Close your eyes. Remember, remember. When you feel barren, like nothing can flourish, remember the rain. Allow yourself a fallow period. Time to rest. To wait. To honour the silence. Let your seeds wear their coats. Give them time to shed layers. To emerge. They’ll know when. Wait for the clouds to come. For the rain to seep into your skin. Renewal will come. Just turn to the rain.

Subscribe now

This emerged as a jugalbandi between and ’s and ’s Poetry Imitation Club. The prompt shared was ‘Five things I learn from the rain’. The list of five coalesced into this piece when I returned to it after a week spent at Kunjana’s club. Can’t recommend both spaces enough if you’re looking for quiet spaces of nurture and inspiration.

There’s a colour I loved 
that infuses 
when you pour hot water
over threads of zaffran
in a cup.

Perhaps you know it by another name? 
saffron 
a colour I once claimed.

I found it in my favourite saree
a kota cotton my grandmother wore
that drapes across the hips
light as a breeze
then drifts up to graze my shoulder.

I found it in genda
hot bright orange
whose petals I would pull apart
to adorn my front door
when Diwali came around every year.

It fluttered in my room
when sunlight filtered 
through chequered curtains 
to dress my bedroom
and bathe the walls  
in orange hues.

But somewhere down the line
we parted ways.

It happened when I began to see
how a flag in its colour was
waved in threat
a weapon to wield fear 
in the hearts of others.

When it was hoisted 
atop a dome
centuries old 
marked to be torn down
axe hammering against stone.

The country I call home
is now shouting 
from every advertisement and 
pre-recorded voice call
show me proof that you belong.

Election card, aadhaar, passport
no one knows kya chalega
but prove your membership
or be dispatched to no man’s land
forever a foreigner.

For many years 
we remained estranged
saffron and I
till my saree peeped out again, asking
won’t you wear me one more time? 

Can anyone own a colour
squeeze it into a box 
of singular identity
one tenor?
Not a chance
I can choose
to don my hair, my body, my home
claim its many hues as my own.

Subscribe now

This was written in response to a prompt A colour I’ve begun to like at hosted by and . If you’re looking for a daily, doable practice to show up for your creative dreams, I can’t think of a better one than the home they have built. Much gratitude also to for reading and sharing her thoughts on this.

If I were a flower
I wouldn’t put on a show.
I would follow seasons
Knowing deep in my roots
Through soil, wind and rain
How to bide my time.
Choosing when to rest
When to bloom.

If I were a flower
I would wait
Till the earth was soaked
In monsoon rain
To emerge from cracks
Where there was nothing before.
A carpet of riotous colour
Growing in the company of others.

If I were a flower
I would be raani pink
Deep purple streaked with yellow
White with a fiery heart.
I would dance in the wind
Sashaying my hips to its tune
Turning my neck
To the sky above me.

I joined my first in March for a weekly, hour-long nighttime session. Three sessions later, I was greedy for more. More quiet companionship. More presence. More showing up for myself. I joined the full experience in May and June—a choice of two daily sessions in the morning in addition to a longer one on Thursday night.

Dheere dheere, I found myself showing up everyday in whatever state I was in. Tired. Rushed. Sleepy. Hopeful. Joyous. There was space for all of it. Camera on or off. Engaging as much or as little as I wanted to. and are the kind of hosts who allow you to just be. There is poetry, shayari, a song to get you going, daily prompts and an invitation to set an intention for the 45 minutes they hold space for everyone in the zoom room.

When Raju shared the prompt, If I were a flower, this is what emerged.

If you’re looking to nurture your creativity in small, quiet, everyday ways, the July CoCreate Club awaits.

No one is at the table yet but it holds a promise. It carries an invitation. Of meeting someone. Of the presence they offer. Of being greeted by a smile that crinkles the eyes. An arm around the shoulders. A good morning kiss on the cheek. The lightest touch. The warmest hug.

It’s the end of January and I’m in Kamshet in the Western Ghats for a 3-day retreat with 11 writer friends from the writing circle. It’s the first time I’ve left 27-month old Saira solely in the care of her Abbu. The first time I’ve been out of earshot of the little human who has altered the soundscape of my life.

I’m there (ostensibly) to write. To engage those muscles. Something I haven’t managed to do much of last year. I have an agenda somewhere in my inbox. I haven’t looked at it. There’s something else at play that I cannot name. It emerges after I return to my life in Bombay and a friend asks: How was the retreat? I can feel a smile stretching across my face. I sit up straighter. Eyes brighten. “Nurtured. Alive,” I respond. “I remember what it feels like to listen to myself.”

The Company Theatre workspace, the venue for our retreat, is a 5-acre property that sits on the edge of a lake. On the afternoon of our arrival, I settle into a room-of-my-own that my friends have made possible. The first thing I notice are the sounds around me. A whirring fan. Rhythmic. Reassuring. The call of a bird outside my window. The crunch of dried leaves underfoot. I lean into the quiet.

It’s the beginning of remembering how much I desire touch. How much I’ve missed it despite having a little person in my life who spends her days clambering over Mamma-Mountain. Little hands finding, seeking, twisting, poking, pressing, shaping, testing. Two years of lots of touch. Two years of no touch.

“Even when they’re asleep, you’re still on,” my cousin, parent to a 3-year old, said when we spoke shortly after Saira came into our lives. Her words landed a few months later. I began to notice how attuned I’d become to the waking-laughing-sleeping-crying-snuffling-teething chatter of a baby. Always having an ear out for what she might need. Listening to her. Listening for her.

How in the interest of her sleep needs, physical intimacy of any kind with my spouse has nosedived. First the exhausted-new-parent stage. The lets-take-turns-sleeping-with-the-baby phase. Then the baby-tucked-between-us sleeping arrangement. In almost every permutation, Saira has wound up in her favourite position - head tucked into my armpit or with my neck as her pillow. A close second is Abbas’ chest, head curled into his body.

Other kinds of adult touch have also dwindled. A quick, one-armed hug from friends with Saira hoisted on my hip. Or none at all in her Amma-is-mine phase that didn’t permit affection to be bestowed on said Amma from any other quarter.

So much like parched earth receiving its first monsoon rain, I began to soak in the affection offered by my writer friends. It was the first time I was meeting some of them in the flesh despite writing together for over two years. I found myself waking up eager to step out. Drawn to the table under the sky for neither tea nor coffee. Driven instead by the need for touch. For contact. To be held and seen. To lean into the physicality of it.

Over the course of the next few days, we gathered to write, read and wear our performance hats. There were tears, laughter, lots of snacks and long dinners. The days flowed into each other with an ease I hadn’t expected. “I’m not missing home,” I shared in one of our sessions. “It’s easy to be fully present.” There is intimacy amongst us. A safety I feel grateful for to be our unfiltered selves. There is no shame in tears here. No too-muchness. No one trying to fix or repair. In the process of writing, there is deep listening. It’s one of the (unadvertised) offshoots of OSC and the people Natasha has brought together. She never talks about it - the alchemy that makes it possible.

On the afternoon of the second day, a session took us down to the lake. Suddenly there were pichkaris and squeals of laughter as water reminded us how to be silly. How to play. Most of us ended up in the lake. Some swimming, some finding their water legs as they slowly settled onto a rock, a stone, holding hands for support. I remember the first plunge into the water. Cold that shocks and enlivens. Aware of where my skin meets water. How it holds and carries me. The way it moves across the body.

Somehow, in these 3 days, I’d fallen into the lap of receiving touch from multiple quarters. In the silence of the morning watching dew evaporate from the web of a ground-dwelling funnel weaver spider. In the company of a tree I lie beneath, back resting on the stone bench. In the cold water of the lake that beckons me to swim towards its centre. Most of all, in the warmth of the words and gestures of the group of friends I have chanced upon. Like bad pennies, I’m hoping we’ll stick together. That there will be many more long tables to gather around and sit under the light of the moon or the morning sun.

I began thinking of skin, of touch, of the hunger for touch after reading ’s essay, Skin Hunger. It led me to this piece. To try to put to words why and the community it led me to continues to be a space I am so grateful for.

Subscribe now

My father was never a demonstrative man. The youngest of 10 siblings, he was born in Bombay after his family crossed the newly drawn border between India and Pakistan with 6 already-born siblings. Dayawanti and Hiranand, my grandparents were too busy keeping their children alive to have time for physical affection. Baba spent more time in his neighbours house in Jamshedpur, a family from Kerala, than his own. Home was a place where his father would thunder about something; his mother, my Dadi, would be at the chulha churning out chapatis and his older sister (a second mother to him) would reinforce how he had to stay in school where she had been forced to drop out. Kisses didn’t feature in their love language.

As a child, I don’t remember physical affection between my parents. An awkward arm around Amma’s shoulders for a photograph. A quick peck on the cheek on her birthday - mostly at our insistence. When my mothers’ Anglo-Indian relatives would visit or we’d go to Madras to her maternal home for the summer holidays, he would wriggle away uncomfortably when greeted with the kiss-on-each-cheek that was the norm. With his family in Bangalore, he would touch Dadi’s feet as she blessed him. For his siblings and my cousins, it was a handshake or a wave. Love amongst the Sindhi siblings was never through language or touch.

