I am pressing my hands against the walls, forgetting that the walls are me. I keep doing this. I don’t know why. Perhaps I am trying to get out. Or maybe I am trying to get further in. Lately those seem like the same direction. I am the performer and I am the audience. I watch myself move through rooms from somewhere several inches above my head. My hands wash a glass. My mouth mumbles something illegible. I’m still efficient. Happy. I am alive but my body is becoming unbearable to inhabit. Is this because I am very good at leaving myself? Is that why I want to claw out of my skin even if I don’t exactly need to. It’s already loosening at the edges so there’s no need. If you look carefully you might see a bone sticking out.

I am sitting at the table and suddenly there is no table, no room, there is only the sensation of falling through something soft and endless. Falling and falling and falling some more. Then I fall back into place and there is a spoon in my hand and someone is talking to me while I have been staring at them for too long. I say sorry. I say I was tired. Haha long night, am I right? I have learned how to count the number of lies that can fit inside an ordinary sentence. Did I mention how happy I am?

I don’t always remember you as dead. My mind is cruelly inconsistent. I am the victim and I am the perpetrator. I keep putting you back in my life. Never properly. A shoulder in a doorway. The shape of a head against a pillow. A story on Janmashtami about how Kanhaiya holds the entire universe between his lips. You are there somewhere. And I sigh a breath of relief. If you’re with him, you must be happy.

I am a plant that has mistaken a window for the Sun. I remember you far too kind and far too loving. Then, the world corrects itself. Then it doesn’t. I hate that second. There is something almost nauseating about how quickly a person can become possible then impossible. There is something doubly nauseating about how vividly beautiful I can paint those possibilities to be.

I used to think the dead disappeared. But they seep. Into objects and rooms and the strange corner of the brain where smell goes to become memory. They seep and they stay and they don’t fucking leave. You are everywhere in the least useful ways. In bhajan. The ‘vamakukshi’ window between 2pm to 4pm. Faint medicinal smell of a room after somebody has been ill. I will catch one of these things and feel my entire mind open like a wound. It’ll then close. Then open again somewhere else.

I don’t trust my senses anymore. The other night I thought I saw you in the reflection of a window as my flight took off and I almost convinced myself it is you because you told me you’re going to go live in the sky, go become a star once you die. I didn’t look away. I sat there, I almost punched the glass because it could hold you when I couldn’t.

It was only a trick of darkness. I could hear someone laugh at me. But I knew that it was a trick. Miracles only existed in your stories. I stayed still because there are some lies you do not correct when they are the only kind thing your mind has offered you. When the world has been unkind and the person you are mourning has been unkind too. I don't blame you for leaving. But I am mad. Not at you. I have done too much of that while you were alive to haunt you this way in the afterlife as well. I love you. I hope you know. We may not have had the easiest relationship but it was beautiful. I am ashamed of what I write and of how I feel but I love you. I love you. The room I talked about is probably a room full of my mistakes. Shadows for people. Silence for memory. Memory for presence. People for God. God for shadows. I know I must’ve made a lot more while you were breathing but I love you.

I have started talking to you without noticing and I want to slap myself for it. Pathetic, sad girl sitting and talking to the sky. It’s nothing sane. Fragments. A thought that begins with your name and then collapses. I keep finding words that no longer have anywhere to land. There are things I cannot look at anymore because they still contain too much of you. And there are things I cannot look at because they don’t contain you at all. I write as I think and I think of you as I write. The untouched things are unbearable and the changed things are worse.

Time is something physical crawling over me. It changes everything without asking. Your absence grows older. I do not understand how an absence can grow older. It should stay exactly the same. Everyday I feel less right to be sad that you are quite literally dead. It feels performative if I let myself cry and cruel if I don’t. Pathetic, sad girl wearing a clowns costume.

There are new layers forming over my grief. Dust. Seasons. Other people’s lives. My own life, humiliatingly continuing. Nothing changes but everything looks different. I want to scream and tell everyone that my grief is still there. One day I will wake up and the pain will be smaller. I don’t know how that makes me feel. I am frightened of what it means if I can carry you lightly. But I cannot stand this pain either. It is in my stomach and I’m so full I can’t eat anymore. I need it to stop but I am scared to let you become a photograph left in water, I don’t want to watch the image slowly loosening from the paper until all that remains is a pale rectangle.

I would rather break than lose the details. So I hold them too tightly. I press my mind against them until they bruise. I can feel myself becoming sick from remembering. There is a physical wrongness to it. My stomach folds. My throat closes. The room seems to tilt. It feels as though my body is trying to vomit up a fact it cannot digest. You are dead. My body rejects the sentence. My mind repeats it. Neither wins. So I continue. I force myself to eat. I force myself to sleep. I force myself to wake. I become briefly interested in something stupid and then feel ashamed. I laugh sometimes. For one clean second I am the person I was before. Then I remember. The laugh becomes foreign in my mouth.

I put my hands against the wall again. The room feels strangely familiar. For a second I think I understand. The wall is not keeping me in. The wall is what is left of me. I am the wall and the wall is you. I have been trying to escape myself by pressing against myself. No wonder nothing moves. No wonder there is nowhere to go. I close my eyes. I cannot tell if I am remembering you or remembering the version of myself that existed when you were alive. There is something monstrous about surviving someone. It is so ordinary. It does not look like anything but sometimes in the morning I brush my teeth with swollen eyes.

There is a particular kind of woman cinema has been obsessed with for years. She wears red lipstick on a Tuesday. She definitely dances in supermarkets. Probably knows how to make cigarettes look philosophical. She drags you to a lake at 2 in the morning and takes you out for a smoke in the middle of the woods. This can be obvious or implied, but she exists primarily to make a man’s life more interesting.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The character who appears in a man’s otherwise beige existence carrying a tambourine and a personality disorder, shakes him violently awake, teaches him how to live, and then disappears before he has to discover that she gets migraines and occasionally wants to spend Saturday night watching Family Guy.

I think the funniest part is that we rarely ask what happens when she gets boring. Simply because she isn’t really allowed to.

The fantasy isn’t simply I want a spontaneous woman. It is ‘I want a woman who will remain endlessly interesting to me without ever requiring me to be interested in her ordinariness.’

That distinction matters.

The MPDG is permitted an enormous range of personality, provided every part of it is entertaining. She can be eccentric. Quirky. Unpredictable. Hypersexual. Artistic. Messy. Philosophical. A little unstable, even. Now, imagine her doing something deeply uncinematic and the fantasy begins to collapse. Because it was never really about her. It was about what she does to him.

This is where the trope becomes much more interesting. For centuries, women have been expected to make life comfortable for men. Cook. Clean. Care. Support. Remember birthdays. Maintain relationships. Absorb emotional chaos. The MPDG is almost the rebellious, aesthetically pleasing cousin of that role. She doesn’t make his home comfortable. She makes his life exciting. Somehow, she is still doing emotional labour. Just with sexier outfits.

