writing remains an attempt to bridge this gap. 

The violent oscillation between a delusional belief in my talent interspersed with colossal moments of being convinced that I can’t write persists. Enough writers I’ve read growing up or admired have insisted that writing can’t be taught, and enough readers have insisted that I possess ‘the voice’ which is more of a prerequisite than any formal education. I didn’t study English literature, nor do I have an MFA, I formally studied film because my relationship to reading and writing felt too sacred to be violated by any pedagogic instruction, my readings on craft involve reading far and wide since the age of twelve, and writing almost everyday. Yet, what keeps me going everyday is that I’m nowhere close to mastering the craft or saying anything of worth that can have a life of its own, and a book deal doesn’t change that. 

I walked into a bookstore in a posh market recently, and the staff members asked my friend and I if we’d like to chat with an author who writes books on business who’s just walked in. He makes polite conversation with the staff about how he loves the layout of this particular bookstore, how there’s space to have a coffee, read a book. I know he’s itching to ask how many copies he’s sold, how his work is being received. Another moment at a bookstore where an ageing gentleman with a back brace inquires about how many copies he’s sold so far. Nobody prepares you for how alienating getting a book deal actually is. There’s the burden of perceived success— you’re looked at with a sense of reverence that feels unfounded, you can’t tell if people want to cosy up to you on account of this purported social capital, or if there’s more to you than the sudden weight of presenting as an articulate, well-read, worldly somebody with a clever opinion ready at every occasion. 

There are many factors that contribute to getting agented or having a book deal; a strange combination of luck, timing, talent and hard work— the last one being the only thing that’s in my control. There’s also a marked difference I notice between the fiction writers in this city, and fiction writers elsewhere. The ones here have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the industry, of the politics of writing, they have clear goals— both financial and otherwise— their love of literature isn’t lessened by these factors, but their relationship to the work is affected and changed by this knowledge. The writers I know who are still writing in some corner of the country or the world, and I’ll get castigated for saying this, have a more intuitive, if less “polished” relationship to the work. The thing with being in a city like Delhi is that everyone has an opinion; on how you should be writing, what you should be writing about, what a writer’s schedule or routine should look like, the smirk of knowing when another writer reads an interview answer about how monotony and nothingness is how I arrive at anything worthwhile to say, the mere fact that I have to give interviews now; while I was accustomed to the private tensions, no part of me could’ve calculated the public pressures of this reality.

— to be continued.

A party occupies the space between what we want and what we think we should want. Someone may not know what a dinner party is, but thinks she should want to host them. When I was sixteen, I was excruciatingly shy and was thrown a surprise birthday party by my two best friends, one I tolerated while being genuinely moved by their gesture. There’s something about being the center of attention at a party that was exhausting then and with age, as I built a sense of self-belief that was ultimately quite fragile, I maneuvered to always being the center of attention, much to the embarrassment of the party hosts.

In Succession, Kendall Roy throws his 40th birthday that sends him over the edge and he can’t even fool himself about what a bad time it is. Often, parties reveal there’s people you don’t like and who don’t like you and are just attending for the copious free booze and to forget who they are for one night. Sometimes, parties are simply a reason to pretend to have a good time, similar to how we act that we know how to be a person in this world. Everyone wants to be the one who knows how to have fun.

Parties seem to be about movement and action, but are actually about standing still. There is a sort of a hollowness at the center of a party; sometimes the party nearly defeats the hollowness, and sometimes it embraces it until nothing else has any space in the room. A party is a place where nothing happens and simultaneously, everything can happen.

I have spent so much of my life dressing up, and getting ready to go stand in a room, and standing in a room, and eventually going home, confused that nothing happened. Nothing is supposed to happen at a party, of course. Although sometimes, when I was young, reckless and way more fun, I had a way of making things happen.

Sometimes, I’ve been super obnoxious, gotten very high and crashed somebody’s birthday party, simultaneously changing the music without the host’s permission (a move as bold as it’s rude), while my friends attempted to drag me out. I’ve also been the sensible one, rallying people to get my friend, high on molly, to leave as she’s the last one gyrating in front of the speakers. 

Over the last twelve years or so, I’ve also seen some spectacular drama go down at parties. I’ve seen people hooking up with people they definitely shouldn’t be hooking up. I’ve seen girls high on something delicious screaming at DJs to turn up the music in a club where the sound is deafening. I’ve sat in a circle of Russians and drank shroom tea. I’ve also met some interesting people— a South African photographer who I traveled to the hills with and then subsequently, shot a documentary in Delhi with. We drifted apart at his frankly, colonial insistence that Durban had better butter chicken. I’ve had a French biker flash me at a party. I’ve developed crushes on people I’ve then proceeded to stare at during several other parties. I’ve hung out at strange, foreign parties where nobody speaks English and gotten blind drunk in a corner. I’ve thrown up, passed out in a washroom, woken up and rejoined a party. I’ve helped drunk people reach home safely and invited myself to dubious after-parties. I’ve disappeared into the pulsating clubs of Berlin, losing my friends to the various dance-floors and emerged thirty six hours later, to hydrate and eat pizza that I couldn’t possibly taste.

I turn thirty in around two months. My last two birthdays were in the pandemic. I didn’t have massive parties to commemorate this frankly, existential pursuit that is being alive and making it another year. Things have changed at a startling speed. For a long time, there’s been no point talking about parties. The world, or my world anyway, moved away from parties, and back to things happening.

A couple weeks ago, I was ready to throw myself back into it, all the shit I claim to hate, and actually love, and also at the same time actually hate. I’ve missed the lavishness of people all getting together in a small space for no purpose at all. I was ready for the shared delusions; I wanted to pretend that there was something to celebrate, that we had gotten through something. I wanted the roar and hum of people crowded together in rooms, struggling to hear one another. I wanted to drink wine and sit in weird ways in chairs, and try to remember how to talk to old friends and acquaintances again. Several Decembers passed and rushed down the calendar and I couldn’t wait for party season to come back again, spelled up in lights over the intersection.

Time and consequences telescoped in on one another. I canceled the rest of the month’s parties, in a little cascade of resignation over the course of a day or so. At the last one, two of us sat in an Airbnb, doing rapid tests while ordering dinner. This was too much reality for a party. The rooms of the world close their doors so quickly; the size and shape of things changes so often and so fast, so much without warning. Life shifts from event to memory before we notice that the process has begun. 

Like everyone else, I am older than I was when all this started; the crowded rooms available to me are different ones now. Last week, I thought about the parties that someone I haven’t seen in years used to throw, the way soft, bright rooms used to light up when I was younger, when I was sure that every next doorway I entered was where my whole life would finally change. Almost immediately, being canceled, parties changed in memory. The rooms got larger, warmer, quieter, more welcoming. The noise got less desperate. When I haven’t been able to go parties in a while, I forget how many of them, even small and unspectacular ones, are really the time when somebody gets up and does a sexy little dance number and nobody knows how to react; somebody has done the wrong drugs in the wrong order, and yells at the people in the compliment tunnel. I rewrite the parties in my mind, inventing them further from reality, until I can no longer sustain the delusion.