The hotel industry my father spent his entire career in was a different story. A world where kisses were dispensed with ease. Airy ones, light as a dragonfly sitting on a reed. Louder, more raucous kisses as the night drew on at parties being hosted in the hotel ballroom. A place where beautifully coiffed women in chiffon sarees and high heels and men in suits would flit in and out. In those stories, I imagined him smiling and pointedly stretching out a hand to shake, thus staving off a potential embrace.

The Baba of my childhood was always quietly affectionate. I remember sitting on his lap, his large white handkerchief in hand when my milk teeth had loosened to the point that they needed room to grow new ones. Baba will do it, I’d announce. A deft wrench and there it would be, tooth in hand, and the promise of ice cream to follow. Every Sunday, we’d pore over the pages of a children’s book - Life in the Water - hardbound with blue fish swimming across the cover. Does it bite? I’d ask, going from page to page. I was convinced this knowledge would help me swim away from the ones that bite when we’d go to the beach in the Andaman islands where we lived. He responded to each question with suitable gravity.

The Baba of my adulthood is also affectionate. Differently so. It takes the form of reminders to pay my tax. In continuing to contribute to my PPF account despite my protests. In handing me a stack of 20-rupee notes as I leave the house so I always have change in my pocket. In dashing off to the market when I realise I’ve run out of contact lens solution. Or medicine. Or a particular kind of chips/murruku/snack I was looking for in the kitchen cabinet. In always coming to the airport for pick ups and drop offs whenever I visit.

At 41, our greetings are limited to high fives (his preference). Or an awkward shoulder pat when I attempt a hug. I’ve made a few jokes about it. He pretends he can’t hear. I wonder if in growing up, there’s a line he decided to draw between us. Of what is proper. Of what he deems proper.

Two years ago, Saira came into our family as a 5-month old baby. With her joining the ranks, the Baba of my childhood has had a second coming. I’ve watched as he transformed into a train engine chugging around the house holding her in his arms, going from one balcony “station” to another to point to his favourite flowers. He takes her horsey-ghoda on his lap. He enters a room she is in while flapping his right arm like an imaginary trunk in imitation of the elephant Gajapati Kulapati from her favourite book. When she shouts ‘Lobe you, Naanu’ at the end of a video call, he responds in like. Kisses are all the rage again.

Saira’s Naanu is funny and silly all at once. I have a strong suspicion that if he dares to stage a retreat when it comes to dispensing kisses as she grows older, she will call him out - whether he pretends to adjust the volume on his hearing aid or not.

I intend to be her echo. I still love Baba’s bristly kisses that tickle my skin.

This piece was written in response to a prompt, ‘Kiss’ as part of the Ochre Sky Stories Writing Circle a few years ago. I’ve dusted it off in light of new findings that have emerged on the main subject of this essay.

The sound of traffic from one of the busiest roads in Mumbai comes streaming in through the open kitchen window. Dust has settled on the black grille that marks the exterior of homes in the city. A slightly bruised banana waits on the window ledge. Watermelon rind is next on offer. For the main course, mutton bones.

A flash of wing and the banana disappears.

“She’s here,” I announce to my spouse, Abbas, who is sitting in the living room in full view of the mealtime service.

I don’t need to look in his direction to know he’s rolling his eyes.

“Watermelon rind? Really? The neighbours are going to complain,” he mutters, darkly.

“They love it. Just wait and see.”

A murder of crows clear the ledge even as I reassure him.

When the mutton bones take its place, the crows make room for the black kites that come swooping in on a screech. The show is over within a span of a few minutes.

“I think she enjoyed breakfast today,” I say to my reluctant audience.

“Aunty Mercy always has an appetite.”

“Wait till you become a crow. I’ll keep some rajma for you. You’ll thank me then.”

He shakes his head.

Early in our marriage, Abbas would watch in part-horror, part-incredulity as I’d gather offerings to place before Aunty Mercy and her friends - my ancestors. In the 9-year long distance run up to our marriage, he’d never seen this ritual play out. I’d never had cause to share it with him. In a city where you can look into your neighbours’ homes and know their routine without ever meeting them, he now lived in fear of what someone might say about this daily enactment.

Subscribe now

My memory of Aunty Mercy - my great grand-aunt - is of her wearing a knee length floral house dress with a pocket stitched on the left side. Her white hair was worn short, brushing the nape of her neck. It contrasted the weathered, wrinkled skin on her face and hands which were covered in dark spots. Her bedroom was under a spiral staircase in the single storey bungalow my mother grew up in. Set towards the back of the house, it was always cool and dark despite the unforgiving summer sun in Madras. She’d shuffle from it to sit in a blue-and-white wicker chair in the verandah. From her pocket, she’d pull out a banana which she would peel and eat. Her favourite food.

Hindus believe that crows are messengers of ancestors—a link between the living and the dead. In Islam, feeding kites is sadaqah. An act of charity without the intention of seeking anything in return. I learnt all this much later. Through friends and Ammi, my mother-in-law.

Growing up, there were always offerings being made to different species. In Port Blair, we had bird feeders and would watch as bulbuls and sparrows would arrive to peck at grain. Little balls of aata would be carried to the end of the jetty for shoals of nethili that would come swarming. When we moved to Gurgaon in the 90s, our long term relationship with the indie that adopted us began with an offering of milk and bread and grew from there. Soupy, the chocolate brown, soup-loving dog became a fixture outside our building. When I walk in my neighbourhood in Bombay, I notice the cat-feeders and those who carry biscuits in their pockets for dogs. We nod to each other.

As rituals go, while I don’t entirely buy into the idea of Aunty Mercy’s now-crow form, I enjoy this small act of everyday remembrance. In those few minutes, I think about how Amma spoke of her as one of the few kind adults in her life while growing up. The piano she would play in her house when Aunty Mercy lived with her sister. How it was one of the few places she found peaceful. Both banana and the act of feeding is my way of saying hello. I remember that you lived. What you liked. You continue to exist in my memory.

I notice how the act of feeding forces me to slow down. The immediacy of it. The thrill of satisfaction when they swoop in to polish off their favourites. Much like dinner guests who have clean plates and then ask to clear out the cooking bartan.

My two and a half year old daughter has been participating in this ritual for over a year. First watching from my arms and now running to me saying, “Saira haddi degi (Saira will give the bones).” She saves her aam ki gutli (mango seed) to share with them.

One of her favourite books is Farida Plans a Feast. In it, young Farida goes out with a tiffin dabba every evening carrying fish for cats, biscuits for dogs, squashed tomatoes for crows and uncooked rice for sparrows. She has begun taking a bowl of water down for the neighbourhood cat. A tiffin dabba isn’t far behind. I wonder if she too will one day call out to the ancestors. If this could be a way for her to lean into paying attention to the world around her. A small act of care. Of remembrance. To remain in connection with the more-than-human world that surrounds her.

Subscribe now

This essay emerged in response to a prompt ‘What role did superstition play in your childhood’ shared in a narrative writing workshop by . It’s from a chapter by Hedi Jaouad in Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy.

Subscribe now

The sun is high when we step out for a walk. I feel the heat of it on my neck and arms. Her hands are tucked under a sweater on the wheelchair in which she sits. The once thick, curly hair she has worn short since I have known her has thinned to reveal brown-and-white patches on her head.

This daily walk was a ritual. In the late 80s, my grandmother would visit us in Port Blair when the school where she taught in Madras closed for holidays. Everyday, we’d walk on the road by the sea. My sister, her and I, arms swinging as we’d sing loudly to the sky, lungs fully expanded. When we moved to Gurgaon in the 90s, the walks continued. Sometimes with a scissors in hand to snip off a hibiscus flower, a bit of money plant that she’d put in a glass bottle to graze the side of a bookshelf or jasmine blooms that would sit in a bowl of water on the dining table.

At 96, the walks take nudging. It’s market day, I say. I haven’t met your friend Nicole. Isn’t this when she goes for a walk? The bones in her hips have softened with age and with it, her confidence to walk. Now I am doing the urging and negotiating, jollying her along much as she once did. Grandmother. Granddaughter. The borders are shifting.

At home, a few hours later, she asks when my parents will return from their trip to Delhi. It’s the third time she has posed the question, previous responses having flitted away. Her memory is as light as a sunbird that takes flight, leaving no trace that it was once there. Late-life dementia has begun chipping away at her short term memory.

I think about what happens when more begins to whittle away. Does the body still carry stories somewhere even when the specifics of person, place and time begin to blur? Does it remember what love feels like, how it courses through the body, engulfing it? Does it recognise grief that lodges in the bones, the ache of desire unfulfilled, of a love story left incomplete? Who are we without our memories? The same person, a same-different person? Tinged in sepia, lies this border between memory and the field of the forgotten. As I traverse this shifting border with her, each day, we’re finding different markers to map new territory.

This piece was written in response to a prompt, ‘When I crossed the border’ as part of the Writing Circle. In the three years since, we’ve continued to write together. We also read, gather for art sessions, for meals and to celebrate and cheer each other on. If you’re looking for a writing community, I can’t think of a better place to turn to.

One week later, Abbas, who is rarely given to illness, was unable to lift himself off the bed. He was running a fever, had a splintering headache and complained of muscle pain. Saira’s nanny, who arrives every morning like clockwork, was dealing with a family emergency and unable to come to work. Suddenly, I was the only adult for the count tending to a curious, active toddler who had to be kept away from her father and couldn’t understand why. Abbas was summarily locked into a room with warm fluids and paracetamol by his bedside. The few words we exchanged was to cajole him to eat what little he was able to.