Patriarchy doesn’t only ask women to be good. Sometimes it asks them to be fascinating. There is a strange contemporary pressure to construct themselves as endlessly consumable personalities and this is where the MPDG becomes less of a movie character and more of a cultural instruction manual. Be mysterious. Be spontaneous. Be sexually confident but never intimidating. Be independent but still have enough emotional availability for both of you. Be chaotic but never inconvenient. Have boundaries as long as they don’t interfere with his experience of you. It is a very specific kind of femininity that tells you to be complicated enough to fascinate, but simple enough to love.

The problem isn’t that men like funny women. Obviously they do. Women like funny men too. Nobody is filing a complaint against charisma. The problem is what happens when attraction becomes consumption and the same quiet demand gets exhausting. The one that tells you to give people something to look at.

There’s no end to this discussion but I would like to conclude by saying that perhaps the most radical thing a woman can do in a culture obsessed with her performance is to stop performing.

Don’t become less interesting. Just stop proving that you are. I still do ridiculous things, end up somewhere at 3 a.m. with no particularly sensible explanation for how I got there. I still want the stories. Terrible decisions that become excellent anecdotes. I will 100% jump into water fully clothed. If you ask anybody close to me to describe me using an adjective, a handful of them will say reckless or wild. I have just learnt how to decenter the witness and center the experience. And I hope you do too.

The terrifying part of 1984 was never Big Brother himself. It was that over a period of time people stopped asking whether he was lying. When we read Orwell today, we often comfort ourselves with the thought that his novel belongs somewhere else. Stalin’s Soviet Union. Mao’s China. North Korea. Anywhere but here. After all, India is the ‘World’s Largest Democracy’. We still vote. Newspapers are printed every morning. Television debates rage until midnight. Instagram reels mock politicians. Democracy survives.

Until you begin asking a different question. What does democracy become when criticism itself starts carrying consequences? What do we make of answers delivered by police batons? These questions become increasingly difficult to ignore.

In June, environmentalist and educator Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike over unresolved demands concerning Ladakh. Families, students and ordinary citizens joined him. Weeks later, authorities removed him from the site, citing medical advice and court directions. A country ranked 102nd out of 123 countries on the Global Hunger Index report has taken extreme effort out of pure concern for the health of a singular, starving man.

This week, thousands of students gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar after repeated examination scandals and paper leaks devastated the futures of millions of young Indians. What began as a movement demanding accountability soon escalated into a larger protest about governance and public trust. Police responded with barricades, tear gas and even molestation in certain cases as protestors attempted to march toward Parliament. The details of the protest are horrific and have left me feeling utterly nauseated and helpless, and I genuinely don’t have the stomach to write about those in depth.

No one ever announces that protest has been outlawed. It simply becomes exhausting to organise one. Orwell’s Oceania didn’t begin by banning disagreement, it just made disagreement increasingly impractical. Democracies are judged by how they respond to dissent and now this judgement is for you to make.

The second thread is the press. It forces us to ask what happens to a democracy when telling certain stories becomes increasingly expensive. In April 2026, Reporters Without Borders released its World Press Freedom Index, placing India at 157th out of 180 countries, down from 151st the previous year. The ranking itself is easy to dismiss as another international report, another set of numbers destined to become ammunition in a political argument. The reasons behind it are harder to ignore. RSF pointed to what it described as the growing judicial harassment of independent media through defamation suits and national security laws, alongside an increasingly hostile environment for journalists critical of the government. It also noted that certain people, and I’m sure everybody is well aware of who I am referring to, in positions of extreme unchecked power have largely avoided open press conferences, preferring interviews with selected outlets over unscripted questioning from the broader press corps.

None of this resembles Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth, where history is rewritten by bureaucrats feeding yesterday’s newspapers into furnaces, it’s not so theatrical. Today, the truth is not silenced, it is simply priced out of existence. This fight was never really about controlling information. It was about controlling incentives. Once enough people decide that speaking is simply not worth the consequences, censorship becomes almost effortless. The state no longer needs to rewrite the story, it only needs to make sure fewer people are willing to write it in the first place.

There is an old misconception about authoritarianism that says it arrives all at once. That it will be announced by tanks rolling through city streets or the constitution suddenly torn apart. History suggests something subtler. Democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Institutions lose their independence one compromise at a time. Criticism becomes progressively more costly. The boundaries of acceptable speech narrow almost imperceptibly until citizens begin censoring themselves because they have learned which opinions are safe to hold aloud and which are better left unspoken. That is the psychology Orwell understood better than anyone. The genius of 1984 was not the surveillance cameras. It was self censorship.

Modern democracies can drift toward that condition without abolishing elections. This is called democratic backsliding: elections continue, but checks on executive power, judicial independence, media pluralism, civil society, and protections for dissent weaken over time. The warning signs are often cumulative rather than spectacular.

India remains a constitutional democracy yet this does not eliminate legitimate concerns. The question is not whether India has become Oceania. It has not. The more pressing question is whether the incentives within Indian democracy increasingly reward conformity over criticism.

Orwell wasn’t writing a prediction. He was writing a mechanism, a description of how power narrows the space in which ordinary people can think, speak, and gather, one incremental, defensible sounding step at a time. Every step in that mechanism is individually justifiable. It’s the accumulation that should worry you, not any single headline. Whether that accumulation adds up to fascism is a contested question, and reasonable people land in very different places on it. You don’t have to accept the label to notice the pattern: fewer places to protest, higher legal risk for reporting, a widening gap between the story the state tells you and the one that plays out. That’s worth paying attention to regardless of what you call it.

The novel ended with one of literature’s bleakest sentences

“He loved Big Brother.”

The tragedy was never that the state won, it was that the individual eventually surrendered the ability to imagine anything else. That is why democracies are sustained by far more than constitutions or elections. They endure because ordinary people refuse to equate disagreement with disloyalty, criticism with sedition, or protest with criminality. Their survival depends on citizens who understand that dissent is not a defect of democracy but one of its essential conditions.

Democracy rarely vanishes in a single dramatic instant. It fades when these principles cease to feel worth defending. The moment a society begins to forget that criticism is a form of civic participation rather than betrayal is the moment it starts to lose sight of what democracy was always meant to be.

The bottle sits beside the sink like a piece of sculpture. It is amber glass with a minimalist label. The scent is called something impossibly specific. It costs forty-eight dollars. It performs exactly the same biological function as the bright plastic bottle of soap sitting three aisles over for one-tenth of the price. It removes dirt. So why are people willingly paying a luxury premium for hand soap?

At first glance, it feels irrational. We live in an era defined by inflation, rising rent, stagnant wages, and economic uncertainty. Young adults delay buying homes, postpone having children, and wonder whether they’ll ever retire comfortably. Yet sales of premium candles, artisanal olive oils, designer matchboxes, specialty coffee beans, and expensive hand soaps continue to flourish.

The contradiction is a map of how humans respond when the future feels increasingly out of reach.