Television loves to show a party being interrupted by a horrific historical or personal event, as if that’s what we earn by having parties. If parties are fundamentally spaces where nothing happens, then they are ripe for that floor-collapsing feeling, in which bad news out of nowhere craters a hole in our lives. An event is almost always bad news. Generally— as I have recently been reminded— when things happen, it’s not a good thing. Nobody likes it when things happen; things that happen, if you round up, are universally not great. Plagues and cyclones and family estrangements are things that happen; the party goes badly because something happens at the party.

We can only deceive ourselves for so long. Eventually something happens, and when something happens, it turns on all the overhead lights in the dark bar. Parties try to be sites of escape, and for that very reason they often end up as scenes of absolute reality. Sitcoms love parties—the ones about groups of young people in big cities are often strung together by party episodes—because sitcoms are farce, and farce relies on characters telling outrageous lies and then having to try to support those lies through a series of impossible circumstances. Comedy and tragedy are much the same at their extremes, and parties are where they collide.

Parties make the promise that everything will eventually be okay. Sometimes, the season of parties shuts down with a whimper; December is just December, gray and tired. I go inside; I change my patterns. I whittle the numbers down. A party is ten people, and then it’s four, and then it’s just two, myself and the person with whom I share the space where I live, sitting together in a room that smells like fresh flowers and burnt garbage. Even this is a party; we gather in a room, we dim the lights and listen to music, and we hope that nothing will happen. We brace for the events, and we frantically try to tell ourselves that they won’t occur, that inside this warm room, our inventions can hold. Sometimes believing in one another’s delusions is a form of love; sometimes that’s a party.

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My Bed by (1998) by Tracey Emin

Today, for some reason, I’m thinking about the various rooms I’ve inhabited through the three decades of my existence. Some strange Enneagram test, one of those emotional blueprints designed you to gain some sort of unidirectional insight into yourself, tells me that my personality type values security above all.

Bedrooms have also, meant to me, the ultimate safe haven, a refuge from the world at large, a space that can be whittled and chiseled according to my changing needs and desires, where I can be naked literally and figuratively and my shame can be nursed in private, where tears flow easy, and the need to be whole can be momentarily assuaged.

I don’t remember the exact contours of the past but certain rooms stick with me— like old scars that never fade, or core memories that remain in the recesses of the mind and collect dust, only to be taken out and admired breathlessly in private.

One such room in the bylanes of Lutyen’s— a friend’s bedroom-turned-painting studio. A sprawling desk in a corner, adorned with her MacAir, always playing a Spotify playlist (before Spotify was mainstream and we had to VPN it to access it), the sound of her puppies pattering on the wooden flooring, a stack of global art magazines alongside a single bed. A double window beams the winter sunlight right onto me as I lie down at the foot of her bed and chat about our dreams of being artists, our changing bodies, feeling immortal in our early 20s, our insecurities laid out before us to perform autopsies and commemorations for as we returned trashed from dubious south Delhi parties, reeking of cheap alcohol and stale pot, sometimes the kathi roll from the kebab stall at Khan Market. I remember the tofu bowls and stream of various kinds of tea— jasmine, chamomile, hibiscus— the warmth from the cup radiating into our bodies as with the very act of being snuggled in bed, with the door shut, safe from the world and its daily assault, we could finally open up.

There are some conversations you could only have in bedrooms, some friendships that exist due to a strange mix of luck and proximity, really coalesce and are more than just real life— they’re a necessary relief from it. We talked so much about everything with no plans to solve anything, making a Sunday into Sunday by wasting it, stretching out the hours, building a shelter, making an apartment count as a house. 

How many small households construct themselves like this, invisible to one another, cocooned far within all the large nondescript buildings in this city, each Sunday, each weekend, on any day of the week? All these people randomly thrown together by chance, by the internet, the need for housing, by money and its lack, by proximity and logistics and the wide-armed iterative hope that rises up against logic again and again, further down the afternoons, further down our lives, in these rooms none of us own, in these homes we invent between one another, with so little proof to any of it, white-knuckling safety and family and the shape of a life out of pure irrational belief.

The various, rotating spaces in these rooms we occupied without hesitation, our limbs bending and moving in ways public spaces could never allow for. How talking shit ritualistically on these Sundays invented meaning out of nothing, drawing together, slowing down, offering rewards without needing to earn them. 

My best friend’s bedroom on the first floor— with its balcony where we sit, drinking whiskey mostly, coffee sometimes. She braids my hair on some mornings, other mornings we scroll Snapchat and order in coffee and sandwiches. Sometimes, a boy I used to love visits and we pass glasses of whiskey between us, the Delhi cold settling in our limbs like molten lead, sleeping with our backs to one another but with the comfort of knowing that hers will be the first face I glimpse when I wake up. What is the definition of these romances that pale in comparison when compared to the resounding idea of love? The romance of friendships is often overstated in many, trite ways but the luxury and excitement of cohabiting with a friend, sprawled in the different corners of her room, her colour-coordinating her cupboard, me reading a book, forces all the itchy parts of the world into the shape of beauty.

All romance is inefficient, that’s the point of it, and that’s why we like it. In another bedroom in another part of the world, a friend fusses over good coffee. I watch her roast, grind, tamp the beans in her expensive coffee machine, while she talks to me about how she bought the imported French wine because I judged her for the Indian one the last time I was over.

I’m not sure how to tell her that I love bad coffee, that good coffee often makes me feel like I’ve taken myself too seriously, and taking yourself too seriously is the difference between silly and stupid. She tells me I should be able to taste hints of fruit in my coffee. I say I’d rather just eat fruits instead. She smiles. As long as I can have bad coffee with my friend, I can claim that I didn’t mean to be silly, that I’m only committing to the bit.

Another room on top of a hill, overlooking a valley marked with freshly painted homes with baroque stone archways and the sunlight filtering through, despite the cold. Here, my friend and I have endless cups of coffee while we discuss the news story she’s chasing in Cambodia, being in our 20s and hurtling through life in Delhi without brakes, why bad ideas feel so good. We have yet another cup, sequestered on her pink, flowery sofa knowing that it’s a bad idea. That the another cup of coffee achieves nothing except digestive stress. Haven’t you ever believed in something despite knowing it made no sense, despite knowing any declaration of your belief was indefensible? Haven’t you ever wanted nothing to count and your body never to decay, surviving through pure spite and will, as though nothing would ever come due, as though logic and reason and fact were just a cluster of petty little powerless accountants, and the world offered something better than their warnings?