A few days passed. He didn’t show much improvement. We ran blood tests for dengue, malaria and chikungunya. All turned out negative.

On day three friends offered to have Saira over at theirs and take her to the park in the evening. I said yes. As I was driving home from dropping her off, my sister called.

“How are you all?” she asked.

“Still not sure what’s wrong with Abbas. We haven’t been able to go to a doctor yet.” I said.

“Want me to come? I can hop on a flight. Then you won’t have to do the bedtime and morning routine on your own.”

Long pause.

I felt the breath catch in my throat. The muscles in my lower back slowly unfurling from a tautness I hadn’t realised I was holding.

“Can you?” I responded, feeling the warmth of relieved tears running down my face.

“You’ll see me tonight,” she responded.

Subscribe now

No one told me that the hardest part about having a child was asking for help. Being open to receiving it. Practicing saying ‘yes’. Of feeling less-than-able multiple times a day and having friends, siblings, neighbours prop you up. With a phone call, an airport drop off, meals sent that you said you’d manage and then gratefully ate when there wasn’t time to cook. A message that said, Are you alone at home with Saira? I’ll come spend the night. A seemingly simple something that would carry me through the day.

No one told me how difficult it would be to lean into the discomfort of not having anything to give in return. Of feeling like I have to do something to deserve this care. Earn it. That having a child would mean looking at my own fraught relationship with care. How much easier it is to give than to allow myself to be tended to.

I’d grown up in a home where I saw my mother do it all. Raise two children (mostly) on her own while my father travelled for work. She hand washed our clothes every morning till a washing machine arrived in my adolescence. Cooked 3 meals a day. Travelled an hour each way for work. All while living far away from anything familiar to her. No friends or family at hand and having to learn a language she had never spoken. The only access to communication was once-a-week STD calls booked in advance for a brief exchange with her mother. I don’t remember her leaning on anyone or asking for help. I don’t know if she thought she could. If that was an option.

I had a front row seat to this high-performing modelling. When I began to work and keep house on my own, I began to hold myself to the same standard. Everything had to be just so. Perfectly planned, anticipated and executed. It was a mantle I wore with casual pride. Anything thrown my way, I’d nod and say ‘yes’. I enjoyed the surge of adrenaline it took to do what seemed impossible in a 24-hour day. How it made me feel capable. In control.

In my 30s, when my body began to protest the relentless pace, I was forced to pause. To take stock. To begin working in different ways. But the voice remained, You can do it on your own. You know how.

When Saira arrived in our lives as a 5-month old, I told myself something similar. I’ve got this. It’ll be hard. But not impossible.

I’ve had to revisit this story on more than one occasion since then.

On days I’ve woken up too tired to make myself breakfast till 12pm. Where I’ve cried frustrated tears in a darkened room after rocking and walking the baby till my arms ached. When my lower back needed a brace to make it through the day. When Abbas had to stay back at work and missed bedtime. Days when someone in the household fell ill. When I felt the absence of my close friends in the city who I feel free to collapse with. I’m tired of saying I’m tired, I mutter on a video call to an old friend. How long is it ok to do that?

Saira’s presence in my life has made me revisit stories of efficiency I’d clung to. To look at how deeply embedded I am in systems that celebrate individualism. A machine-like productivity. To learn to listen to the (loudly) communicated message that there is nothing in my control. There never was. To remember as I struggle to say ‘yes’, what it feels like to be present for a friend, a sibling, a loved one. To know that asking for help is an act of trust. Of saying, I feel safe to be imperfect with you. To remind myself that it brings with it an immense softness. A letting go of pretensions. That it’s a place of building intimacy. Of love.

Saira has given me permission to say, I haven’t got this. I’m bone tired. Overwhelmed. Can you hold my hand while I hold hers?

Subscribe now

The desert cooler whirred in the background, the scent of fresh khus filling the air. It was peak summer in Delhi. A fine dust from the loo, hot dry winds that blow through the day in north India in May, crept beneath the doors and windows. It lightly coated the black music system, glass side tables and the arms of the milk chocolate brown sofa set in the living room.

I slipped a cassette into the tape deck and hit rewind till the spool reached the beginning. A few seconds later, Bryan Adams voice filled the room.

I've been down, I've been beat
I've been so tired, that I could not speak
I've been so lost, that I could not see
I wanted things that were out of reach

Then I found you, and you helped me through
Yeah you showed me what to do
That's why, I'm coming back to you.

Subscribe now

Microphone in hand, my lungs and throat expanded, filling with air. The lyrics of Back to You slipped off my tongue with ease. Head thrown back, I hit the chorus without missing a beat. I was 14-years old and it was my rockstar moment.

Then the telephone began to ring.

It sat a foot away from me on an oblong piece of driftwood within arm’s reach. I stared at it, unable to bring myself to pick it up.

If it’s Amma she’ll call back. I’ll tell her I was in the bathroom. Or asleep.

If it’s someone else, they’ll think no one is home.

I hit stop on the music system, the exuberance of an afternoon of gusty singing slowly seeping out of my body. I don’t know when the things-I-fear list began to include telephones. Or more specifically, having to answer them.

Perhaps it was when I began to struggle with the word Hello. When the stammer began to grip me more and more often. When picking up the phone and being unable to speak would feel like failure.

If I can sing why can’t I speak?

Instead, breath would lodge in my throat, eyelids blinking rapidly, facial muscles contorting in an effort to spit out words. The more anxious I became, the more difficult it would be, the words dragged out of me as if they were being taken to the guillotine. Simple, everyday words. Hello. Chase. Quantity.

Worst of all, my name. Deepika.

“I want to change my name, Amma,” I pressed upon her after a particularly difficult day at school. She looked at me, helpless to comfort.

The beginning of the school year was always the worst. A new class meant a new teacher and inevitable introductions. I would wait in frightened paralysis as the teacher would ask each student to stand up and introduce themselves. I dreaded the 40 pairs of eyes that would be trained on me. The Ddddd Ddddd Deepika jokes that would follow.

“I don’t know what her voice sounds like. She’s so quiet,” my teacher said at a PTA meeting.

So quiet. An echo from my childhood. My cloak of invisibility, as I liked to think of it, when I began reading the Harry Potter books. My very own source of power. I could vanish and blend into the corner of a room and if I stayed very quiet, no one would notice. For the most part it worked. I’d choose a desk and chair to one side of the room, neither in front, nor the back and preferably near the window. Windows always helped.

Don’t make eye contact. Look away. Pretend you’re looking at your notebook, sharpening your pencil. Something. Anything.

I remember when my cloak began to slip off and reveal me. An English teacher in class IX submitted my name for an inter-house creative writing competition. There would be no need to read anything out later, she said. She had soft brown hair that she wore in a low ponytail fastened with a long black clip. Sarees that looked soft to the touch. I felt reassured by her presence. Later that year, a poem was published in the annual school magazine. I remember the high of seeing myself there on the page, black ink printed on a thick cream sheet of paper. Proof that I existed.

At home, Amma urged me to sing. To sing loudly. To remember to take a gulp of air when I had to speak and felt stuck. I joined the school choir. Not the English one that all the cool students who wore their uniforms with style and whose confidence I envied were part of, but the Hindi choir, the misfits. All the same, when I stood on the assembly platform looking into a sea of faces, I didn’t want to run away. I could hear myself and was beginning to like it.

When I joined the Sophia College post graduate media course as a 20-year old, the plan was similar—to lay low and play to my strengths. I wanted to be a print journalist. No performance. No eyeballs on me. Instead, in week 2, the class was divided into groups and asked to perform a street play. Everyone had to have a role- no exceptions. I crept up to my teacher after the announcement and asked if I could be excused.

“I have a stammer”, I said, haltingly. “I won’t be able to do it.”

“So stammer,” he said, barely glancing at me. “You have a voice, right?”

I have a voice, I said to myself as we marched in circles around the roundabout of the college premises that evening. I was shaking. My voice was shaking, slowly rising in unison with my classmates—singing, shouting, feeling its power, the headiness of it.

The thing about fear is, it thrives in isolation. The more it is urged out of the darkness to come out and dance in the light, the easier it becomes to loosen its tightfisted grip. Over two decades, fear of my stammering, imperfect voice has accompanied me. I still feel it waiting in the wings when I’m in any new situation, in how my breath lodges. I think of the many companions who’ve helped me along. Teachers for whom I was visible and who made room for expression in different forms; those who demanded I own what I wanted to tuck out of sight. I think of close friends who’ve sat through multiple practice sessions before I’ve had to make a presentation at work. Patiently, solidly standing with me. Of a home that always encouraged singing.

I’ve learnt that it takes practice to look at fear. To visit it everyday, multiple times a day. To befriend and hold it close. To know that it’s telling me something, inviting me to claim my whole self, starting with my voice. To raise it in a mark of power and protest. I’ve come to love the promise that fear holds—of the exhilaration that inevitably follows when I choose to walk towards it.

I still practice my singing voice everyday.

This essay was written in June 2023 at an workshop by and . A place that takes fears - old and new - and invites you to befriend them. I remember reading out some of this essay in that session and the accompanying urge to run and hide. All I saw reflected back to me was loving gentleness. Raju asked me to record the whole essay at the time. I couldn’t then but it wanted to be spoken out loud now.

