Bring biscuits, bread, and jam; bring books, a mat, two chairs, hot water, coffee powder, slim pouches of lemon tea. Give your seeking the nature of a picnic so you do not have to face how hollow and bottomless is waiting.

Lose something. Give something to the wind. Losing the way or losing the light does not count—they’re not yours in the first place. Drop a hundred. Chip a nail. Shed an earring. A small ache is a part of your days and today must be no different. For the rare thing to happen the usual must occur exactly the same.


Did I say, bring the spotting scope? Must I say the obvious? You are not supposed to be able to see things that far with mere human eyes. You are not supposed to see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the Crab Nebula. But you share the want to know the unknown, the predisposition to yearning, with your ancestors. You share it with the person who made a glass with which to see things that far; you share it with the person who turned their gaze, for the first time, to things that weren’t us. Bring that scope. Look across.

Finally, ask everyone else what they know.


The shepherds who walk the desire lines, the villagers who work the farm, the drivers who move people, goods, information. They know things. The mother and the cub that roam the red mountains were last seen hunting thirteen days ago. They must be hungry. If you see thangkar, the vultures, circling the sky, there’s a fresh kill; if it’s cha thago, the magpies, it’s the carcass after the leopard is done. The feast takes time; the leopard would not leave its kill for two or three days.

Everyone knows something. Especially the man whose face resembles an eagle, who is driving out now because the sun is coming down, his day’s bread is earned. He has the photos of The One you are seeking. He will stop on his own—you won’t have to ask. He finds his duty to tell you what he knows. Look towards the right of the red bush on the top of the peak your scope is already pointing to. Seeing far requires more eyes than your own.

Even then it will take you long. Even after you have everything you need. You will need to squint and strain your gaze. You will have wait for the slightest movement to sieve the real from the camouflage. And then, your prying eyes will notice them: mother, cub, and the hunger that is like your own. You will receive your startlement—but it won’t be just the two snow leopards tearing their kill. It will be how diminutive their bodies are against the enormity of the mountains. Your eyes will need a moment to adjust to the scale.

Some people will say you’re lucky, very lucky, but all you will think is how certain this outcome was once you arrive at three thousand five hundred metres to come in the path of something. See the thing you always had instead of the ability to see far ahead: hindsight. You’re doing your best with it.

After the spotting, your belief will return. And don’t be spooked: so will that dropped earring.

What has the chance to accumulate then are the things we return to. What has the chance to compose us are rituals. The annual trip with friends that survives distance and changing lives. The twenty minutes with a book before bed. The Tuesday evening class we never miss to practise our notes. The sketchbook in the bag we reach for while waiting for approval at work.

How we spend our days returning to the things we love is how we spend our lives. This reframed version allows me to focus on a more interesting question: What is worth returning to?

Literature. Noticing. Curiosity. Silence.

If these are some of your answers too, then I have an invitation for you. An invitation to three monthly rituals.

One to read. One to write. One to listen. All to lead an examined life.

You’re invited to the Interior-Exterior Essay Club.

It is a corner on the internet I’ve built where we gather around essays. Why? So we can practise paying attention to language, to our feelings, to lives different from ours, to ideas that can potentially stretch and shape our own.

Starting August 2026, every month, hundreds of people from across the globe will gather to:
1. Read a single essay, together and slowly.
2. Write towards a question, a feeling, or an idea inspired by that essay.
3. Listen to a remarkable writer open up about their relationship to the form and what they notice in the works they return to.

Some of the writers joining us for the guest sessions:
Sumana Roy in Aug
Paromita Vohra in Oct
Tishani Doshi in Nov
Ranjit Hoskote in Dec
Rega Jha in Jan
Manjushree Thapa in Feb
Arati Kumar-Rao in March
This is a growing list.

Join the Essay Club

Our inaugural session on 8 August, 2026 has Sumana Roy talking about Disobedient Essays. Whether you join now or six months from now, your membership gives you access to sessions and notes released during the period you are a member.

If you face any issues with the registration or have questions that aren’t answered here, please reply to this email. If you’d like to gift a membership—which is a wonderful idea—then head here.

I’m very grateful to Vaishnavi Sharma who built and designed the website with so much love and is helping turn it into a home for announcements, conversations, and material for the club.

If this is not the right time or the right thing for you at the moment, thank you for indulging this brief departure from the regular programming. A new essay from me will be in your inbox soon :)

Best,
Ankita

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And while I will never deny the magic of that spacio…

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2. Only vulnerability makes the right conditions for vulnerability.
   