For much of the twentieth century, luxury was aspirational because it represented a destination. Objects whose value lay partly in their visibility. This was famously described as conspicuous consumption which means buying expensive things not merely for their usefulness but because they signal status to other people.

Today’s luxury looks remarkably different and part of this shift is economic. Researchers have long observed what has become known as the lipstick effect that is during recessions or periods of financial anxiety, consumers often cut back on major purchases while continuing to indulge in relatively affordable luxuries. The theory emerged from observing cosmetic sales during economic downturns. Whether the lipstick effect appears consistently in every recession is debated among economists, but the broader pattern is difficult to miss. When people lose access to large dreams, they often redirect their spending toward smaller pleasures.

A twenty-five-dollar candle cannot replace a vacation in Tuscany but it can make Monday evening feel less like survival.

There is an alternative explanation. Humans do not evaluate purchases by price alone. We evaluate them by frequency. Think about ‘Girl Math’ in its truest form. Imagine spending four hundred dollars on a concert ticket an experience that lasts one evening. Now imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soap you use every morning and every night for months.

The luxury of the twenty-first century is less about excess than discernment. This explains why brands increasingly sell stories rather than products. For example, the candle isn’t vanilla, it is inspired by a monastery in northern Italy. Humans have always attached value to narrative. Anthropologists have argued for decades that objects become meaningful because they carry social and symbolic significance. Stories transform utility into identity.

Our grandparents imagined adulthood as expansion. A bigger house than their parents. A better job, more security and more space. Many young adults today experience the opposite. They rent smaller apartments, postpone milestones, work remotely, and spend more of their lives indoors. Whether by choice or circumstance, daily life has become increasingly concentrated into a handful of rooms. When your world shrinks, those rooms begin to matter more.

Social media accelerated this transformation. Private rituals are performed for the public. Morning coffee is photographed. Kitchen counters are curated. Fridge organisation videos attract millions of viewers. Entire industries have emerged around making ordinary life look cinematic. Calling this superficial is easier than realising that the object matters less than the pause it creates, which is especially important in todays world. Another way to look at this is that in a digital economy, physical pleasures become disproportionately valuable because they remind us we still inhabit bodies. That we are undeniably human.

Imagine a rabbit nudging insistently at a cat’s face, head lowered, utterly convinced that love should look a certain way. The cat is mildly annoyed but secretly delighted, it begins licking between the rabbit’s ears. The rabbit relaxes. The cat purrs. The rabbit remains a rabbit. The cat remains a cat. That is why they work. Neither animal becomes the other nor is it asked to. Most of us spend our lives looking for someone who loves exactly the way we do, when what we should be looking for is someone who understands the way we love and allows us to remain ourselves while doing it. That sounds painfully obvious and very honestly is painfully obvious. It is also astonishingly rare.

Compatibility has very little to do with shared interests. They are without a doubt important but I also know couples who have been married for forty years and cannot agree on a single film to watch, and I know people who share every hobby imaginable and cannot survive a disagreement without threatening to leave. Shared taste is pleasant while shared humanity is essential.

The real question is this: who do you become around this person? Do you become smaller? Many of us do. We laugh less loudly. We hide our enthusiasm. We stop telling stories halfway through because we have learned, consciously or unconsciously, that the other person finds them tedious. We become less emotional, less needy, less ambitious, less strange. We become edited, somewhat watered down versions of ourselves.

Erving Goffman argued that social life is fundamentally theatrical. We perform different selves depending on where we are and who is watching. There is truth in that. Everyone performs. You behave differently with your professor than with your best friend. Different versions of you emerge in different spaces. Although, I would argue that intimacy should be one of the few places where performance becomes unnecessary. Your relationship should not feel like a role you have to rehearse for, if anything it should feel like taking off your bra after a long day.

And yet so many relationships are built on performance. Partly because we fall in love with potential or we fall in love with our own imagination. You meet someone charming but emotionally unavailable and tell yourself that underneath their detachment lies a depth only you can reach. You date someone inconsistent and decide that what they really need is patience. You encounter obvious incompatibilities and rename them “things we can work on.”

This is the halo effect at play, one attractive trait causes us to overestimate the entirety of a person’s character. They are witty, so they must be kind. They are intelligent, so they must be emotionally mature. They are attractive, so they must be good for us. Rarely do we stop to ask whether we actually like the person in front of us. Instead, we begin loving a future version of them. A hypothetical person. A possibility. Possibilities are easy to adore because they do not share the ability to disappoint you the way real people do.

Love built on potential inevitably becomes exhausting because it transforms relationships into renovation projects. As flattering and self sacrificial as you think that might be, no one wants to spend their life feeling like unfinished homework.

Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, believed that human beings flourish when they experience unconditional positive regard; the feeling of being fundamentally accepted as they are. Pure, to the bone, acceptance. This does not mean endorsing harmful behaviour or abandoning personal growth. Healthy relationships challenge us. They ask us to become better. But there is a profound difference between companionship and conditional approval.

Human beings are remarkably sensitive to conditions. Children who grow up receiving affection only when they perform well often carry that template into adulthood. They become experts at earning love. They anticipate needs, suppress desires, avoid conflict, and mould themselves into whatever shape seems most likeable. This is asymmetrical emotional labour. Many people perform emotional labour constantly in romantic relationships. They become whoever the relationship requires. Until one day they wake up and realise they have disappeared. The right relationship should not require your disappearance. The right person may not always understand you immediately but they will remain curious. They will want to understand you for who you are and not for who you can be. Love does not require self-erasure.

The rabbit and the cat make such a compelling image.

One says, love me this way.
The other says, this is exactly how I love.

Compatibility isn’t perfect alignment. It’s looking at each other and saying
You are allowed to be exactly who you are here because I love you for who you are.
And meaning it. This applies to everybody.
Let yourself be who you are and let people be who they are. Give them that freedom.
If you are a rabbit, find your cat and if you are a cat, find your rabbit.

The mistake many of us make is assuming that healing means the complete absence of pain. We imagine recovery as a clean break from suffering, as though there should come a morning when we wake up and discover that the heartbreak, anxiety, anger, or grief has quietly packed its bags and left for good. The human brain does not work that way. According to theories of predictive processing, the brain is fundamentally anticipatory. It is constantly drawing upon past experiences to make sense of and prepare for the future. Trauma, loss, and disappointment do not simply disappear with the passage of time. Instead, they become internal templates and patterns through which we interpret new experiences and navigate the world.

Recognising these patterns can at first be profoundly discouraging. You leave a toxic relationship determined never to repeat the experience, only to find yourself months later drawn toward eerily similar emotional dynamics. You spend years unpacking childhood wounds in therapy, only to discover that a stray criticism can still provoke the same disproportionate hurt you believed you had long since outgrown. It is easy to interpret these moments as evidence that you have failed. It is important to realise that human beings are creatures of habit who are shaped by social conditioning long before we become aware of it. Families, institutions, and cultural expectations leave deep impressions upon us. We return to what is familiar not because it is good for us, but because familiarity itself often masquerades as safety even when it is the very thing that wounds us.