, whose voice always gives me courage, shared an essay today to honour her writing voice. I’m following suit with this one.

Hiss. Sizzle. Sputter.

Cloves ricochet off the side of the steel dekchi. A cardamom bursts open, black seeds spilling out of pale green skin. Pepper corns, star anise and a stick of cinnamon swell in hot oil. Onions change colour as they cook in the company of freshly pounded ginger and garlic. A bowl with mutton marinated in dahi, green chillies and dry spices browns slowly. Dheemi aanch pe. The fragrance carries the promise of what is to follow.

A few hours later, Abbas and I sit down together. Plates laid out on red cotton table mats. Onion kachumber. Raita. Grains of rice stained yellow-red from strands of zaffran mixed in milk dressing each layer of rice. We eat in silence. Fingers assembling a balance of meat and rice. After the first helping, I lean back into my chair, submitting to the warmth that fills my insides.

Subscribe now

I’ve never called any one place home. To the where are you from questions, my responses would vary. The go-to answer would be to simply say Delhi. The place my parents lived for 23 years and the city where I did a lot of growing up.

To the, where is your hometown query, I would say Madras, the place my mother spent her childhood. A green-and-white bungalow with bougainvillea climbing the front wall. A house with a garden. Fruit trees. Space to play with her cousins who visited every summer. A home she was desperate to escape. Memories coloured by the alcohol abuse she witnessed and the violence that would follow. A childhood laced with terror and the explosive outbursts that marked it. It was a place she was compelled to live when her father died just days before her first birthday. Where her mother - my grandmother - had to return to raise her two infant daughters.

And your father’s native? Bangalore, I’d mumble. The city where some of his siblings and my Dadi had settled but never a place he called home.

How do you explain that a refugee Sindhi family doesn’t have roots in the way of an ancestral home with physical markers of place. That Baba spent more time in his neighbour’s house in Jamshedpur where the family migrated after partition than he did in his own.

In neither scenario did home conjure up visions of rest, safety or comfort.

My nuclear family of four had many homes. My older sister changed 7 schools before she was in class VI. By the time I was 8 years old, we’d traversed the country with every transfer Baba got. Patna-Agra-Madras-Port Blair-Delhi. School, friends, language, food, the air we breathed, the sounds we heard while waking up and going to sleep - all of it would change.

Home didn’t have a fixed identity. It was transportable. Folded up and packed into boxes in a matter of hours. Bent edges and creased books would be smoothened and carefully placed on shelves in a new home. A shattered lamp shade was painstakingly repaired one glass shard at a time like pieces of a puzzle. There were inhabitants in the past home that never made it. That got lost in the packing frenzy. That couldn’t be put together again. Each move bearing witness to what was carried along and what was left behind.

When we moved to Gurgaon in the early 90s, the colony we lived in was one of the few that existed and was still only half occupied. There was one anda-bread shop within walking distance but you had to risk life and limb to get to it. Cross the Mehrauli Highway, dodge between tractors piled high with mounds of hay, six-and eight legged trucks that frothed black clouds of diesel fumes and heaving vehicles that were carving into the the Aravali range just a few kilometres away. On the odd occasion when we’d run out, Baba would be dispatched to this shop to replenish supplies. I would sit at the window in the living room, watching till I would spot his salt-and-pepper head reappear at the main gate of the colony.

For the most part, we always had extras of everything. On weekly shopping visits across the border to Delhi, Amma would carefully list the inventory of what we had and what was running low. On any given day, you’d find everything from grocery staples to maps of India, glace paper, sequins and bottles of white shoe polish. Just in case. If you ever to visit my current home and feel like exploring the kitchen cabinets, in addition to expected supplies, chances are you’ll find toothbrushes rubbing shoulders with extra soap and candles (always be cyclone ready). In the age of instant-everything and 10-minute delivery promises, I am the butt of many jokes amongst friends. But much like an ant storing for winter, there is safety in my storage cabinets.

As an adult, I’ve set up multiple homes in 4 cities over the past two decades. The first was in a one bedroom-kitchen I shared with a close friend in an SRA (slum rehabilitation authority) building in Bombay. As the sixth floor inhabitants, water was the last to reach our home and so began a 5:30 a.m. ritual. Taps would be left open and at the first sound of water hitting the bottom of the plastic bucket, we’d shoot out of bed to begin mopping, cleaning, washing and bathing. All while one of us would tap on the pipe outside the kitchen window with a long wooden stick to encourage the flow of water through creaky old pipes. I’m not sure how useful this tactic was but it gave us a semblance of control over our fate.

By month two, we signed up for a couples membership at a gym in a neighbourhood building. Our main motivation - to wash clothes without fear of water running out. I wonder now if the trainers and staff suspected something was awry when they’d see us heaving bags out from the shower room with the smell of laundry powder following in our wake. Ask anyone though - washing clothes under a shower head makes for a great upper body workout.

Water constraints notwithstanding, every morning, I’d cook one of the four dishes in my repertoire. From Monday to Thursday we journeyed from dal khichdi to mushrooms in white sauce. My NGO salary at the time was less than the monthly rent due. The commitment instead was to my housemate - to make home-cooked meals in lieu of rent which her advertising job covered. So there I was at 6 a.m. chopping and dicing while she saw to the rest. It was a friendship already forged in a hostel room in Bombay that was now sealed by the fire of our illegally acquired gas cylinder. Every evening after our respective days at work, we’d open the foldable table, pull out the two moras we had bought (our only furniture investment in the house) and sit down to dinner together. It was home.

The first home I shared with my spouse was a 400 sq foot 1BHK (bedroom-hall-kitchen). A bright, sunlit space on the top floor of a sixth floor building at the edge of Versova in Bombay. There was no space to tuck in side tables in the rectangular bedroom. If the cupboard door was open, you had to dive onto the bed and roll over to the foot of it to access the rest of the room. Acrobatics were part of the experience.

The kitchen made up for the spatial limitations of the bedroom. Deep counters. A handy cabinet that would slide in and out. A large window with enough room for pudina, mirchi and kadhipata. We didn’t know it then but the pièce de résistance was the view it offered. On our first evening as we unpacked mugs and organised cutlery drawers, egrets came swooping in twos and threes to rest on the tree right outside our window. Within minutes, green turned to white as they settled for the night, yellow bills tucked into feathers. I’d never imagined something like it amidst the urbanity that surrounded us. For the three years we lived there, they became embedded in our experience of home.

The kitchen was also the site of many firsts. Sambhar spattered onto the ceiling when the pressure cooker burst its top. A butter-garlic prawn dinner that Abbas made only to be told by our respective mothers that they should have been de-veined (we survived the meal sans upset tummies). Our first experiment cooking mutton which turned out rock hard. The crows did it justice after we tried to chomp on it and failed.

Our limited repertoire didn’t put off the many friends and family we hosted. On my first Eid I bought keema to make kebabs. They were too watery and didn’t hold. Abbas’ cousin who was visiting from Dubai effusively complimented the flavour and fell upon them. A friend from a neighbouring building would drop by at meal times and gustily tuck into whatever was on offer. What’s for dinner, Deepu? he’d ask. The answer didn’t seem to matter. It was never perfect. It was always warmly received.

In the first lockdown in 2020, Abbas and I found ourselves in a bubble with friends in our neighbourhood. It began with food exchanges on days we had scheduled home cleaning. Parathas and paneer arrived one morning. Lasagne on another. Sindhi sai bhaji was sent across. Meals flew back and forth. Comfort drawn not just from the food but the knowledge that here were two people we could lean on in the event of what might unfold.

A year later, a virulent strain of Covid-19 spread. A second lockdown was announced. This time the anxiety was even closer to the bone. Whatsapp groups were flooded with requests for oxygen cylinders as the country gasped for access to healthcare services that were woefully inadequate. Abbas’ uncle in Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh became one of the statistics.

Stuck in Goa when the lockdown was announced, our friends came to share the same roof and stay in my sisters’ house with us. They witnessed the helplessness and anger firsthand. We talked about family members we were worried about - too far to be present to them in any way except to listen. To trust that they would call. That we’d hear each other’s voice again.

Amidst it, I found comfort in the daily demands of house holding. The routine it insisted on. The act of sharing it with two other people I had otherwise only spent time with socially. Masks off. Polite veneers shed with every cycle of clothes to be washed and dried. Every meal cooked. Every dish washed.

There was a seamlessness to that time. An intimacy borne of witnessing the detail of another’s life. Of participating in the ritual of the everyday. Of standing shoulder to shoulder cutting, chopping, cleaning. Noticing a preference. Asking questions. Being curious. All the tiny things that make us human. The softness it brings. Tawa buttered toast. Safeda cut into squares. Dal with a ghee-jeera tadka. In a world magnifying fear and what ifs, I found a place of rest. Untethered to place but held in this essential way in a fragile world.

I still harbour a dream of having a physical place to call home. A small piece of land. A Laurie Baker house built on it. Big windows that allow the light to stream in. An amaltas tree blessing it with yellow flowers in the summer. A garden left wild. A patch of pudina. Sunflowers. A dog. Or two. I want to say, My daughter planted this nimbu tree. That’s the mango tree she climbed. There’s the bench we nap on. I imagine this home always has something cooking on the stove. That there are many cooks and always takers. That we’ll sit down together at a large wooden table. Meals to warm the insides. To find home wherever we are. To rest in its warmth.