3. After a round of sourdough with sherab (Tibetan chilli garlic mixture), seabuckthorn jam, and apricot marmalade, we sit by the Zanskar river to write. I ask the group to think about the word ‘water’. They each have hats and scarves and sunglasses on, and I am relieved they have not walked out in protest against the unexpectedly hot sun. Instead, they sit there, making constellations in their notebooks—mapping ideas, memories, and associations around the elixir of life. A raft of tourists, bulked up in lifejackets, is passing by, carried slowly by the stream that is on its way to meet the Indus. The people on the raft, like heads following a tennis ball across a court in unison, lock their gaze on our group, who are deep in their notebooks, deep in a whirlpool, deep in the adventure that is to meditate upon your thoughts.

   

4. Travelling is a reframing of being lost. Or being lost is a reframing of travelling. Our phones out of network, the rocky valley devoid of vegetation, on a gravelly path, we follow the car ahead of us, whose driver drives up purposefully until not. He comes to a halt, and we come to a halt, and we speak aloud what we have been feeling all along. “We are lost.” It must be that this is only our second day, that we have ‘time’ to be lost, or that we all want to keep the other calm, that we are laughing. We are laughing and searching for home. We are laughing and we are lost. The new place we are heading to and the new place we are lost in, what is the difference except for intention? The confident driver, whom we blame for our late arrival, and whom we confront later, says, “Aren’t you here to travel?”

5. Everyone has a style. For Ruby, it’s her humour cutting everything sharp. Prajakta tells everything like a story, even her feelings rest behind characters. Shivani has a knack for neat structures, swift progressions, and a callback at the end that gives her essays a circular nature. Everyone has a style, and I try to see it for them, to spotlight it back to them. This is my job. For Sophia, who already writes in visceral metaphors, who is unhesitant to be vulnerable, the best I can offer is an attentive space where she can see the kind of effect her writing has, so she can leave surer of its place in the world. Sumesh writes with confident specificity that holds his own way of seeing the world; Pooja has the gift of saying things as they are without ridding them of their softness; Rhythm shines in precise sentences that keep the greyness of the world intact. Vishal arrives at the sessions forgetting his pen, losing his reading list, and certain he has nothing new to say. I make it my job to make V love writing. I don’t have a separate strategy except what I had already planned: every morning begin with a selection of writing, read aloud, read again, picked apart.

   
   On the third day, V shares his personal essay with me in private. “You are philosophical, and it’s a good thing,” I tell him. Throughout the six days, I am holding in my palms Annie Dillard’s insistence about the necessary work of a workshop. She said, and I paraphrase, that a workshop must leave writers with an unmistakable sense of their potential and the confidence to expand the scope of their attempts.
   
   On the last day, without my prompting, V writes something. It is a 3-page essay, which I am told I won’t get to read until maybe a year later, in which he has asked many whys about things he assumed he knew. “I am so happy about this essay,” he says, the third time that day. He is glowing in the way you do when you dive into a pool, and instead of drowning, discover your buoyancy.

5. I am woken up by the soft orange sky streaming through my window at five fifteen in the morning. I left the curtains drawn open just for that. I can see, down in the field, someone’s at the scope, tracing the brown and muddy mountain range across from us, looking for something.

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1. Two hours before a hailstorm, the wind is soft, the fields in the lowest exposure of brown and green, and hanging above, a river’s worth of a grey cloud stretches over the entire expanse that forms the frame of my eyes. How everything peaks to its most beautiful before it goes wrong, like shiny lucidity arriving at the disposition of a sick man hours be…

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The Dancing Girl is a bronze sculpture, discovered in the southern settlements of Mohenjo-daro—a civilisation unearthed in the excavations of the 1920s by the Archaeological Survey of India and…

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1. To say I walk to regulate my temperature is only half-truth. Yes, it gets chillier as the day progresses here, and a long walk in this mostly hilly terrain immediately acclimatises me; walking is not a chore but an impossible-to-ignore yearning. The village I have been in these past few weeks is surrounded by expanses of fields, and the fields are surro…

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Writing is easier to postpone than almost anything else. A sink full of dishes somehow feels more urgent than the image that emerged in your head. A notification on the phone feels louder than the persistent ping of the essay that’s in the drafts. That’s why we have the Writer’s Table and our monthly write-along sessions.

The details of our upcomi…

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Becoming, no matter the seduction of great starts, happens in the great middle.

2.

Just as the earth moves around the sun, orbit after shifting orbit, so does living feel like returning to the same questions - altered, shaped, edited. What then is a new beginning if not an iteration? What do we keep writing if not the same poem?

3.

What does a bushchat kn…

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