There are some conversations you can only have in a bedroom. At the onset of a panic attack or in the middle of an argument that only moves in circles, circumventing defenses and apologies and attacks with a strange ant-like dexterity. Something about lying down next to the warm body of the person you can’t remember you love floods your muscles with the reach of memories; you’ve laid in the same position with lovers and friends and you think of the strangeness of all the Sundays past and how their bedrooms form a part of your life that’s forever changing; being young, and temporary, and knowing that these shapes, these groupings, this room that wasn’t a room, isn’t supposed to last. This was the layover, the station on the way to the next station on the way to wherever we were going. Maybe that’s why it mattered so much, why it felt so safe, so comprehensively tender.

Having a chat in your friend’s room is a finite action, even when drawn out across a whole Sunday; eventually it runs out, eventually the coffee mug is empty, eventually there’s something else to do. Eventually it’s Monday morning. Your life catches up to you; the next thing happens.

We made a home in the breaks between one thing and the next, between action and consequence, between thought and decision, living with one another for these small moments in the grace of delay. I would have stayed there forever if I could, trapped in that bedroom on a Sunday like a bug in amber. I’ve had all the good coffee that people who talk about coffee the way wine people talk about wine rhapsodize over, and I’d trade all of it for one mug from that drip machine on a Sunday in that kitchen, in a home made possible because it couldn’t last.

Lying in bed aimlessly with a friend or a lover makes everything from your own bed in your own home to the strange IKEA bed in an Airbnb into one and the same bed. It’s the same way an apartment becomes a house, the way a stranger becomes a friend and a friend becomes family, the alchemy that renders small and meaningless objects anxious and magnificent.

I felt like I saw their whole life in one anecdote, the sweep of it, and the loss where the window never again closed fully against the cold. But maybe that was just the way love is selfish at its core; I felt like that detail was the whole story because it’s a detail in my story, too. When one of you gets up to get a cup of coffee in bed, or draw the curtains without being asked to, or adjust the tilt of a screen during a movie, or share a pillow, or sometimes fall off to sleep while claiming you’re awake, I realise it’s sickening for anything to be this tender, to be this purely good, this soft and this kind.

It’s not just that kind of love, though, or it’s not the only version of love that looks like two people in a room. So many people do this— lying down in a room together, having chats about things of no consequence, things that matter the most. Nothing could be less special, or less original. This time refuses to distinguish itself. It feels like everything else, which is to say like nothing. But it still persists, on several mornings, this bed, this person, this half hour where absolutely nothing happens. No one outside of this can have any part of it; the room has no door.

I turn 31 in a few weeks, and despite all signs pointing to otherwise, I feel like I’m in the middle of a veritable 30-something crisis. Too inconsequential to be called a midlife crisis, too early to be pegged as a quarter-life crisis, I’m somewhere in the middle— straddling the emotional commerce of being a girlfriend of a three and a half year long relationship, of a senior employee at a firm with managerial responsibilities and expectations of leadership and initiative, scattered between Facetime calls, Whatsapp messages and Instagram DMs through which most of my childhood and early adulthood friendships persist. I invest in better skincare, and therapy, stay hydrated, do Pilates, say my ‘I love yous’ and ‘I miss yous,’ but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that something is inherently off. I can’t entirely concede to the path so meticulously laid out for all of us— degree, marriage, kids, annual vacations, steady climb up some mythical corporate ladder, education loans, home ownership.

Here are some tangible realities I see myself and those around me contend with; nobody has prepared us to watch our parents grow older, inevitably marching towards death. They tend to forget more, their resentments and unmet needs have calcified and settled into the folds in their skin and wrinkles on their faces, they have made/are making peace with their mortality. My parents have briefly discussed their retirement plans, wills, power of attorney transfers for properties, where the gold is stored. A deep sense of information, heirlooms, family secrets, seems to be transferring to me; their only child.

While I hold this information in my body and psyche, I contend with the duality of holding jobs to make money, while hoping a writing career that’s culminated into a novel often rejected on the grounds of being too political, takes off. Me, and most people surrounding me, are inherently lucky by way of being able-bodied, educated, without the pressures of basic survival, and we’re alive, we survived Covid, we should be happy, right? Sometimes, I feel, freedom is an addiction that’s hard to kick, and between the Feminist texts and fiction about women who refuse to cave to societal moors and the constant negotiation with the several emotional, psychological and physical spaces I inhabit daily, the lore of freedom has never had me in a stronger iron grip than it does now. Half my friends invest in homes with their partners, are on their way to having children or are currently bringing up four-month-olds, the other half go to dive bars every alternate day, sleeping around with impunity, but an overall sense of meaning making persists through all of us.

Having effectively lost the last two years of my twenties to Covid and the subsequent lockdown, returning to an economically precarious reality meant rushing back on the money train in this capitalist hellscape, and it’s only now we’re taking stock of what does it really mean to be in our 30s.

There’s a sense that time is contracting, running out, a pervasive sense that our looks or our bodies won’t last forever, that maybe we should seriously consider having kids , the feeling soon waysided by the exhaustion of new parenthood, searching for meaning in careers or seeking balance after working nonstop in our 20s— and speculating all the while thanks to social media if others are enjoying happier relationships, better jobs, and fitter bodies. There’s a clear fork in the road of sorts; what does it look like to cave into the path of least resistance (better job, money, partner, home, kids), or the very real tendency to want to burn it all to the ground?

A friend says considering leaving a relationship in your early 30s is not the same as anytime in your 20s because your options might be limited, or your willingness to negotiate old ways of being with new people in your life might be compromised. So, then the question begging to be asked is; are we all choosing to stay in relationships out of a fear of the unknown, of trying our best to not end up alone? Or, is there a sense of maturity in knowing that this moment right here is as good as it could possibly be? There’s simply no way to truly know how to grapple with the weight of uncertainty— of love, of my own relationship with myself, the people I love, the things and placed I used to cherish once, my changing desires and self-image, at once volatile and cathartic.

When I was seventeen, a boy I was dating (let’s call him F) used to say a rather pithy thing— everything fades. He’s forty, married with a five-year-old child now, and I find myself returning to this seemingly innocuous statement and find it to be increasingly true. Everything does fade— the thrill of the new job or promotion, a swelling bank account, holding hands for the first time with the person you’ve just fallen in love with, attractive people whose glow you can bask in, social media followers. Recently, I went to the beach and felt like I was over both beaches and sunsets.

A lot of writing tends towards a certain romanticisation of the bad, the difficult, the unspeakable, and the unknown. Perhaps, that’s why I’ve always been attracted to writing to begin with. It’s the only space in life where it feels okay to not have any answers, where going off-track doesn’t feel terrifying, where taking breaks from the mundanity of keeping a job, a relationship, and other social constructs, alive, doesn’t feel like its laden with effort and guilt. Ultimately, it feels like a certain step towards making some kind of meaning in our lives mediated by late-stage capitalism and its attendant baggage.

A part of me wants to blame the weather for this malaise. I finished the final edits on my novel in September and from then on to sometime March, I had a flurry of visitors. Two of my best friends, some friends of my partner’s, visits to my father outside the country, a wonderful, protracted twelve days in the hills with two of my closest friends. The ocean was perfect, the sunsets never tiring, the breeze cool, nothing happened, nothing happened, and then one day, summer hit like the rug’s been pulled underneath your feet. The world used to feel like a big house with its doors open, and now it feels like a punch in the face everytime I step out.