I began thinking about home and what that means to me after reading ’s essay Home Is Where The... Red Floor Is!, the seed of which was planted in one of the writing circles. Then there was asking the question in her essay: '“I still wonder, though: is home a place, a person, an idea, a set of associated feelings…?” A few days ago, it was Janice Pariat’s piece in the Indian Express that invited me to revisit these ramblings on home.

We have unfinished business, home and I. She’s asking for more to be witnessed. I’m going to try to listen.

.

Never mind that S is 13 months old and measures 77 cm off the ground at last count. Or that her motor skills are very much in the still-to-master zone. There’s plenty of room to project of my own deeply buried desires.

I’m not talking about early childhood development milestones. Or about how many teeth she has sprouted. She’s got all that down with the babbling and staggering about like a drunken sailor docked at her first port of call.

Far more ambitious plans are being plotted. Messy Baby. Barefoot Baby. Not-Well-Put-Together Baby.

I’m in danger of encouraging her to embrace her mad scientist look. Of kicking her shoes off. Of leaving them off. Of giving the gravity defying wisps of hair behind her ears that point up at the sky an approving ruffle. In short, I’m angling for S to be the antidote to me, her mother. To my compulsively good girl, unfailingly polite, well assembled persona. The one I bridle against but have succumbed to after years of wearing the buffed and polished mantle.

Subscribe now

It started innocently enough.

Our landlord came to visit soon after S arrived in our lives at 5 months. He’s a parent to a one-year old boy. Have you started solids? he asked. We shook our heads. We were just about coming to terms with having a whole little person in our charge. When you start, think about baby-led weaning, he said. It’ll take some courage. It’s very messy. But it’s incredible how they begin to eat everything and do it themselves .

This little peanut feeding herself? I was intrigued. I was hand-fed well into double digits with mealtimes that involved long story telling sessions. My grandmother had the art of building edge-of-the-seat suspense into everything from the biblical Samson and Delilah story to the crocodile wanting to offer up his monkey friend as a snack for the missus. She even threw in a set of her own that involved a greedy rabbit eating plastic carrots and getting a stomach ache. All while she removed meat off bones, cleaned bony fried fish and made rice balls of different sizes to feed my open mouthed sister and I.

Coming from this school of feeding, my pentium system needed an update. I’d never heard of baby-led weaning and so I began to research. I read everything from ‘how to serve cauliflower two ways’ (this one made me feel like I was prepping to start a Michelin restaurant) to watching videos of 6-12 month old babies gumming chicken drumsticks and lamb ribs (addictive viewing). I starred, saved and sent a host of them to my spouse, Abbas, to get him up to speed. We had to be in this together. The whole point was to have S hone her motor skills through this thrice daily activity. Become part of our mealtimes. To eat what we were eating instead of pureed mush. I was sold.

It took a little longer to get Abbas onboard. Are we really going to do this? he asked, after watching some of the more hairy videos. I put it down to his family trait of overthinking everything. But I take (modest) pride in demonstrating the bigger picture when it comes to these matters. So after a week of lobbying, he agreed. On principle.

The first experiment was S’s boiled egg breakfast. To get us warmed up, she ripped off her bib and deposited it on the floor beside her. No receptacle for all that wasn’t destined to make it to her mouth, I noted. Still determined to continue, a roughly mashed boiled egg was placed before her. Both hands immediately came into play. One to grab a handful and shove into her mouth. The other to practice her pincer grip as she slowly chased bits of egg yolk that had turned to powdery, smeary streaks of pale yellow on her white plastic tray table. She then proceeded to squeeze it in her little fist as if to check whether the egg could be juiced in the palm of her hand. Failing that, it was lovingly smeared into the side of her head. An egg mask for her still-wispy hair.

Abbas left a quarter of the way in - torn between grabbing a handkerchief to wipe her face and facing my remonstrations. I took a deep breath. It was going to be like this, I reasoned. She was still very much on her formula at 7-months so anything solid going in was just a bonus. Squishing and smashing complete, I carefully lifted her from her chair, brushing off all visible signs of boiled egg. I said a silent prayer that she’d learn motor skills at the speed at which Mozart wrote his first composition.

When we settled down for nap number one is when I realised I should have moved bath time up. The smell of egg-meets-sweat-meets-humid-Bombay-weather was sprawled across my chest. Every inhale made me want to hold my breath. The clock stared at me mockingly. An hour and 30 minutes to go. Never did a nap go by more slowly. Never did I rise nursing a headache and an unholy animosity for the humble boiled egg.

Lying there that morning, I made some tough decisions. We would try again. With Everything.But.Egg.

Less offending candidates were lined up to continue the process of enabling S to self feed. Broccoli florets. Uthapam. Gaajar idlis. Keema-aloo. All hit items which also lent themselves to (relatively) easy clean ups.

With every meal I noticed something else happening. The urge to wipe, tidy and neaten was beginning to fade. I was enjoying S’s delight at the way pumpkin would squish to a pulp in her hand. How she would angle her palm to get most of it into her mouth. The way she’d examine what remained on her fingers. Her singular attention. I grinned back at a face smeared with dahi. Eyes glinting, nose crinkling as she began to enjoy this new flavour. Her surprise at the way juice squirted out of the first tomato she bit into. How she traced the trickle down her elbows. Most of all, I began to admire how utterly unconcerned she was about how she looked. Or who was looking. Just the single minded focus on what was underway and her pleasure/surprise at every discovery.

For someone whose first response to any uncomfortable emotion is to scrub kitchen counters, re-organise cupboards and clean fans, you can imagine my surprise at where I now find myself. Happy to clean and tidy up around S but not the chief architect of said mess. This unexpected situation has emboldened me to bat away other voices. The ones that say Wipe her mouth. It’s going to get all over her clothes.

I witness my response to these voices. How it makes me want to right the perceived wrong. To hush the critics by doing what they ask. To please, perfect and receive a pat on the head. I notice the unfurling knot of fear when I don’t jump up to clean the messy baby. What will people think? I sit with the censure of leaving S to walk barefoot in the park. I kick my shoes off in solidarity. When was the last time I did this in the heaving, busy city I live in? I revel in S’s wild rosebush hair that is growing every which way. I want to leave mine open to the ministrations of the wind.

I am drawn to a vision of a grown up S. A woman free to be her wild, unapologetic self. Who doesn’t feel bound to be perfectly poised and perfectly coiffed. Who is secure in herself. Someone who is able to hold her own with quiet confidence, sans explanation, sans guilt. Who trusts her instincts and her innate wisdom.

I am drawn to a version of myself that I’ve never made room for. Bad Mamma. The one who chooses to honour what feels right to her. To experiment. To fail. To be unafraid of failing. To be imperfect. To know that the only right is for S to see that Mamma doesn’t have all the answers. She doesn’t have it all together. To thrive in the freedom of being not-well-put-together.

It’s a work-in-progress, but I’m starting to enjoy being Bad Mamma.

That evening, I was imagining lasagne followed by a slice of chocolate orange cake topped off with some adult company. My spouse, Abbas’s paternal leave had ended in a blink and he had resumed going in to work. For 9 hours a day, I was suddenly the newly appointed parent-in charge. With no help at home, I was keenly aware of being the only available adult to this tiny living being - wholly responsible for meeting her needs. I was nervous. Exhausted. Unsure of what I was doing.

Subscribe now

After a long day with S and struggling with nap number three, I decided a change of scene would do us both good. Post some acrobatic wriggling to settle S into her baby carrier, we were off. I took a roundabout route, pointing to the yellow trumpet flowers and hot pink bougainvillea on the way. As I walked up the pathway that leads to the cafe, my feet were suddenly heavy.

What if she starts crying after I place the order? Or worse - mid meal? Do I finish? Do I leave? Wait for them to pack it? 

What if it’s cold inside? I don’t have her blanket.

What if there are people working who will be disturbed? 

I remembered crying babies on flights I would try to escape from by pulling out my headphones and cranking up the volume. What karma could I expect from past action?

I reached the glass fronted doorway to the cafe and stood staring at it. A minute later, I turned around and we made our way back home.

When my sister arrived for a 3-week childcare visit (let’s be honest, it was actually a prop-the-new-mother-up visit), I told her of my attempt to go out with S. The next evening she popped the baby into the carrier for our evening walk and marched us off to the cafe. S played with a teaspoon, clapped her hands and flapped her arms at people sitting at adjoining tables. They waved engagingly in return. The staff brought us a lemon tart on the house. I made a mental note to order hot food instead of settling for a quick dessert. Maybe, just maybe, I could do this again. 

On an average day, I am given to more anxiety than my spouse. But in the first few weeks of S’s arrival in our lives, we were rivalling each other in that department.

“Is it ok to kiss the baby?” Abbas asked the paediatrician on our first visit after we received her. “Germs. I worry about that.”

“Yes, you can kiss her.”

“Can I take her out for walks?” I asked, emboldened.

“Do whatever makes you and her happy”, he responded, a faint smile and nod of the head. 