The first time, you abandon yourself without realising it. The second time, you recognise the feeling only after the damage is done. The third time, you notice it in the moment. The tightening in your chest, the urge to over explain or apologise when it isn’t required, the impulse to chase someone emotionally unavailable, the familiar story you begin telling yourself about your worth. This is progress, although it rarely feels like it. Change is moving from unconscious behaviour to conscious choice. What matters is not perfection but latency. How quickly do you recognise the pattern, and what do you do once you see it?

This is why healing can feel so repetitive. The same lesson appears again and again, dressed in different circumstances. Different cities, different friendships, different lovers, yet somehow the emotional terrain remains strangely familiar. It is easy to mistake this recurrence for stagnation, to assume that nothing has been learned. In reality, recurrence is how learning works. Neuroscience demonstrates that the brain changes through repetition. New neural pathways are strengthened not through a single revelation but through repeated acts of noticing and choosing differently. The work is mundane. It is saying no when you would once have said yes. It is resting instead of proving your worth through exhaustion. It is the slow accumulation of different choices in the same old moments.

There is also a collective dimension to healing that contemporary culture frequently ignores. Modern society encourages us to view suffering as an individual problem requiring individual solutions. If you are anxious, you meditate. If you are lonely, you practice self love. If you are burned out, you sit and optimise your morning routine. Yet time and again we are reminded that many of our wounds are social before they are personal. Recognising these broader patterns can be liberating. What feels like personal failure is just adaptation. Sometimes the problem is that you have learned to function in conditions that are inherently unhealthy.

Perhaps this is why healing rarely feels dramatic. There are no orchestral soundtracks, no definitive endings, no moment when a voice announces that you have officially arrived. It is quiet. It is the subtle realisation that you responded differently this time. That you left earlier. That you asked for help. That you no longer confuse chaos for passion or self sacrifice for love. The wound may still ache, but it no longer dictates the direction of the story.

Healing was never meant to be a journey from brokenness to wholeness. It is the lifelong practice of becoming acquainted with ourselves. We do not heal by outrunning the past. We heal by deciding that it no longer gets to make our choices for us. There may never be a moment when we can declare ourselves completely healed. Some wounds leave permanent traces and some griefs become part of the architecture of who we are. But healing was never about becoming untouched. It was about becoming aware. It is the radical act of recognising ourselves clearly and choosing to respond with greater freedom than we had before.

If you look closely enough, every one of them comes from a family that drinks ‘chai’ together. The daily ritual of it. The ordinary, unremarkable cup that arrives every evening at the same hour. The cup that requires no occasion because it is the occasion. Growing up in a traditional Indian household, you’ve been taught since a young age that a partnership is not between two people but between two families. Some families gather around a television. Some gather around a dining table. The families I have always been drawn toward seem to gather around chai. So I am not really sure whether I was attracted to the people or to what the ritual represents. Perhaps both. Because chai has always meant something in my family too.

When I was younger, every evening after school I would wait for my grandmother to make me chai-doodh, which is basically what you’d give your kids when they’re not old enough to drink tea. The routine was so ordinary that at the time it felt invisible. I would immediately throw my bag, lay on the sofa and she would emerge from the kitchen carrying my cup.

If you know me, you know I love asking stupid questions. Once I remember asking her

“Tu mhara pe chidi ri tari banaila? Ghano trass di tar?”
Will you make me tea even if you’re upset with me? What if I trouble you a lot?

“Ho”
Yes

“Pan kyu”
But why

“Ghare aai na tu”
You came home

I had come home. That was reason enough.

We would sit together and drink it while watching some horribly made but extremely addictive Saas Bhau TV Serial. If someone had asked me then whether these moments mattered, I probably would have shrugged. Children have a peculiar blindness toward the things that sustain them. We assume the world is permanent because we have never seen it disappear. It is only years later that you realise some of the happiest times of your life were disguised as ordinary afternoons. Daily routines. The older I grow the more I realise love is domestic. How you spend your days is truly how you spend your life.

My mother does the same thing. Whenever I’m home from college, she brings me my chai in bed every morning. It is so normal and so underappreciated in my household. Sorry mumma I love you. But every time, every single time I am forced to live away from home I am struck by how extraordinary it actually is. In absence we define significance. Someone wakes up before you. Someone enters the kitchen. Someone boils water. Someone remembers exactly how you take your chai. Kadak adrak. Extra ginger. Please. Someone carries it to your room. Someone begins their day by thinking about yours.

My friends and I have our own tea time in college at a place that ironically is called tea time. Some things are meant to be. Like clockwork at 5, almost without fail, we gather at the same place and spend an hour together before returning to real life. I have learnt that families become families through repetition. Showing up again and again. Occupying the same space so frequently that your presence in each other’s lives begins to feel inevitable. And somewhere along the way, my friends started feeling like family. They know the stories I tell too often. They can tell when something is wrong before I say a word. Years from now, I won’t remember every conversation or every detail we have spoken about during our evenings, but I will remember the feeling of it being 5 and knowing that my people would be there waiting. Far away from home, tea time gave me another family.

My father has spent his entire life maintaining a respectful distance from the kitchen unless it is to go out of his way to irritate my mom by singing love songs in the most tone deaf voice possible. But the day I had an exam which I was absolutely turning my house upside down over, he made me a cup of chai. The chai in itself was terrible. Objectively speaking, it was one of the worst cups I have ever consumed. Sorry papa I love you. But I drank every drop. What I remember more than the taste is him standing there holding the cup with the slightly uncertain expression of someone operating unfamiliar machinery. I remember instantly understanding what he was trying to say. Good luck. You’ll ace it. It’s okay even if you don’t.

To stay on topic, I realised my bias most clearly with one particular boy. It was raining. The air smelled of wet earth, everyone was sheltering under whatever roof they could find after our coaching had ended. We had been standing together when I asked absentmindedly and out of habit

“Do you want to go get tea?”

To which he looked at me and immediately said

“Tea kai bole, chai bol.”
Don’t call it tea, call it chai.

I laughed. It was such a ridiculous thing to correct yet something about it stayed with me. He wasn’t being pedantic. Quite the opposite if anything. He said it with the instinctive affection people reserve for things they grew up loving. Being there listening to him defend the distinction, I remember thinking that his family probably drank chai together, and touchwood, they do. Moreover, he loves making his mumma a cup of chai. There are so many values hidden inside the most ordinary parts of our lives. I remember falling for him because he shared the same language of love I had grown up speaking. He used to fit in my life effortlessly. Reminiscing on this really makes me think about how some people might not stay but the love they give you never leaves.

In families especially, love is often translated into action because words feel inadequate. Years pass and my fascination for these practices increases.