October-March in Goa feels like a practical joke, the other shoe dropping, the surprise party waiting for you in the dark of your own house. Even the good things arrive like a jump scare. Sometimes, I sit by plants and let their leaves caress my face, as if it would ever be possible to get close enough to anything.

I’m in love, and then my partner leaves for New York and its dirty subways, dirtier parties, small hotel rooms in Soho, and the cold air laced with pot and indifference. I fall out of love, we say maybe we want to see other people, touch that feels foreign, chase elusive thrills as we hurtle towards death to remind ourselves that despite the weight on my hips and the slant of his shoulders, we are young. These twenty days apart felt like years had passed, histories convulsed. Economies failed and bars closed, all kinds of people loved each other and then stopped loving each other. Groups of friends splintered and reformed, we went to parties, nursed hangovers. We watched new shows and collectively mourned Logan Roy’s death. We all tried to get better at one thing or another, and mostly failed, and occasionally succeeded. We talked about our social media following, and the Dior show, and the box office numbers, the murders of gangsters, we followed court cases on same-sex marriage legislations, Covid numbers swelled again. Everyone wore one kind of shoes, and then everybody was wearing a different kind of shoes. Everyone tried to forgive one another. People I saw everyday disappeared into the churn of associations and commitments. People got famous, got married, got pregnant, got divorced, got over one another or never did.

Despite the warnings and despite the odds, despite the banks and the news and the government and the heartbreaks and the cars and the phones and the headlines, the cold ground turns warm and the flowers push their way up into the sunlight. All along the filthy sidewalks, the trees bloom white and pink and then neon. Petals lined the asphalt and the air smelled like laundry and gasoline. Nothing stops it; every argument fails. Nobody asks to be reborn, and no one can do anything about it.

All around the world, summer arrives with stunning inaccuracy. It’s spring equinox, and suddenly, without warning, everything changes. All the leaves of the tree outside my window wither and fall, until they start to grow back, one stem at a time. Summer here makes me feel hideous and unprepared— like that nightmare about showing up to take a test you didn’t study for, which was how I knew it must really be summer. If only I had planned ahead for this, I told myself, just like I tell myself every year. If only this time I had remembered to become a wholly different person before summer arrived.

But there’s no way to be prepared for it. The coastal winter bursts at the seams with possibility; the beauty’s exaggerated, nobody stays in their apartment. Good weather elbows and shoves its way inside. On the first day of coastal winter, I would forgive anything; the obnoxious music at election rallies, burning piles of garbage, traffic jams, stale fish. Nobody who ever went outside on a coastal winter afternoon could really believe there are no second acts in everyone’s lives.

But, summer? Summer is proof that things change. Can people change? How can I change my life, my habits, my patterns? Does change necessitate suffering? In summer, this change is literal and obvious, as real as the sweat between my shirt and my skin as I sit indoors and write this.

I talk about the weather because sometimes it feels productive to focus my energy on the inevitables. I think F was wrong. Nothing fades, everything changes. I know why people assume the people we love won’t change. It’s smart to even believe that we won’t change. It’s necessary to live within the scope of circumstance, to make plans based on honest assessments of capacity and faults, shared histories and future possibilities. I know how to be safe, because I have been looking at safety my entire life from the outside, as though peeking into a stranger’s house. Some hope is useful, a lot of hope can be dangerous.

Summer comes every year, whether I feel beautiful or not, and just like all miracles, it feels both miraculous and ordinary. The coastal winter tells me that everybody can get what they want, should they choose it. This unlikely world, together, reaches for the sun.

I go out, and my hair’s a mess, my makeup runs, I don’t feel beautiful but nobody cares. There’ll be another winter, and yet another summer. And, I’ll never be prepared, buy new versions of the same clothes, post old photos with new captions. Seasons will change whether I’m happy or not and even when I fail to adequately love the people I love, even when I miss my deadlines, even when I leave texts unanswered, even when I’m too old, or not a good enough friend or daughter. It comes whether I get up early or sleep in late, whether I manage my time well or poorly. It comes even if I don’t go outside. There’s nothing to do about it, and no way to earn it.

In the warm air, every risk is worth taking, and nobody can come up with a good reason to go home. And there’ll be many more such crisis; they’ll be neither miraculous, nor devastating. They’ll hum along, before things change again.

I believe it’s impossible for me to talk about an experience or a situation without plugging into its deepest, darkest rock bottom. In exploring what happens in this cavernous space not found easily, in the shadow self, in the parts we actively work to hide from others, in the spaces where shame, guilt, self-doubt grow. I suppose, it’s because of the idea of authenticity. I don’t believe I have many answers to provide to the world so my form of authentically engaging with it is to share my deepest experiences, in the hope of recognition, commiseration. In the hope of alleviating a singular, anxious loneliness that plagues everybody. I think the rock bottom is a glorious place to be. A place where the sense of self stands completely annihilated, because it’s only there you can reach the absolute truth. You can recognize what bits of you are in rebellion with your conditioning, with what’s expected of you as a human being, a woman, a man, a lover, a professional, a cog in the larger capitalist machinery, a consumer. Different communities have different terms for this experience. In the spiritual community, it’s called ‘being conscious,’ of our choices, of our patterns of thoughts, behaviours and consumptions, our relationship with our bodies and others. In Islam, it manifests as the Prophet’s teachings, as diktats which in essence are just a way to be a better person, in service of a more absolute truth which is that the self is a sum of other parts. In Buddhism, it’s the practise of detachment. Whatever term it make take, for me, it’s simply the practise of authenticity.

I want to talk about shame. For me, there’s two varieties of shame. One that arises when I feel like I’ve disappointed or failed to meet the expectations of others. This can play out in professional, social and familial circles. And another, the deeper kind, is the shame that arises from when I’m unable to stand up for myself, when I know I have forgone authenticity for approval. A deeply examined life will prove that this happens more often than we’d like to believe.

As children, we’re rarely taught the importance of being authentic, of saying ‘no',’ of voicing our disapproval, distaste, disagreement about a person or a situation. Whether it’s in school or larger family circles. In insidious ways, these systems meant to protect and support us, becomes tools of oppression. In Eastern cultures, placing the importance we do on family and community acts as a double-edged sword. Are we going to be rejected if we don’t comply with the larger norm? A tough endeavour when acceptance is what we most crave. But acceptance at what cost?

Fairly early on, I was certain about one things, which is that I didn’t exactly fit in. Child of a Hindu-Muslim marriage, immigrant kid, a young woman who didn’t fit the predominant beauty standard, a writer by profession, unmarried at 30 and so on. My rebellions were also quite pedestrian and expected, although bringing with them a fair share of shame and guilt and looking back, I realise I internalized it because they weren’t conscious choices. They were simply a reaction to the feeling of being oppressed or put into a box or the feeling that love and acceptance would only be granted to me on the basis of certain behaviours. It’s only now I realise those meaningless rebellions created a vortex of alienation around me that led me to seek professional help and people who could actually validate me for who I am and not for who they want/expect me to be. Naturally, that was an ugly process, kind of a second birth, as trite as that may sound but pain turned trite is still pain, as is deliverance.