Reassurance from doctors and friends notwithstanding, larger questions continued to nip at the heels. What on god’s green earth qualifies me for the job? What on god’s green earth am I doing? Both were daily reminders that I have nothing under control. Zero. Zilch. My prior child-free life (might) on occasion have offered the illusion that by meticulous planning and organisation I could shape or control an outcome. As a new mother, S has turned that notion on its head. I’ve stopped committing to time-bound plans. Only refundable tickets are bought. Breakfast plans are made in the morning after an assessment of who has slept how much and the corresponding degree of fatigue. Presence. That’s what S reminds us of every day. How to practice it. 

The books we were sent to prepare for S’s arrival in our lives had their merits with details on milestones and month wise what-to-expect information but it’s the people in our lives who have shaped my experience of motherhood. The small, everyday support that has given me courage. Like nail cutting.

“How do I cut her nails?” I asked my mother, two weeks in.

“Do it when she’s asleep. That’s what I did,” she responded 

Excellent advice. Except that S only sleeps when she is lying sprawled on my spouse’s chest or mine in a darkened room. A tricky situation for my nail cutting aspirations. When my friend, M, came visiting, I lamented about the length of said nails and the scratches on my neck and arms. Where’s the nail cutter, she asked. Next thing I knew, she’d picked up one of S’s little hands and was snipping away while continuing to chat to her. S didn’t flinch, yank her hand away or try to eat the nail cutter. No blood was drawn and all fingers and toes remained intact. It was emboldening just to watch. Thereon I have taken many deep breaths, put S in my godi, and practiced chattering confidently with a nail cutter in hand. S has watched with patient interest each time. 

Then there was the great outdoors. I would put on my sneakers, strap S to me and set out for a walk every evening. The distance covered would be as far and I was able to go till I’d begin searching for a bench on which to rest till we’d turn around to come home. A 3-kilometre radius at best. So when a friend with a toddler told me how she goes to the park by the sea everyday in an auto, I felt another surge of I can do this too.

What was I afraid of? I can’t say for certain. But there is a body awareness that comes from being wholly responsible for someone else - an automatic double checking and slowing down. Just to be sure. So even the act of hopping into an auto - and I’ve taken hundreds - needed some reintroducing. 

There is something that shifts in the act of doing. In taking that tiny first step. Then five. Ten. Of stopping to see how it feels. Of allowing myself to savour the rush that comes from trying something I was afraid of. The freedom. That high. Of looking to S to see what she enjoys, where she needs a little encouragement, a hand for support. Or more time. In demonstrating how she only goes at her own pace, I am learning to give myself room to choose mine. Slowly. Unhurriedly. With no one to please and nothing to prove. I am learning to be unafraid to ask questions. To set boundaries. To voice them. To turn to the loving presence of the incredible women I have in my life who are holding out their hand to support me as I go about the business of learning to be S’s mamma. 

6 months

It’s 3:30am. I feel the length of your body stretched out on mine, head tucked beneath my chin. Your hair brushes softly against the underside of my lower lip. Soft like a downy chick. But less fluffy. You’re still growing into your fluff. There’s something about the dead-of-night feeds that I have come to love despite the bone deep tiredness that follows. Maybe it's the weight of your embrace after you have fed. The giving up of all control, of holding. The trust that you will be held, comforted, soothed back to sleep. It’s implicit. I feel your heartbeat against mine. Rapid. Do babies have faster heartbeats? I add it to the list of questions for Dr Google. For now, it’s you, me and the hum of the air conditioner as I watch the fronds of the coconut tree cast shadows on the curtain in my room.

12 months

It’s 4:30 am. You slide off my chest and curl into the side of my body. Head tucked into my armpit. Like the owl babies in your book. Your hair is longer. It sweeps across your cheek in a wayward curl. Grazes your neck. Falls softly on your forehead. You spill over the width of my folded legs when you feed. The muscles in my left arm are getting definition. The ones that support your weight. They are growing with you. Even as my limbs are leaden with tiredness. You wriggle and turn. Your head finds the pillow of my stomach. The warmth of your hand rests on my bare arm. You hold me in your embrace. My now big-ger Baby S. Who’s completed a whole year around the sun.

Part 1 of this post was typed out on my phone in April 2024 in response to a prompt shared by in my group . The invitation was to ‘Write about an embrace, a hug, an instance of being held by someone. Wrap it up in 150 words.’ The last part opened a crack in the door to write again after a hiatus. That’s the magic of OSC - it makes room for all kinds of writing lives to exist.

“Not yet,” I respond. “But whatever we choose, her last name will be Khatri Khan.”

“That sounds weird,” says my spouse. “Neither here nor there.”

“It doesn’t matter. I want her to know that both our names count.”

Subscribe now

As decision making goes when a baby arrives in your life, a name ranks high up on the list. Abbas and I had been talking about this one for years- even before a baby was on the cards. 

I’ve always loved Urdu names. Their lilt, cadence and inherent khoobsurti. How the sound falls on the ear. Lightly, softly like leaves in the wind. Mahnoor. Jahan. Zulfiya. We had a list of options we’d keep adding to. So when the time came to choose one for our baby girl, the first name was a given. It was the second name where we found ourselves at odds. The it sounds confused argument just didn’t carry heft for me.

As an inter faith couple, I’m not oblivious to the oddity of seeing and hearing our names said together. When we place orders or make appointments for one another, either Abbas is referred to as ‘Mr Khatri’ or I as ‘Mrs Khan’. My chartered accountant who is exacting in all financial matters still sends me pdf documents to verify titled ‘Deepika Raza Khan’. It is almost as if he is unwilling to accept the alternative—that I have chosen to keep my name. For me, it was simple - I like my name. It’s what I have grown up with. It’s how I know myself. It’s what I respond to when I hear it said out loud. Simple. Just the way men keep theirs. No questions asked. 

When I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele a decade ago, it was one of those ‘aha’ moments. Written as a letter for her friend who was raising a baby girl, it is a manifesto with fifteen suggestions on raising a feminist. In the seventh suggestion, she writes, ‘How many men do you think would be willing to change their name on getting married?’ Unicorns. That’s how many.

In an interview, Adichie shared a tool to use whenever one is in doubt about a feminist response to a situation. Just ask yourself, she says - if roles were reversed, would the same question be posed to a man? I’ve always found it a handy one to whip out. Whether it’s a question of ‘what was she wearing’, ‘how often does she want to meet his parents after marriage’ or ‘is she going to go back to work after the baby’. It has wide applicability to the questions asked of women as nauseam. 

I think about Beulah. The name my mother carried before she married at the age of 23. In the stories I hear about Beulah, she would return home sporting bruises from cricket and volleyball games. She played the veena and the piano. Loved motorbikes and loud music. Graduated at the top of her class in economics. Had a job she loved with colleagues whose company she enjoyed. She had dreams for herself. She carried the light of those dreams. 

I think about Anupama. My mother. The only persona I have known. The one who was always doing for us. Who stopped playing sports. Who took up work in any capacity that facilitated her primary job - looking after us, her family. The one who was tired, anxious, rushed. Who was organising, planning and facilitating for everyone else. Orchestrating down to the last detail in service of the comfort of her family. Who then had little to give to herself or make space for her needs. Who was weighted down by this cycle of no rest but never been able to articulate it. 

I remember seeing glimmers of Amma’s former self. They’d appear sporadically. Like when she decided to take my sisters bicycle out for a ride in the colony we lived in - how gleefully she rode. She forgot to use the brakes, ran it into a tree and hurt her foot. But the aliveness in her eyes and the flush of her skin that evening. Beulah would appear again on her home turf in Madras where we spent summer vacations. When she’d leave us in the care of my grandmother and go off to do the things she wanted to. Sans company. Sans children. When her cousins would visit and she’d be in the throes of a heated game of Ludo. That Amma laughed freely.

“Why did you change your name when you married Baba?” I’d ask her on repeat as a child. 

“No one could pronounce ‘Beulah’. They’d laugh and say: What kind of a name is that? So when I got a chance I changed it,” she’d respond. 

“But why Anupama?” I’d persist.

“Baba would call me Anu. So that’s what it became,” she said.

I wonder what would have happened if she had stayed Beulah. Or taken a name of her choosing. If that would have served as the impetus to honour herself, her needs. To stand for what she wanted. To remember what she loved. Actively. Everyday. I wonder how differently it might have shaped her relationship with my father. If it would have challenged his place as the family patriarch. The decision maker in all things financial. If instead they would have been partners in their relationship.

I am many shades of my mother. I fall into long spells of doing for others even when it is not asked for or needed. I overextend. I find myself lingering at the bottom of my to-do list. I do this because it gives me a sense of purpose. It makes me feel needed. Useful. 

I am different from my mother. I am able to catch myself (more often than not). I know when there is resentment building. I notice when I tire quickly. When something that otherwise is joyful feels like a chore. Burdensome. I am able to observe how it creeps up, this need to please. To constantly do. Instead, I am learning to slow down. To say, I’m spending the evening talking to my friends. Or drinking tea while I stare out the window. Or driving by the sea with too-loud music playing. 

My friend sent me this poem a few days ago written by Emisenla Jamir in This Is How We Disappear. 

“I lost my name 
the day I became yours.
[…]

I remember it slipping 
out of my tongue, my name,
falling into forgetting
until it became a memory
found in old certificates,
honours and achievement won
by a person whose name
I only vaguely remember.”