Tea occupies a strange place in human life. It is one of the few rituals that persists precisely because it is so wonderfully unnecessary. Every cup represents a choice. Someone chose to stop what they were doing. Someone chose to remain in the room. Someone chose to spend a little more time together. Tea creates pauses in the machinery of daily life. You can see it happen. You can see that tea stretches time. And because it stretches time, it creates intimacy.

Every cup is a small declaration that tells you to slow down and stay a little longer. Perhaps that is why so many cultures have built entire philosophies around it. In Japan, the tea master Sen no Rikyū, through his philosophy, transformed it into a way of treating ordinary moments with extraordinary care. At a time when tea gatherings among the elite had become elaborate displays of wealth and taste, he deliberately moved in the opposite direction, stripping the practice down to its simplest form. He shifted the attention from display to presence. To him the essence of tea lay in the full attentiveness between host and guest.

Another concept that emerged from Japanese tea culture has made a special place in my heart.

Ichigo Ichie. One time, one meeting.

The idea that every encounter is unique and unrepeatable. That this exact second will never exist again in the same form. The people gathered around the table will never precisely share this moment again. The conversation will never unfold in the same way. The afternoon light will never fall through the window quite like this. The moment disappears even as it happens. Tea asks us to notice. Maybe that is why it makes me so emotional.

In my experience, very few things repair human relationships as effectively as someone quietly asking,

“Chai peene chale?”
Do you want to go get some tea

It is a remarkably gentle gesture. Nobody has to discuss the fight immediately. Nobody has to produce a perfect apology. The chai arrives first then the conversation follows. A cup becomes a bridge. I think that is what I recognise when I encounter families that drink tea together. It is about the habit of making room for one another. Of pausing and gathering.

One time, one meeting. Ichigo ichie.

The tea cools. The conversation ends. The people we love get older. So do we.

Which is why, whenever someone asks if I’d like a cup of tea, my answer is almost always yes. I don’t particularly need the tea, although there’s a chance I might. I understand what is really being offered.

Stay a little longer.

Let’s share this moment before it disappears.

Every cup of tea is a reminder that the people sitting across from us are not permanent. Neither are we.

I don’t remember how we got there. Most interesting conversations happen by accident. At some point I mentioned my fascination with Blue Monochrome (1961) by Yves Klein.

My friend stared at me.

“The one that’s just blue?”

“Yes.”

“The entire thing is blue.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s important to you?”

I understood the confusion. To someone encountering it for the first time, it sounds ridiculous and actively absurd. Thousands of artists spend years learning anatomy, perspective, colour theory, composition. Then a man paints a canvas plain blue and somehow ends up being celebrated.

It is a reasonable doubt and the problem was that I couldn’t answer it. At least not properly.

I could tell her about Klein’s attempt to create an experience rather than an image. I could explain his fascination with immateriality, with emptiness, with colour as a thing in itself. I could talk about the particular shade of a deep ultramarine blue he developed and patented. I could talk about how he intentionally applied the paint using a roller forcing the viewer to focus entirely on the colour itself rather than the artists hand. None of that captured the real issue.

The real issue was that I had stopped seeing the painting as strange years ago. It felt completely normal and that realisation bothered me. I did not think my friend was wrong. If anything, her reaction seemed more intuitive than mine. Most people, when presented with a giant blue rectangle, do not immediately begin contemplating post war European art movements.

So why did I? The question followed me for weeks.

Eventually it led me to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. There are few ideas in sociology more useful and more irritating than Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. The irritation comes first because the theory appears to be saying something deeply cynical, that our tastes are not really our own. That the books we love, the music we claim changed our lives, the wine we pretend to understand, the media we reference in conversation, even the way we speak and sit and laugh are all part of a social economy. They are assets and signals. In Distinction (1979), perhaps his most influential work, he proposed that culture itself functions as a form of wealth.

Bourdieu’s central insight was deceptively simple. What we call taste often feels personal, but it is deeply social. The things we admire are shaped by our environment and the communities we move through. We inherit ways of seeing long before we become aware that we are looking.

The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became. I had always imagined my appreciation of art as something individual. I liked what I liked. End of story. Yet Bourdieu suggested that the story was much longer than that. Nobody is born understanding abstract art. Nobody enters the world with strong opinions about modernist architecture or experimental cinema or feminist literature. These are acquired tastes in the most literal sense of the phrase. They must be acquired.

What has been called cultural capital refers to this accumulated knowledge. The familiarity. The ability to navigate certain worlds with ease. Knowing which books are important. Which artists matter. Which references require explanation and which do not. The fascinating thing about cultural capital is that it rarely feels like knowledge. It feels like instinct. In Distinction, he argued that taste functions as a mechanism of social classification. Preferences are not merely reflections of who we are, they are tools through which social groups distinguish themselves from one another. Taste creates boundaries. The miracle of class reproduction is that it rarely feels like class reproduction. It feels like preference.

The market rewards not effort alone but recognised value. This is where economics enters the conversation. Classical economics concerns itself with the allocation of scarce resources. Bourdieu expands the concept. Social life itself becomes a marketplace in which multiple forms of capital circulate. Economic capital can be converted into cultural capital through education, travel, art consumption, and elite schooling. Cultural capital can, in turn, become economic capital through professional success. Social capital, which is essentially your network, facilitates both. The forms of capital constantly exchange with one another.

Status is a moving target because value depends on scarcity. This insight links Bourdieu to economics once again. Just as financial markets depend on scarcity, cultural markets depend on exclusivity. Once everyone possesses a form of cultural capital, it loses some of its power. Accessibility reduces significance. New distinctions must be created.

The point is simply that our loves emerge within social worlds. Understanding cultural capital allows us to see that judgments of taste are rarely neutral. They are historical, political, and economic. They reflect distributions of power as much as distributions of beauty. What societies call “good taste” is often a story about who has the authority to define goodness in the first place.

Yet there remains an important question lurking beneath Bourdieu’s argument. If taste is socially produced, does that make it any less real? The temptation is to answer yes, as though discovering the origins of our preferences somehow exposes them as artificial but this assumes that authenticity requires independence. Very few things that matter to us emerge in isolation. Language is learned. Morality is learned. Even our capacity to love is shaped by the people around us. We do not consider these experiences less meaningful because they are socially acquired. Why should taste be different? The challenge is not to abandon our preferences once we understand where they come from, but to recognise that what we experience as personal judgment is often a conversation between ourselves and the worlds that taught us how to see. Every act of seeing comes with a lens.

When I looked at Yves Klein’s monochrome, I wasn’t consciously thinking about art history. I simply experienced the painting as meaningful. That experience was not spontaneous. It had been built over years of reading, learning, listening, and looking. It rested upon foundations I had forgotten were there.

Suddenly my conversation with my friend looked very different. We had not merely disagreed about a painting. We had approached the painting carrying different histories. The more I thought about it, the more I noticed the same phenomenon everywhere. In literature. In fashion. In food. In music. This is particularly true in the case of luxury.