Deliverance, to me, is the other side of hitting rock bottom. I know a lot of my friends right now are going through a major transitional shift in their psyches. We’ve just turned 30 or are at the cusp of it— we’re more sure of what we hold true or sacred, less prone to abandoning ourselves in unsafe interactions, more iffy about caving into the desires of others without examining their intentions, more suspicious of the world as we’re more sure of our place within it. There is a definite loss of innocence, as some might see it, but to me, it’s simply the illusions falling away. It’s the desire to show up authentically for ourselves and in the world at a time where authenticity is regarded with suspicion and disapproval that’s causing the innate tension we may be experiencing.

For me, this tension culminates into rock-bottom. The rock-bottom doesn’t look as sexy as certain films or TV shows will have you believe. I don’t sit out on my couch in sexy lingerie, drinking and smoking myself to death with smudged-mascara. Rock-bottom looks like being unable to get out of bed for an entire day, not doing the things that I know will make me feel better such as exercising or having a home-cooked meal or brushing my teeth or eating at all. It manifests as irritation with all my loved ones, the need to hide myself from the world because my sense of self feels splintered, fragmented into various bits seeking approval from various others. It’s a terrifying, and a familiar place. And in that familiarity and terror also lies the truth.

The truth is that authenticity will always remain a deeply lonely pursuit. And any kind of movement will feel sluggish, any belief half-baked. The brain will invent lies to protect me in the short-term, but will manifest as disease and depression in the long-term. In these moments, I have no choice but to listen to myself, to start the process of integration where I can return to the world battered, but lighter. Tired but more sure of myself. Lonely but not alone.

All of this is to say that if you, like me, find yourself grappling with the rock bottom, don’t be afraid to plug its depths, knowing that you will emerge a different you. A new you. It happened for me. I’m back on here, doing what I do best, knowing that this is all I have to really do, before the rest falls into place.

The Bad

House of Dragon - so bad, so cringe, just. sex and violence. Prequel to Game Of Thrones really struggles hard to live up to the hype of original GoT. Of course, the last few season so GoT didn’t live upto the hype of the books and now the show certainly doesn’t live up to the hype of the insanely successful series. It wants to be a greatest hits playlist of Westeros at its meatiest. Family members make promises they cannot keep as they connive and betray each other, in secret and in plain sight. There is jousting, romping and fighting. There are dragons, of course. There is a drunken orgy, an axe to the face, a caesarean without anaesthetic, seeping wounds, severed limbs and severed organs, too. George RR Martin’s world struts its way back on to our screens with confidence but makes little sense. The CGI is better but not the plot or the storyline.

Obviously, it is about the Targaryen dynasty, and though other familiar names are mentioned – a Tully here, a Stark there, an arrogant Lannister dropping by – this is the Targaryens’ story. With such detail, if it had darted between Houses and their various seats of power, then I am not sure I would have been able to keep up.

Ravenous fans of Game of Thrones may be pleased at first, but it quickly becomes clear that despite drawing from several of Martin’s short stories, the source material is as slight as J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices, with studios left to either fill in the blanks or hope that fandoms won’t mind the ones that remain.

Dracula - A four and a half hour long disappointing, bait-and-switch pastiche of a mess. While the new series is similar to Sherlock in structure, with three 90-minute episodes, its ambitions are a little less clear. It doesn’t set out to be a modern-day take on Dracula at first; instead, it reinterprets Bram Stoker’s original novel across a wider canvas. It starts in a similar place: Jonathan Harker, the hapless 19th century real estate appraiser, is sent to Transylvania to mediate Count Dracula’s long-distance purchase of land in England. Dracula quickly begins to deviate from its source material. The series immediately suggests Harker might meet a fate that’s very different from the one in the novel, the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing is now a nun named Agatha Van Helsing, and the rules of vampire fiction that Stoker’s novel established are slowly picked at. Unfortunately, the show isn’t actually interested in being as subversive or different as it leads you to believe. If the entire series had maintained the sense of humor and gruesomeness of the first episode, during which Dracula tosses a severed head at a group of nuns like a bridal bouquet, it might have been among the best adaptations of the source material. In the present, in a concluding episode that feels half-written, and has none of the compelling weirdness of the previous two episodes. Hell, there’s barely any action, with much of the time devoted to Dracula adjusting to modern life (with the requisite jokes about the internet and feminism) and interminable conversations about the nature and science of vampirism.

(spoiler ahead)

The tragic-romantic ending in no way flows with anything that happens up to that point, and feels completely unearned. It suddenly gives Dracula a soul where no evidence of one existed before, and effectively negates the most entertaining part of the miniseries. Bang’s take on Dracula is witty and philosophical, but he’s no misunderstood antihero crossing oceans of time to find his lost love. He’s a monster, who really seems to enjoy what he does, and that’s so rare in these uncertain economic times.

Though Bang brings a lot of “this Dracula fucks” energy to his performance, it’s surprisingly restrained in that regard. Oh sure, here Dracula doesn’t discriminate between men and women when it comes to victims (and if that bothers you, I suggest you read up on the life of Bram Stoker), but it feels as though the creators drew a very distinct line they were unwilling to cross.

The Good

Dopesick - This eight-part drama unpicks the immorality and greed that led to the rise of “miracle painkiller” OxyContin. It’s based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Beth Macy. The show tackles it from all sides. The miniseries comprises three strands.

The first is the tale of Dr Samuel Finnix, played with commendable unshowiness by Michael Keaton. Finnix is a devoted doctor in a tiny Appalachian mining town, targeted by Purdue as part of its mission to overcome doctors’ reluctance to prescribe opioids for long-term use because of their well-documented addictive qualities. He is persuaded by eager young Purdue rep Billy Cutler (Will Poulter) to start some patients on the new drug. An early prescription goes to Betsy (Kaitlyn Dever), who works in the mines alongside her father, and suffers a back injury. She can’t afford to miss work, especially as she and her girlfriend are saving to start a new life in a more welcoming town. As she becomes dependent on OxyContin, Betsy’s story combines the impoverished circumstances, bad luck and sense of hope that turned such towns into ground zero for an epidemic so explosive it would virtually remake the country. Almost the first words Finnix speaks on screen are at a hearing in 2005, speaking about his patients: “I can’t believe how many of them are dead now.”

The second strand concerns the legal efforts to pursue Purdue and its owners, the Sackler family. It is largely through two US attorneys and the composite character of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) deputy director Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) that we come to understand the dangerously porous nature of the boundary between public and private work – allowing, for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators to leave government employment to work for the people they had previously been regulating. We also see how Purdue’s marketing strategy changed attitudes towards pain and pain management among both the general public and the medical profession, and appreciate the massaging and outright abrogation of truth and responsibility required to create a market for OxyContin in the first place.