I don’t want to hold on to my name like a relic of a past me. I want to celebrate it. The woman that I am still getting to know. The one I am growing into. I want her to take any shape she chooses. I want Baby S to witness that firsthand. To know that both Khatri and Khan have equal place in her story. To know that one doesn’t supersede the other no matter how odd it might sound to the rest of the world. I hope that she will celebrate the many stories her name carries. That she will hold them close. 

This essay was spurred by something my writer friend wrote in response to a prompt shared in our group. It was published in April 2024, titled Tell me the story of a name.

Subscribe now

“Real”, I respond. 

“You don’t look like it.”

“We’re the United Colours of Benetton”, I announce holding my forearm next to my sisters’ deep brown to demonstrate. 

“Black and white,” my sister added, nodding sagely.

She was 12 and I was 9. We’d done this drill before. 

Subscribe now

It was the mid-90s. My family had moved from the Andamans to Delhi a few years ago. Post the 1991 liberalisation, India’s economy had opened to foreign investment. Riding on its wings, Benetton stores arrived in the capital city. An Asian, black and white child smiled back at us from a glass-fronted window display, all lined up next to each other. Their presence proclaiming - there’s room for all colours of the shade card. In a country that kowtows to fair skin, I think about what a bold advertising stance it was for its time. 

My sister took it and made it ours. Now we didn’t have to parrot - Amma is from Madras, Baba is Sindhi. N looks like Amma and I, like Baba. Instead, we whipped out the Benetton slogan to answer the elevator uncle’s greedy curiosity about the difference in our appearance. Or alternated it with We’re mongrels, often leaving the recipient of said information looking alarmed. I didn’t know what diversity meant. I just liked that we weren’t a neat fit. Proud of our mixed bloodlines and largely unaware that it was seen as less-than.

I don’t recall my sisters’ experience of these exchanges. She never let on, but I imagine there were degrees of hurt and irritation at the repeated comparisons that were made between us. Annual visits to my Sindhi side of the family in the summer holidays was when the comments would stack up. Malai laga do, rang khilega. Baahar dhoop mein khelnein mat do, aur kaali ho jayegi. (Rub milk cream on her - her skin will lighten. Don’t let her play in the sun - she’ll become darker.)

My sister parried these blows in true fashion. She spent her summers playing cricket in the heat of the afternoon sun or swinging off parallel bars. On other days, she’d take her bicycle out from the back gate of the colony to explore the neighbourhood that lay beyond. I never saw her touch malai with a long stick pole. Much of it was just her doing what she loved best - being outdoors. But I wonder if somewhere she was also sticking her chin out in protest. Say what you will.    

In the few decades that have passed since we both lived under the same roof, I haven’t thought about the difference in the colour of our skin. There would be the offhand comment. Your building guard stopped me from coming in. He asked which parlour I had come from and whose house I was going to, she said once when visiting my home in Yari Road. We’d rolled our eyes and laughed. It was a blip in the radar of our lives. 

In February this year, the blip became a foghorn. My spouse and I received a referral for our baby girl from the central adoption agency. Suddenly, what does the baby look like became a central question from the light-skinned Pathan side of the family. Once initial introductions were made, the exclamations began. Yeh too humaari kallo pari hai (She is our dark angel), they said. I heard the affection in their tone even as I found myself bridling against the use of the phrase. She is all this (fill in the blanks for glowing attributes) bas rang daba hai. A bas that carries the sting of a wasp. 

It’s a term of endearment, I’m told. But I find myself revisiting all the evidence of fair-favouritism I’ve come by and how language is often where it begins. I remember walking into government offices and police stations for meetings with dark-skinned female colleagues in the NGO I worked with. I’d see the difference in how we were looked at and treated. In how it would be assumed that I was the person-in-charge. In her essay, The colour of my skin has a sisterhood, my friend writes: ‘A Madrassi in the Delhi I grew up in, is a sitting duck for this specific kind of prejudice. I remember how people looked at us. For a while, I thought it was because we didn’t look rich, which in part was because we weren’t fair.’  

My daughter is on the cusp of toddlerhood. Soon, she will say her first words. She will repeat what she hears. She will ask questions. She will want to know the meanings of words. Sponge-like, she will soak up everything around her. I don’t know what social osmosis will lead her to believe. I want to protect her from the everyday, casual comments that may come her way. The ones that can lodge deep beneath her skin, the needles sharp. I know it is foolhardy to think I can. I wonder if instead the job is to anchor her sense of self in a place that’s not skin deep. For her to recognise it for the prejudice it is. To find her own equivalent of ‘Black and white’ and a tribe she can laugh about it with.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken to using different descriptors - she’s my chocolate brownie baby. Creme caramel, says my spouse. Gulab jamun, adds a friend. We cover our favourite desserts between us. They’re all delicious.  

No? Phir apna kyun nahin kar lete?

In the weeks running up to the day Abbas and I were due to meet our 5-month old baby girl, I found myself revisiting this conversation. It had been 3 years since we got on the waitlist of the central adoption agency. Three years of many conversations that challenged us. Of why we want to raise a child, of what that looks like, of love and belonging.

In response to the apna kyun nahin kar lete (why don’t you have one of your own) not-so-sublte nudges, we would clarify that it was a choice. That the circuitry involved in baking an apna baby were working just fine. Toh phir? Ek toh kar lena chahiye. Doosra adopt kar lo. (Then why? Have one of your own at least. You can adopt a second.) 

Versions of this not un-anticipated line of questioning have been a part of our adoption journey since we’ve told friends and family. Some asked with loving curiosity. Others were laced with judgment, probing to investigate the details of said circuitry. Kuch toh gadbad hoga (something must be wrong).

For the most part, my feathers haven’t been ruffled by these exchanges. Not even when a fellow passenger on a train somewhere between Casablanca and Tangier in Morocco asked if my spouse and I had children. When I replied that we were adopting, I watched as her face contorted into a mixture of horror-pity-anxiety as if I had just confessed to bloody murder and she was now in on the detail. She then commiserated about our fate, shaking her head in disbelief. How will the baby be yours?

Subscribe now

I began to trace the contours of apnapan (belonging). To observe how the word lands in my body. To look at how its roots extend from the soles of my feet deep into the earth. How my shoulders relax and my belly expands with breath when that sweet sense of belonging courses through my body. The way it spans blood lines and geographies to live in the safekeeping of those who love me without ifs and buts.

I think about my blood relatives. There’s a degree of similarity of physical features and a shared history of where we come from. But beyond those I can count on the fingers of my hands, few evoke a feeling of they are mine and I am theirs. That sense of kinship and intimacy that makes me feel rooted lies elsewhere. In places and people where I know I can collapse and be held. Where I feel safe to exist in all my multitudes. To be celebrated in all my messy vulnerability. To be softly told to hold on to it. That it’s precious.

My belonging-ness has been birthed in many places, most of which I have rarely anticipated. It shines over the two-decade long relationship I share with my spouse and all the growing up we’ve done together. In how there is freedom to reveal what I want to otherwise tuck away from the world. To not feel judged for it.  

It was forged in a hostel room in Bombay when I left my parents home for the first time to move to a new city. When my hostel roommate walked in holding a window cleaner - the one cleaning device I had forgotten. In the 20 years since, that relationship has grown deep roots from weathering the storms that come with adulthood and basking in the light of learning about ourselves. It thrived in the kitchen of a student house overseas where peers from Lahore and Tokyo came to be my home as we cooked our way through semester submissions and navigated a new country. I have physically been in their presence on three occasions in the past decade but they are who I call on when the world feels heavy. 

Apnapan has taken the shape of a young neighbour from my childhood who in a role reversal now tends to me by knowing what I need often before I articulate it. It has taken the form of her mother, who offered spaces of silence and rest when I was shaken by the collapse of my physical body. When she saw me hiding from the world, she gave me the gift of quiet, undemanding company as I struggled to come up for air. She now sends me photos of extracts from books she wants me to read. Flowers. Poetry. 

Over the past few years, apnapan has found a place to write, dance and weep with a roomful of little windows on zoom as I found myself in the company of fellow writers. None of us look like each other. We are an array of shapes and colours. I thought I’d signed up for a writing workshop. Instead, I found a group of women and men with whom I am unafraid to reveal my underbelly.

In the embrace of these relationships, I feel like I can say, I belong.

Is it really blood, then? Or can I hope that my daughter will have the abundance of many life springs of apnapan. That she will know how being seen, heard and witnessed is possibly one of the best ways to experience it. That she doesn’t have to make herself smaller or fit herself into someone else’s idea of who she should be. I hope she will know that true belonging lies in a place that feels safe.

I know my daughter will have questions. I know that she will ask one day, why don’t I look like you. I hope that she will see mirrored back to her a place of belonging.

“Haan Dadi, aloo tikki khaye.”

“Phir 4-5 badaam kha,” she’d say, reaching for a narrow steel dabba with a blue sticker. 

A mirror with an attached storage unit adjoins the diwan in the room on the first floor of the house in which Dadi spent the last few decades of her life. All within arms reach, it had an array of repurposed jars and bottles tucked into its recesses. A small pouch tucked into an empty Nivea cream jar with a few hundred rupee notes rolled up inside to hand out as kharchi. A Bournvita dabba that housed  two kinds of biscuits. A small tiffin with soan papdi or Karachi halwa. The contents varied depending on the visitors she received and what they would come bearing. Some would find their way into her assortment of dabbas and the rest were handed out as gifts to those who came to see her. Nothing was ever wasted.