Luxury is commonly understood as a matter of money but money is only part of the equation. The ability to buy something expensive is one thing. The ability to recognise why a particular expensive thing is desirable is another. One requires economic capital. The other requires cultural capital. Objects become significant because people collectively decide they are. Art is no different. I still love Yves Klein’s blue monochrome. If anything, I appreciate it more now than I did before. It reminds me of how much of what we consider personal is actually learned. A single blue canvas taught me less about art than it did about perception itself.

It forced me to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the things I admire say as much about the world that taught me how to look as they do about my own independent judgment.

I think that’s far more interesting than the painting.

History, despite its obsession with conquerors, has always belonged to caretakers. Love is the same. Perhaps that is the great misunderstanding. When we are young, we look for people who make us feel alive. Later, we look for people with whom we can rest. One is more cinematic. The other keeps you warm through winter. And inconveniently winter lasts longer. The older I get, the more I suspect kindness is the rarest form of intelligence. A kind heart and someone you can come home to. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. The ability to move through the world aware that other people are real. Real in the same way you are. With private sorrows and invisible fears and mothers who worry about them and childhoods they still carry in their pockets.

There is a profound philosophy hidden inside simple consideration. A man who notices when your glass is empty. Who remembers your best friend is interviewing for a job and asks how it went. Who sees a waiter is having a rough day and says thank you. Who texts you to let you know today is a busy day. These things seem small but life itself is mostly made of small things. Nobody spends their days surviving grand gestures. We survive Tuesdays. Traffic. Period cramps. Bad news. Exhaustion. We survive the accumulated weight of ordinary existence. And suddenly people who know how to be gentle become the most extraordinary people in the room. The novelty wears away from everything else. Beauty becomes familiar. Charm becomes repetitive. Mystery becomes exhausting. Even brilliance eventually sits down and takes off its shoes. But kindness remains strangely untouched by repetition.

You never grow tired of being understood. You never become bored of feeling safe. You never wake up one morning and think, wow I wish this person considered me less. I used to think love was finding someone remarkable. Now I think it may be finding someone who remembers that everyone else is remarkable too. Ironically, this is what makes them remarkable. Looking at someone and realising they have spent years making the world slightly softer for everyone around them. What an astonishing thing that is. To arrive at the end of your life having caused less suffering than you could have. To have had power and chosen gentleness, to have had reasons for bitterness and chosen warmth. There is something sacred about that. And oh so attractive.

And maybe growing older is simply realising that you write poetry about the Moon, but entire worlds have survived because the Sun rises everyday. The things that sustain life have never been the ones that beg you for your attention.

April 5th. A friend of mine passed a very casual comment directed towards me because I told him how much I scored in an exam. I was extremely happy, elated even.

“Tujhe itna kya padhne ki zarurat hai? Trophy wife ban jaaiyo.”

I wasn’t so happy anymore. To everyone else it felt like a compliment, to me it was an obituary. Not for who I was but for the person I wanted to become. The strange thing was he wasn’t being malicious, this is what made it worse. Casual reduction is nauseating. I did not know how I should be reacting. What he meant was simple. You’re pretty. You’ll be fine. What I heard wasn’t this. What I heard was that my beauty, which is arguably the most transient thing about me, made everything else irrelevant. All those ambitions and essays. Nights of studying whatever I could get my hands on. Science. Math. Music. Literature. History. Psychology. Philosophy. Geopolitics. Art. Film. Languages. Sociology. Dance. Debate. Drama. The 4000 something books I have laying around my house. Not scoring under 98 for a majority of my school years. It broke my heart and to understand why you must understand something about me.

I come from a family that treats learning like a way of life. The highlight of my parents’ first date was a conversation that revolved around reading. That detail feels insignificant until you realise it perfectly explains the household I grew up in. Ours was a home where growth was considered a lifelong responsibility. My parents pursued intellectual, emotional, and spiritual betterment with almost religious dedication. Books arrived in stacks. Podcasts played on the TV more frequently than any Indian serial did. Workshops filled weekends. I have been a part of almost every class possible. Spiritual teachers and business thinkers all found their way into our dinner table conversations. Sometimes even onto our dinner table. New ideas were not consumed passively but debated and dissected. Improvement was never framed as a response to inadequacy but as an expression of curiosity. There was an underlying belief that a human being should never become static, that the mind is a muscle and it required constant stretching. There was the conviction that there is always another perspective to consider, another version of yourself waiting to be discovered, lurking in every corner of my house.

And now I have come to learn that people look before they listen. Sometimes they never listen at all. And when this happens long enough, something inside you begins to split. There is the self. And there is the thing people see. The thing people want. A screen they project entire fantasies onto. I have spent most of my life trapped between those two versions of myself. I have lived my life inside a glass box.

For years I confused attention with affection because attention was everywhere. It arrived in endless supply. Compliments. Stares. Desire. At first it felt flattering. Then it started to feel terrifying because eventually you realise that you are not a person in those moments. You are a product that is available for consumption and for replacement. People looked at me and saw an asset. This self erasure comes disguised as compliments. The tragedy of being reduced to beauty is not that people notice it. It is that beauty becomes the conclusion. The final answer. I want to scream sometimes. Do you know how desperately I want to build something that survives me? I understood very young that a person could be desired intensely and still remain completely unknown. There is a particular loneliness in that understanding. A loneliness so specific it barely has a name. You begin to feel disgusting in your own skin. Not because your body is ugly. Because it has become louder than your voice.

The reason I study isn’t because I have to. The reason I work isn’t because nobody will take care of me. Have you met my father? I do these things because I want a life that belongs to me. Because how I look was is something I was given. But everything else I built with my own hands. And that’s not to say I hate being called gorgeous or stunning or sexy, I would be lying if I implied this. I spend hours getting ready and I invest a lot of time and energy in maintaining how I look. I love pictures and compliments and blowouts. What makes me uncomfortable is when I am stripped down to just that. Let all versions of me coexist in peace, even if you don’t understand how or why.

Limerence is such a clean word for something that feels so dirty inside the body. Because it isn’t romantic, not really. It’s humiliating in a quiet way. It’s sitting there trying to act normal while one part of you is absolutely convinced that if this person chooses you, something inside your life will finally click into place and stop making that low electrical buzzing sound it always makes. I don’t even think I want them sometimes. I think I want what it would mean if they wanted me. That is the part that’s hard to admit without immediately having to bash my head against the nearest wall. Because it sounds pathetic when you say it plainly but it’s true in a way that refuses to leave. There are moments where I can actually feel the split in me. One part is functioning like a normal human being. And the other part is shadowing slightly behind, watching and watching and watching. The case is always the same. Am I enough or am I not? It never gets written down but it is always the question.