The third strand focuses on the Sacklers – specifically Richard (Michael Stuhlbarg)– the prime mover behind making OxyContin palatable for wider use in order to supersede a lucrative patent held by the company, which is about to run out. He takes a lesson from his Uncle Arthur’s playbook, who was commissioned by 1960s pharma giant Roche to develop a marketing campaign for their anti-anxiety medication Valium.

Abhay and I were a sobbing mess once the series was done and immediately devoured all the Opioid-adjacent content available online. There’s at times way too much going on in the show, with the story jumping between timelines, the beginning and perpetuating of the full-blown Opioid crisis that’s now snowballed into a fentanyl problem. It is perhaps best experienced as a companion piece to the excoriating documentary on the same subject, The Crime of the Century.

Into The Inferno - Halfway through watching footage of throbbing magma in this unnerving documentary, I welled up, embarrassingly. There is a nihilistic awe with which Herzog presents his primeval images of churning red lava, pulsing beneath the Earth’s crust with their terrible destructive power. He flies over volcanoes in a helicopter and looks down directly into the boiling epicentre. It triggers a kind of Conrad-esque horror. Or perhaps ecstasy. Two sides of the same coin with Herzog.

In carrying forth with his tradition of documenting man in nature (in Grizzly Man, Herzog sets out with a a thesis: that Timothy Treadwell’s life as a “kind warrior” protecting the grizzly bears of the Alaska and his tragic but predictable death becomes a kind of allegory for his troubled soul, his alienation from humanity, and ultimately, the unsentimental view of nature towards all mankind), in Into The Inferno, despite its title, Herzog does not explicitly compare volcanoes to hell. The nearest he comes to theology is a final monologue, delivered in his unmistakable rasp: “It is a fire that wants to burst forth and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike.”

Like Klaus Kasinki in Aguirre and Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, this documentary hinges on the beliefs and fears of many such men contending with their own mortality; Clive Oppenheimer, an English volcanologist, a tribal chief from Vanatuau, Kampiro Kayrento (the fossil hunter). Herzog travels to North Korea, Iceland, Indonesia and Ethiopia and investigates people and how their Fate is intertwined with both the unstoppable forces of nature and the capricious sands of geopolitics.

Herzog casts an anthropologist’s eye on them, and sees how these people have developed customs and rituals that are part fearful, part celebratory. They bow the knee to the volcano; they draw strength from its awful power but also cower and convert their fear into religious myths. In Indonesia, locals have evolved the legend of a supernatural American GI called John Frum who will one day emerge from the volcano to spread his bounty. Herzog's camera sits alongside Paektu Mountain, a huge volcano that’s considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean people. A group of young men in uniform approach, marching in formation. We, along with Herzog, assume they are soldiers, but it turns out they are university students, come to pay homage to the volcano. They sing, and as they do, Herzog pans across the line of them and solemnly entreats us to consider the same spectacle ever happening with university students in California.

"Everything we saw was an act of presentation, and we went for it," says Herzog. "There is no way to see this enigmatic country other than how it wants to present itself."

Soon we discover that Kim Il-Sung, who fought the Japanese and became the first president of the country (eventually declared "president for eternity," Herzog informs us), established his secret military base at the volcano, effectively co-opting the country's religious mythology about its own origin to establish his place in its pantheon of gods. Several guides take us around the mountain to different sculptures and, eventually, to the secret base itself, which Herzog says is a place that carries roughly as much weight in the North Korean imagination as Jesus’s birthplace.

Into the Inferno is less interested in science than it is in humanism, in prodding the civilizations that live in the shadow of these volcanoes. Every civilization has tales of its own creation and of future apocalypse — what if both were contained in a mountain, and that mountain loomed over your life? Imagine living beside a mountain that both gave rise to your world and could wipe it out at any moment. Would you fear it? Worship it? Sing about it? All of the above?

The Bad (but pretending to be Good)

The Humans

Family drama through the lens of horror. We’ve seen it before in Hereditary, The Shining, Us. It’s adapted from a 2016 award-winning Broadway play by Stephen Karam and the result is a kind of expressionistic horror in the vein of Polanski. Family gathering at Thanksgiving where the dysfunctions and micro-tragedies of all the characters come into sharp focus. These people look like the last group of humans left alive after some apocalyptic catastrophe, the remnants of homo sapiens being watched and examined at a distance by aliens. The grimly damp and undecorated duplex in which they have assembled could almost be a mass hallucination, triggered by a trauma worse than anything they’re talking about. Karam and his cinematographer Lol Crawley will often record their conversations at a distance, as if they have these people under surveillance. Often, the camera will home in on the damp patches bubbling and cracking the walls, or the clanking old pipes along which weird echoey sounds travel. Sometimes a conversation will take place behind a fiercely detailed closeup of a pigeon feather on a window sill, which has been torn off by one of the anti-vermin spikes. The impending sense of doom and the uncanny takes The Humans beyond miserablism. Are these people sleepwalkers? Or is this all a dream or memory that one of them is having? Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.

Or is it just trauma from the experience of shifting into a new house in New York when you aren’t rich?

Vacations are a great way to get away from it all. And, I did. I got away from it all. I didn’t open my laptop screen for the two weeks (okay, maybe I did twice), I replied to work messages curtly, every time I got sucked into a vortex of I must do this or this is pending, I got pulled into the 90th stimulus of the day by way of a sculpture exhibition, a fluffy hypoallergenic Persian cat I could actually cradle on my lap, an excellent cup of cortado, the pavements which looked like two-lane highways, trendy 20-something hipsters in bucket hats and bootcut jeans with piercings and flaming red hair, older men catching several anchovies with enviable dexterity and indifference towards their skill, the deceptive calmness and blueness of the Bosphorus, the uncanny similarity in the whiffs and scents of the city and the glaring differences evident in its excellent urban planning, the wealth reflected in the public transport system, the heated marble at a Turkish hamam and all the other trappings that come with when you can escape what you know.

In this new shiny place, nobody knows who you are. As you lug your body around, the one that’s still struggling with the inevitable weight gain, successfully avoiding thinking about how you’ve spent 3 decades on this planet but still aren’t quite sure how taxes work, are yet to invest a single penny and often forget to dry yourself after showers. 30. That age where everything begins to catch up, or feels like it will, or society reminds you that it certainly will sooner rather than later. Your boyfriend notices fine lines around your eyes and you laugh it off but inside, you’re smarting. No matter how much you diet or workout, you gain the pounds so you fuck it and eat an ice-cream at midnight because everyday is a tough day when you have a job and bills to pay.

But, when you’re on holiday, all of reality as you know it seems to fade away, a glimmer in the distance, a chore for later.