When her husband passed while she was still in her 50s, Dadi donned widow’s white. But in all other respects, she was nothing like the shadowy caricatures of widows I’d seen in Hindi cinema. Till her body allowed for it, she chose to live on her own in a small one-bedroom apartment in Domlur in Bangalore despite three of her children living in the same city. I remember the sheen of her salwar kameez, her white chiffon dupatta and her black rimmed glasses as she sat on a high wooden stool by the gas stove when we visited during summer holidays. Finely chopped onion, green chilli and coriander mixed with spices were kneaded into the flour which she would roll into a thick roti cooked with a generous quantity of oil- koki. Always dheemi aanch pe (on a slow flame), she’d say. 

My father’s mother, Dayawanti, crossed the border from Sukkur in the province of Sindh to the newly independent India. She was one of the 30 lakh Sindhi migrants to make their way across the border in the wake of the post-partition riots. One saree, a few gold bangles tucked into her blouse, a husband, 5 children and a sixth on the way- was the story I was told growing up. Her tenth and youngest - my father - describes his childhood as having to stretch a little a long way. My father would eat the apple and we would get the skin, he’d say. Letters to access government aid went unanswered as the family struggled to find their feet in new terrain.

When I first read Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children as an 11-year old, the apple story found resonance. “Jam or butter, dear — not jam and butter. We can't afford that sort of reckless luxury nowadays,” the mother said to her youngest child in the book. Every occasion that presented the choice thereafter made me feel very grown up- butter or butter plus? The former kindling an affinity for my father’s childhood and the latter feeling gloriously indulgent. Butter and Jam.

Dadi was a storyteller and an avid listener. Long after the bones in her hips and knees has softened to the point that she needed a walker to make her way from bedroom to living room, the ritual of hosting continued. Badaam and kishmish were an invitation to settle down for a chat as she’d launch into the 20 questions she’d have lined up in anticipation of her visitor. They were always tailored to each person’s life circumstances.

To my mother, Tumhari ma kaisi hai? Roz walk pe jaati hai? (How is your mother? Does she go for a walk everyday?) An assessment of my Naani’s physical independence when her own was fast slipping away. To my sister and I: Job kar rahi ho? Kamai acchi hai? Bacha ke apna makaan lena. (Are you working? Is the pay good? Save it and get your own house) Reassurance sought and given that her granddaughters were able to fend for themselves.

On every visit, she quizzed my sister about why she wasn’t getting married. Each time, she listened to the why, nodding in agreement on occasion to the rationale. Financial independence was key. The rest was optional. In a deeply patriarchal family where girls where groomed in the direction of a singular life purpose - marriage - she was an anomaly. Some years later, when I told her about my soon-to-be Muslim spouse, she didn’t bat an eye. The only question she asked was whether I had good relations with his family. Thereafter, his siblings and parents were added to the list of those she enquired after and prayed for. 

Once key questions were asked, the gauntlet for conversation was thrown open. It could range from updates on family members to descriptions of her first jhalak of my grandfather when she was married at 16. Or the almirah of sarees that was part of her trousseau. I didn’t know how to cook, she’d say. I had to learn after we came to this side. That I couldn’t make chapatis was a matter of hilarity even as I reassured her of my ability to feed myself with ever other kind of food group. There was a lightness about her despite being physically stuck in a body that did not allow her movement or ease. For the better part of the last 25 years of her life, a sharply observant sense of humour kept her good company.

Till a few weeks leading up her passing at the age of 107, Dadi filed away the detail of each interaction with her very large family and their offspring. Two more weeks and I would have made the introduction to the newest member of her family - my daughter. But I suspect that somewhere in the firmament her face is crinkled with laugh lines and her never-miss-a-thing eyes are watching the antics of  her 11-month old great granddaughter. They might not meet in the flesh but S will know what an immense presence Dadi continues to have in our lives. Introductions have already been made - S loves her baadam.  

“Not today.” 

“That would have been a bonus,” I respond, laughing.

It’s been five months since Abbas and I received our baby girl through adoption. Five months of feeling as if we’ve been flung into the deep end. Of parking our research on ‘what to expect with a 5-month old’ in light of what actually plays out with our little person. No, this baby does not sleep for 6-8 hour stretches, I want to report back to the first response google throws up on month-wise baby sleep schedules. As not-young, green-behind-the-ears parents, we’ve been up in the dead of night to record videos and run a search on ‘legs twitching in sleep’. Then there was listening for grunts, gurgles and sighs and learning to decipher ‘feed me’ cries from ‘cuddle me back to sleep’. The first a primeval sound and the second a softer call to action. Turns out babies are noisy sleepers. Then there was two weeks of passing a nebuliser pipe back and forth to help ease S’s breathing when she had a stubborn cold.

The only certainty in this time has been that there is none- that we have to work with what is. To be fully present to what her very individual needs are. 

What that also means is zero time off. No window to say ‘Aah, she’s got this nap. I’ll step in for the next one’. Or ‘maybe she won’t want to taste the chappal today. I’ll finish my cup of tea’. (She always wants to taste the chappal. The tea always grows cold.) It means being attuned to every sound and smell emanating from or because of her. Of having to continuously evaluate what can be gummed as she industriously goes about the business of discovering the world with her mouth and tongue. Rabbit’s (now semi-permanently wet) ears - ok; shoes- no; the strap of my handbag- maybe. There’s a fearlessness in her explorations that I part-envy and part-dread. Dread from having to be on alert at all times lest she suddenly launch herself towards a fallen coaster while holding an aam ki gutli to her mouth. Envy at how she knows no fear.

Sleep as much as you can before the baby arrives, I was warned by friends in the days running up to her arrival in our lives. Forgoing sleep has been the easier dance to dance. With all the demands of caregiving and the relentless repetition of it, a certain isolation has followed on its heels. Feed, play, wash, dry, fold, put to sleep. Rinse. Repeat. As the days and weeks stack up, there are fewer spaces to speak to this isolation or even to muster the energy to. Time and adult conversation have become a delicious indulgence. One I miss deeply. 

Hour-long weekly sessions at the physiotherapy clinic I go to are one of the few pockets of time I have wholly to myself. Where the initial guilt of leaving S in the very able hands of my spouse was quelled by telling myself- It’s to make you stronger so you’re able to lift her. To meet the physical demands of caring for a baby. The voice in my head was actually saying, Should I be enjoying this as much as I do? Does it make me a bad mother to want time for myself? 

I’ve grown up listening to stories of how Amma would be on her feet rocking my older sister in her arms all night as she’d cry inconsolably while my father would take his pillow and sleep on the terrace of their barsati in Hyderabad. I didn’t know what to do or why she was crying. When she cried, I would cry, Amma would say. Why didn’t Baba stay up with you? I’d ask. He was working 12-13 hour days. My mother-in-law would tell me he needed to rest. That he shouldn’t be disturbed. I wonder if she saw that hers was a full workday. A 24-hour shift. No days off.

From Ammi, my mother-in-law, I heard a different story. Still in the infancy of her marriage, she found herself in Georgia, then part of the USSR, accompanying her spouse who was serving in the Indian navy. Her first born was a toddler at the time. Who did you speak to? How did you manage? I ask. I picture the sheer, bone-chilling cold, zero communication devices by which to call home to speak to one of her own. To access the familiar. The absence of the comfort of a shared language. Of sharing a laugh. Of an exchange at the grocery store. She remembers the older, kindly neighbour who took a shining to the little boy and his young mother who had blown in as if on the wings of a snowstorm. 45 years on, Ammi still rattles off phrases in Russian that she’d learnt to navigate her new world. Her lifeline. I wonder if she ever considered a few hours in a week to herself. Of what that might have looked like. Or if the long days caring for her 2-year old left any room for those contemplations.

Fractals of their stories echo in those of so many other women I know. So normal, so steeped in the this-is-how-it-is busyness of keeping a child alive that it often doesn’t merit the simple question: How are you? I imagine an alternative storyline where they had a friend or two or three who would come by after the baby went to bed. Just for them. To have a cup of tea. To chat. To perhaps sit in silence. To witness the women who were vanishing into the invisible work of child rearing. To say, Tell me how you are. To listen. 

In this parallel universe, I imagine the women-mothers-caregivers feel free to say, This is what I need. Let’s go for a walk after dark. A drive. Let’s eat dessert in quarter plates that have been tucked into the back of the drawer. I’ll pull out the special cutlery. A place where there is no guilt, no apology, no judgment for the having wants. For saying the words out loud.

I started writing this while remembering a particularly gruelling period of sleepless nights with S. That week, when my physiotherapist asked, ‘How are you today, Deepika?’ I was surprised by a sudden mistiness in my eyes.

“I’m tired. Not sure how much I can do today."

“You’re here. We’ll see how it goes,” she said. 

“Would you like the lights dimmed? Some music?”

“Sure. Anything is fine - I don’t want to make a decision,” I respond.

Pharrell’s Happy begins to play as I lie on the pilates reformer in the darkened room. 

She watches me quietly. 

When the song is over, she says, “Maybe a Buddhist chant?”

I nod. Yes, exactly. 

I feel the length of my spine supported by the reformer, breath reaching my belly. For 50 minutes, it becomes a place I feel free to make room for my wants.

This post has made its way here courtesy the gently held space of Ochre Sky Circles and the wonderful group of writer-friends I’ve found through and