And the worst part is how ordinary it all looks from the outside. It looks like attachment. Inside it feels like begging without sound. There is a psychological explanation for all of this, I know that. Intermittent reinforcement. Uncertainty. Dopamine spikes. All of that. But explanations don’t really stop it. They just make it feel slightly more embarrassing. Being loved is not the same as being safe. But being chosen is. It feels like proof. And I know that is too much to ask from another person. I know that. I know that people show up for themselves. Humans have been trained for survival but my instincts are failing. So some part of me keeps asking anyway. Waiting. Always waiting. For something that never quite arrives in the shape I need it to. Sometimes I wonder if the real addiction isn’t the person at all. It’s the moment before certainty. I don’t know what that says about me. Or about anyone. Or about how many of us are walking around turning people into mirrors and then getting hurt when they act like people instead.

But here’s the part I can’t resolve cleanly. What is enough? Is it ever enough? One wish or two or hundred. When is it enough?

you say you’re upset and i am nauseated seeing you this way

i want to hug you till the anger melts off your bones and hold your hand never let go and kiss your face till you’re giggling and i want to rest my feet on your lap and pull your ear just because you’re close and you’re upset but you’re not explosive and that makes me feel so safe you’re angry but you keep your calm and it makes me want to hug you and hug you and hug you till the anger melts off your bones you’re stern you’re expressive and your maturity makes me want to bite your lips till they’re bruised and now i want to fix your bed sheet the corners are coming out and make you chai unsweetened you’re weird for not having sugar i want to leave you notes all over your apartment and untangle your charger and refill your water bottles put them in the fridge you only drink cold water and write on your board to tell you that i love you and i hope you don’t erase it because i want you to have a reminder you’re upset but you’ve grown and you’ve told me calmly when i got you a bouquet of pink roses today so i wish i got you a 100 you’re upset and i love you you’re a good guy and you’re upset but that’s okay because you love me back and i love you and i love you and i love you and i know that’s not a solution to anything but it keeps multiplying when i look at you it keeps reproducing like rabbits like mold like a divine infestation and one day you’re going to open a cupboard in your kitchen and all my love is going to come pouring out onto the floor because i’ve hidden it everywhere i put it everywhere in your big boy apartment and there’s too much of it now there’s too much of it and you’re upset and i can’t carry that fact correctly but you are here to help.

Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been an audition. That is the ugliest truth about me. Everything I do is an offering. Kindness. Achievement. Every version. I do not know how to need people correctly. That is the first thing you should understand. I know how to anticipate. How to prepare. How to hold twelve different futures in my head at once so nothing collapses when it matters. I keep contingency plans tucked inside me like spare organs. I know how to sense anger before it fully arrives. I know how to make suffering look graceful, digestible. Easy. I know how to keep the world spinning.

Enough about what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. What the fuck even is casual? I don’t know how to love them without making a God out of them. If it doesn’t consume me, I don’t want it. Maybe because I don’t know what to do with it. Or maybe because love for me doesn’t exist if I don’t get to build you a temple inside my ribcage. This isn’t exclusively for my relationships. It’s for my friendships too. Don’t ask me if I think it’s good or bad. To me it’s nuanced. To you it may be stupid. And I’ll tell you I don’t care. But I probably do.

Enough about what I don’t know. Here’s what you should know. I take pride in being direct. If I love you, you will know. If I like you I will tell you. But if you’ve upset me I won’t tell you. I don’t want to inconvenience you because I want to make your life easier but I am hurt and the flowers blooming out of my pain are rotting at the edges. The stench will suffocate you soon. I will spend my life making yours better. I will carry birthdays and grief and grocery lists and doctor appointments and your moods. I will learn how you like your tea and make it for you every morning. I will shout at you if you have too many biscuits with it. Limit your maida. I will cut an extra plate of fruit every time I cut some for me. I will peel your oranges. I will stay awake and track your flight. I will let you call me insane only as long as you do so with a smile. I will keep a mental inventory of your allergies. Our fights will be limited to your water intake. I will make sure you’re reading enough books. AI scares me. I will not let your brain turn to mush. I will make you rest. I will make you laugh. I will make your life difficult but only when you need to forget about the real difficulties of life. I will trust you. I will listen to you if I do. I will let go of my obsessive need to control everything around me. And I will give you a hard time before I listen but I will listen. Most importantly I will learn what makes you happy. And I promise I will make you the happiest you have ever been. For love for the eldest daughter is practical and emotional and logical and spiritual and

You pull me into it like it’s nothing. Your hand finds mine. You don’t ease into it. There’s no careful beginning, there is no soft negotiation of space. You take me like this moment has already happened somewhere else and we are only catching up to it now. You always know what you want and you always get what you want. Something inside me gives way so quickly it feels like relief.

And we move just enough to forget where one of us ends. I can feel the exact point where thinking becomes impossible. It’s physical. It’s like missing a step on a staircase you thought would be there. My body lurches, my stomach drops, and suddenly I am flying. Literally. I am on your shoulder.

The music slips somewhere behind us or maybe it stops. I can’t tell anymore. The room rots at the edges. Faces blur into something indistinct and wrong. The lights smear across your skin until I can’t tell if you’re glowing or dissolving. Your breath is louder and your heartbeat is closer. Everything else has the decency to disappear

It’s just your fingers at my back pressing like you’re trying to remember something you’re about to lose. I should pull back. But I don’t know how to. I don’t want to know how to. I don’t ask what this is. I don’t ask what comes after. I’ve learned how that ruins it. Your hand is around my neck now. You’re making sure I feel exactly how close this is to breaking me. I like it. Your breath hits my cheek, almost controlled, like you’re trying to keep something from spilling out. Or maybe you’re trying to keep something in. I can’t tell which is worse.

So I let you spin me. I let my head fall where it wants. I let the ground tilt. I let it all feel like too much. Because it is. Because you look at me like you’ve already started missing me. And I know that you lie but your eyes don’t. Your eyes your eyes your eyes. There’s a second where I think I might fall down and out of this entirely. But your hand catches me again. Of course it does. You don’t let me fall. You just don’t let me steady either. I love you. Not in a serious way. Just in amazement.

My understanding of the moment starts to turn. And I think that’s when it settles in. This isn’t the kind of thing that stays. It’s the kind that burns through itself, fast and bright and careless. We move like we don’t owe tomorrow anything. The knowledge of an ending is a gut punch, or maybe I owe that to the tequila shots. It makes my stomach twist. Not metaphorically. Actually. My body is trying to reject it, my survival instincts are kicking in because I know my survival will not be clean. This will alter my understanding of the world and of us. Fuck off. Go back.

You are made of instinct and need and that is the most attractive thing about you. Your hand tightens for a second and I think even you feel it slipping. There is a sick clarity but neither of us says it. We just keep moving. Like if we don’t stop it won’t end. If we don’t look too closely, we won’t see the edges fraying. And I realise somewhere between one step and the next I’m not afraid of that anymore. Not of the ending and definitely not of the way this will leave me on my knees. I don’t want this to last. Not because I don’t want you. God, that would be easier. But because I can feel what it would become if it did. We would have to soften to survive. I can’t have that happening to us. We would not be us. I want this, this unbearable unstable almost violent closeness that exists exactly because it can’t hold.