Nobody in this new city knows about how you were 25 and much hotter, although definitely way more dumb. You can subsume yourself into the variety of crowds milling on the streets, gaze at paintings, well up while reading about Kemal obsessively collecting commonplace objects that belonged to his beloved, Füsun: her white pearls, yellow dress with flowers and a lace neckline, ticket stubs, half-drank Raki, three cups of Turkish coffee drank in anticipation, movie posters, a white silk scarf with yellow daisies, a gallery of women who cheated on their alcoholic husbands and had their photos published in the Turkish newspaper with their eyes blacked out, a steel iron like the one your dadi used, a collection of fine-toothed combs made of wood, ivory, and plastic. You think of the manipulative sentimentality of it all and you cry. You didn’t cry when your you lost your grandparents or right after a cruel break up but here, you want to sob. There’s a young couple taking selfies with the half-drunk Raki so you resist the urge.

Your hotel is located right across from a brothel (and a laundromat, thank god) and although, it’s a 4-star with luxe rooms and friendly hotel staff, most nights as you get to your room, you witness transactions of the purest kind. Women in short dresses and no underwear parade up and down the street lit in halogen blue as you feel a wave of relief before collapsing on your bed. Big cities are hard and they knock you down even when you’re just passing through. You can turn up at a club where nobody knows you and marvel at the German influence in the space-disco/techno music the DJ plays. Later, you chat with him in broken Turkish and learn he wants to come play in your city. The world’s made up of contradictions and stunning similarities.

When you end up at a fine dining restaurant not dressed right and the waiters look down at you, it’s funny, an adventure. It feels less like an attack on your socioeconomic status, more a nod to your rebellion. You go to more art galleries and take artsy photos, locate the artists on IG and tag them. In this new city, you could be someone who knows and gets art. On your birthday eve, you can’t get any bookings for dinner so you end up at a sushi restaurant with a stunning view and eat too much sushi while two Greek girls seated so close, you can see the bumpy texture of their skin beneath their make-up, sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you. You’re like, “fuck, people just want to be loved.” You go to another bar, people stare at you, maybe you stare at them. Either way, everything feels like it’s bursting at the seams with possibility.

You pet so many cats, you notice how the cats here are more affectionate than the ones where you live. Perhaps, it’s you who’s more affectionate though.

You drop your pretensions and go for a live concert of a pop band. You barely drink and sing out loud— two things you always thought could never happen without the other. You climb up fortresses with majestic views but what gets you is a moment on the street that feels like a tableau.

A half-finished çay, coffee stains on a wooden table, a bike helmet, a crushed packet of cigarettes.

You go to the countryside, phallic structures made from volcanic stones with bright red flags with white crescent moons, flying proudly atop them. You go for a hot air balloon ride, 3000 feet up in the air, packed in like sardines with 20 other people but what gets you is the nightguard at your hotel. An Afghani man, Hazara you presume, who helps you open a wine bottle even though he’s never touched a drop of alcohol himself, who practises his English while reading Tolstoy and copying paragraphs from it while crossing out the protagonist’s name and adding his— Bismillah Faizi. Your heart breaks and you don’t know what to do.

The moments that get you are the ones where you sit down, tired, after a trek and a mountain dog snuggles up against your leg. Or, when your early morning flight is delayed by 3 hours and you eat cheese toast with salami and coffee outside an airport smaller than the Shimla airport and equally beautiful as cops packing serious heat gather in groups drinking their coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. A cop who looks like a Turkish James Spader sizes you up and you think of how it would be creepy if it wasn’t so absurd.

By day 10, you’re so spoilt by the good coffee that even an average cup tips you over the edge. Your best friend braids your hair on a ferry on the Bosphorus and you feel like you want to remain in the moment forever.

But, you can’t. The last day inevitably creeps up on you, bringing with it all the hysteria and anticipation of something good, ending. You throw a fit, so do your co-travellers, the roads have too much traffic, the bars are packed, but you make a night of it anyway. You pack your suitcase in a drunken haze at 4 am, convinced you’ve forgotten something behind and grab the last coffee and croissant before you’re thrust into the unforgiving, clinical desperation of an airport.

The security takes your jam and pickled chillies away, a local specialty. In your drunken haze, you forgot to put them into your check-in luggage. On the flight, you think of the muck you’ve been mired in non-stop for two years, how if you liked you could hold onto the glow of the last two weeks for at least six more months (no harm in trying). You come back with the shitty grin of the asshole who’s had way too good a time and you avoid everything that’s normal to you for as long as you can.

📷 Abhay Puri

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I can’t believe it’s the second week of the The Weekly and I’m already late. But to quote The Canterbury Tales, “for better than never is late; never to succeed would be too long a period.”

So, here goes.

What I’m Reading

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Hailed as 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 by Time Magazine, Cha’s deftly crafted debut novel alternates between the perspectives of four different women in Seoul as they navigate romantic and financial crises, filial expectations, career aspirations and deeply held traumas. Each of the women dreams of escape from her hapless situation through different routes: Kyuri, through her beauty; Miho, through her art; Wonna, through her unborn child; and Ara, through a K-pop star. Cha, who grew up in South Korea, Hong Kong and the U.S., imbues each character with her own unique voice as they all fight through a grim depiction of modern-day Seoul. All are struggling financially.

“Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn't even enough to buy a house,” Wonna laments.

Because of Kyuri's successful plastic surgeries, men hire her to be their companion at after-work "room salons," giving her an enviable stock of designer purses and spending money. Sujin is saving up for surgery to attain the same face as Kyuri, but Cha shows how all the women are impacted by these standards. Ara's work as a hairdresser makes her literally invested in part of the beauty industry, and even though artist Miho hopes her talent will allow her to rise on her own, she finds herself dependent on the whims of a wealthy boyfriend.

“For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That’s just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you,” says Miho.

At times, the voices of the many characters can blur and the timeline can be confusing. Wonna is the least developed character and interacts with the others only in a plot twist at the end of the book.

However, taken together, Cha's empathetic portraits allow readers to see the impact of economic inequity, entrenched classism, and patriarchy on her hard-working characters' lives. Sadness and a sense of dislocation are found in all the characters. Although the lifestyle for which they opt is dazzling and glamorous, the pitfall of disillusionment is always there waiting, as the wealthy and elite class of Korean men seem only interested in commodifying and objectifying them.

Cha grew up in the United States, South Korea, and Hong Kong and is a former Seoul-based culture and travel editor for CNN.

3.5/5

What I’m Listening To

Sacred Space with Radha & Dane Majors by NTS Radio

Ambient, dub, soul jazz— Radha curates these monthly mixes for NTS. For this one, @danemajors takes over with a bag of euphoric downtempo, dreamy pop, and lush street soul tune.

4.5/5

What I’m Crying To

Vulnerability Study by Solmaz Sharif

your face turning from mine

to keep from cumming

8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl

baba holding his pants

up at the checkpoint

a newlywed securing her updo

with grenade pins

a wall cleared of nails

for the ghosts to walk through

20/5

What I’m Watching

Spencer by Pablo Larrain

This sad, moody, orchestral film had so much potential. Sweeping, surreal imagery of the English countryside captured on film by French cinematographer, Claire Mathon, Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood scores the film with lush orchestration, Kristen Stewart’s heady, tear-jerking acting chops and Pablo Larraine’s intense character study (Jackie, Ema, A Fantastic Woman) yet somehow, the film falls short of evoking much, apart from a general contempt and dislike for all of the royalty, including the former Princess of Wales.