Your hand won’t be there when the music comes back. So I stay right here in the almost. I build us a white picket fence house. You would make a great dad. Even greater husband. Promise me you will be happier when we end. Promise me you will achieve everything you have dreamt of.

I move closer. Close enough that it hurts, that it presses the air out of my lungs. The nausea crests and settles into something steadier, something I can live inside for a little longer. I do not do this to keep you. Or to fix anything. Just to make sure I feel all of it. I let you hold me because this is all we get and I promise it is enough.

You’re in my arms now and I keep adjusting you as if discomfort is the problem, as if death is something that can be negotiated with better positioning or a softer grip or a different angle of light. Your head falls back wrong every time, it won’t stay where it used to rest so easily against me. I fix it. Again. I fix it again. If I get it right you’ll come back. That’s how this works. That’s how this has to work. Your mouth doesn’t move. It just stays slightly open. Aren’t you going to tell me when you will come back?

Still I am talking to you. I am still talking to you.

I don’t remember what I’m saying anymore. It’s just sound now, a stream of half formed things spilling out because silence feels real and nauseating. If it gets too quiet I might hear the absence, the thing that isn’t happening, the breath that isn’t returning. I think if I keep speaking I can fill that space. I can trick the moment into continuing. I can stretch time thin enough that it doesn’t snap.

Your skin is changing. It sits on you all wrong. I joke that I will buy you a wrinkle cream but you don’t laugh this time. So I tell you I will never get married if you don’t come back but I don’t think you care anymore.

It’s subtle at first. The skin. The yellow. It’s something I could pretend isn’t real, like when fruit starts to turn and you tell yourself it’s still good if you don’t look too closely. But I am looking, I can’t stop looking. There’s something about the way you feel under my hands that makes my stomach twist in on itself like it’s trying to escape me, like my body knows something I am refusing to understand. My intestines are trying to strangle me because I know what I should not. I am being punished for being a know it all, you never liked this habit of mine so it’s okay.

I keep pressing my ear to your chest.

Again.
And again.
And again.

As if hearts can be convinced. Death can be bargained with. Take me, leave her. She has had a longer life but I suppose mine was more fulfilling. Let her be happy. I don’t need happiness as much as I need everyone around me to have theirs. Papa is nowhere to be seen and his mother is not talking to me. Is this a joke? Nobody in this family gets things right unless I micromanage them.

I know I could be wrong but it feels as if rhythm is a choice you’ve decided to stop making out of stubbornness. You’re proving a point again, like any second now you’ll gasp and shove me away and laugh at how far I let my panic go. You are lying to me again. But there is nothing, endless nothing that feels louder than anything I’ve ever heard. I am standing inside a scream that never actually happens. My throat feels scratchy and I want you to dig your nails in it and take me with you. But you’re not going, so I suppose I shall stay too.

Your hand is in mine and I am moving your fingers, bending them, straightening them, I am 2 years old again and you are my first toy. The same toy you had hidden because I refused to sleep. Your stillness feels like betrayal, if I let you stay like this then I’m agreeing with it. In reality I’m signing something I never read. You have never been obedient but now your hand doesn’t resist, it just follows.

You’re here.

You are here.

Your weight is here, your face is here, the small scar near your ear is still exactly where it was, nothing has been taken and nothing has been removed but it is empty where you were. Someone reached in without permission and hollowed you out and left the outline behind so I would have something to hold while I realised. Your God has cheated me. Your God has cheated you. More importantly your God has cheated me. This stings so much I have forgotten about how many times you have cheated me. Come back. Stay here. I don’t need you but I think papa does. He hasn’t cried yet. I started crying when I knew you were going to leave. I knew you would do this. I don’t think he knows. How will I tell him? Where have you left me?

I keep waiting for something to reverse, for whatever mistake this is to be acknowledged and undone. Time is a fabric or something of that sort. Let me fold it, iron it, sew it. I will decorate it with pretty buttons and lace if you promise to come back.

Because this feels like a mistake.

It feels like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. There is a glitch in the matrix and it is a glitch so violent it should tear everything else down with it. The fact that the room is still standing and the walls haven’t collapsed, that the air is still moving in and out of me like nothing has changed when it is not moving in and out of you is what makes it unbearable.

How dare anything continue.

I try to remember the last thing you said.

I replay it a hundred times but it’s already slipping, already distorting. My mind is rotting faster than your body. I am losing you in real time even while I’m holding you still. I want to dig the memory out, pin it down, keep it intact, but it keeps dissolving in my hands, turning into something softer, no resemblance to you at all. You have all but been soft two times in my life and this is the second one.

I press my face into your neck.

There’s a smell. Unfamiliar, something just beginning. I am a writer but I don’t want to name this because naming it would make it real in a way I can’t undo and the only person that hates the loss of autonomy more than you is me. It makes me recoil but I don’t move away, I stay there, I force myself to stay because leaving would mean admitting there’s something to leave from. And there is in fact nothing to leave from. You are coming back and you are coming back so soon. I will let you lie to me but I will not let you break my heart. There’s only so much I can take.

I don’t think I’m breathing properly.

Everything feels thick. I have to drag air into my lungs and it doesn’t want to go. Oxygen knows this is wrong and is trying to keep its distance from me. You are leaving and so is oxygen, everybody leaves. Everything leaves. I am all alone. This room is dark and I can see the Milky Way so I think I will pick which star you become.

Suddenly I can’t feel you.

Not the way I used to or the way that mattered.

And it spreads.

The emptiness, it doesn’t stay contained in you, it leaks, it crawls, it settles into me like something alive, something patient, and I can feel it taking up space inside my chest, pushing against everything that used to be there and replacing it with something colder that doesn’t ache in sharp bursts but in a constant, suffocating pressure.

I think this is how it happens.

Not just losing you but losing the part of me that knew what to do with you. Especially since I thought no part of me knew what to do with you.

I’m still holding you. It’s pathetic, really. The eldest daughter of this household refusing to let them pry a dead body from her cold, dead hands. Not crying, wailing. There is bhajan all around me and I try to seek solace but I think the screams in my head are louder than anything they are singing. They are trying to take me away, pick me up, tell me to be strong. I am always strong. Always strong, always happy, always full of life. Today I feel less me and more you, I am not so full of life.

But I am still waiting.

Still adjusting your head, still whispering things I should have told you long back, I am sorry. I don’t know what for since you have caused me immense pain and I have stayed through most of it but I am sorry for not staying for longer I am sorry for not telling you I love you enough times I am sorry for not sleeping on time when I should have I am sorry for always having my nose in a book I am sorry you won’t see me get married I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry.

The part that makes something inside me turn and rot and hollow itself out completely is that I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, or how long I’m willing to stay before I realise that the thing I’m waiting for is never going to recognise me again. Goodbye sweet girl, don’t look over me but look over papa. You owe me that. I love you. I will always love you. You might come back to me in grief but I will take whatever scraps your God has to offer if that means you are coming back to me.