For starters, Sally Hawkins (the brilliant protagonist from Shape of Water) is wholly underused, perhaps appearing in 3-4 scenes with no pivotal role to play in the narrative, ultimately ending in a twist ending that falls flat. For another, the score is great but it often overshadows a good scene or saves a weak one. The dialogue by Steven Knight (Locke, Peaky Blinders, Serenity) gives me the feeling that everybody in the Royal family only speaks in riddles and clever epithets. Princess Diana was a larger than life figure and it’s tough to say something about her that hasn’t already been said yet so I understand Larrain’s inability to give us something truly immersive. That being said, he did manage to achieve that effect with Jackie. I’m not sure if it was more to do with Natalie Portman or the kind of public figure Jackie Kennedy was.

For a film that meant to humanize Diana, it only left me with the feeling of being further alienated from her.

3/5

Internet Moment Of The Week

After Slapgate, Will Smith was spotted at the Mumbai airport and is reported to be visiting Sadhguru. To seek atonement, perhaps? Let’s see how this develops. But until then, remember to pay attention to the matters that actively need addressing in this country: saving the soil! Don’t forget to log onto Sadhguru’s merch store for some fresh 🍋 drip

0/5

And, if you have the time to spare, have a look at the fresh spate of communal hell that simmered across 9 states and 15 days in April culminating in shops and houses in Muslim-dominant areas being scorched and raised to the ground.

0/5

See ya next Sunday!

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I’m doing it— I’m going in for the low-hanging fruit that is recommendations delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday. I’m pretty sure I have adult ADHD so can’t say how long this sub-category will last or if it’ll find any love amongst you all but it’s better than writing to you once every three months. Oh, also I finished the second entire restructuring of my novel today so everything feels good and effortless. For now. I also made a cover photo for it! Please appreciate my abysmal design efforts, hugely improved by Isha. I also rate everything out of 5 because why the hell not.

Let’s get into it.

What I’m reading

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

I finished this book last month and I have to say, for somebody who didn’t like her debut nonfiction book Three Women, Taddeo’s really hit a home run with this one. Story of a young, barely-hinged, 30-something narrator, Joan is voracious and obsessive. She is addicted to love and its analogues — in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else.

The novel opens with an actual bang: Joan’s married boss, with whom she’s had a protracted affair, bursts into a restaurant where she’s having dinner with another man and shoots himself in front of her. (No spoilers here: It literally happens in the first paragraph.) The dead man is Vic, the avuncular creative director of the Manhattan ad agency where Joan works, a besotted sugar daddy who mentored, promoted, bedded, spoiled and stalked her. The memory of their affair hangs like Spanish moss over the first half of the book.

“I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted,” Joan says. “It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.” After Vic’s death, Joan sets off on a cross-country road trip, pausing briefly for a one-night stand with a traveling salesman she meets in Texas, whom she seduces simply because his name is John Ford. “Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media,” she explains.

Her journey ends in Southern California, where she rents a house overlooking Topanga Canyon. Joan, a quintessential New Yorker, is comically immune to its charms.

In Los Angeles her days are filled with ruminating and shoplifting. She gets a job as a barista and meets a variety of men who want to sleep with her, including Lenny, her senile landlord, and River, a 22-year-old dropout who lives in a yurt. She pops pills and answers text messages from Vic’s angry widow, and goes out of her way to befriend a woman named Alice — a celebrity yoga instructor she spotted on a magazine cover back in New York, “one of those aspirational magazines for people who make more than five million dollars a year.”

This, it turns out, is the entire reason for Joan’s West Coast odyssey: Unbeknown to Alice, she is Joan’s half sister, the product of their father’s extramarital affair. Their growing friendship prompts a reckoning, and a shocking revelation about Joan’s past.

I am interested in what a writer like Lisa Taddeo has to say, what she has to tell us with her debut novel. By all indications—the book jacket, the blurbs, the marketing—Animal is a feminist revenge killing tale. To a certain extent, it is, but it also feels reductive to label Animal as such. Yes, there is revenge, there is a reckoning, and there is a killing, but they seem secondary. Unlike other pieces of pop culture and art that revel in the what (the violence, the rage, the revenge), Animal is concerned with the why—it is a novel that is concerned with making us aware of all the reasons the what happens. 

Towards the third act, the plot overtakes the character but it’s so deliciously done, the character is everything I want to be but won’t allow myself to be, that I had a hard time putting it down.

4/5

What I’m Listening To

Ambient Resistance

This playlist has 17 hours and 10 minutes of uninterrupted ambient bliss. With favourites like Huerco S., Jan Jelinek, Susumu Yokota, Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, E.M.M.A, Car Culture, Max Richter, Mica Levi & Yves Tumor— this playlist is delicious, weird, sad, ethereal and sometimes, downright fucked up. It helps me sleep, it helps me during yoga, it helps me feel sadder when I’m sad and most importantly, it helps me focus & write!

My favourites?

Mica Levi’s Love - original soundtrack for Under The Skin, that super creepy Jonathan Glazer sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial disguising itself as a human female, driving around Scotland attempting to lure unsuspecting men into her van.

Isao Tomita’s Suite Bergamasque: Claire De Lune No.3 - the brilliant Japanese composer does a rendition of Debussy’s in pure synthesizers, for which he won a grammy. A lot of you will vilify me for this but an upgrade on the original, if that was even possible.

Jan Jelinek’s Do Dekor - From his 2001 album, Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, second album by the German producer. As the title suggests, this is exactly what the album does and it does it very well. Minimal, heavily textured, with a rich sound, the bulk of Loop-finding-jazz-records is given over to a more idiosyncratic pulse, which sheds more light on what Jelinek is doing with his peculiar mixing ideas.

Yamaneko’s Shaped Like Kaladeiscopes - UK born, Japan based producer, he does it all— ambient, new age, techno and 8-bar grime. From his 2020 album, Spa Commissions 2. Get ready for hypnotically arranged vocal samples, aquatic chime pieces and wind-swept harps to create some of a distinctive soundscape.

5/5

What I’m Crying To

I hate explaining poetry so I won’t even try 5/5

What I’m Watching

Taylor Tomlinson’s Look At You Netflix special

Dead mothers, therapy, antidepressants, bipolar disorders, fingering & Jesus— nothing’s off the table in this slightly unhinged stand-up special 5/5

Internet Moment Of The Week

Ranbir kissing Alia’s maang tika during #ralia - a wedding I didn’t need to know anything about ever.

My current icon, Julia Fox calling her book “not a memoir but a masterpiece.” An oldie but a goldie nonetheless.

5/5

See ya next Sunday!

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