I lived in a lot of supposed-to-be(s). There was a certain way that things were meant to happen, it was simply how I was raised. I went to school, came back with twenty minutes to spare for lunch, then went to tuition classes until 5:00 p.m., followed by karate classes until 7:30, until I was finally home by 8:00. Dinner was always at 9:00, and I had to be showered and ready for supper by then. Pack my bag for the next day, do my homework, and sleep by 10:30 after saying my nightly prayer.

There was never any space left for disagreement, compliance was my only solace. So you can only imagine the disappointment that smothered my mother’s face when I told her I did not like chess, or how short my hair was, or that I wanted more books in my room than the curriculum required. How I wanted to join the reading or history club instead of advanced arithmetic. It was as though I had grown a second head right before her eyes (hopefully, this one with a mind of its own). They disapproved of it completely, not because they did not support my interests; but perhaps out of fear. The fear of a world that had never been kind to people who strayed from the plan.

My phone was confiscated overnight. Certain “bad influence” friends were blocked, and all my books were locked away in the upstairs cupboard where I couldn’t reach them.

“Too much recreation has damaged her head. We should enrol her in another class between tuitions and karate.”

And so it began, the slow deterioration of my childhood. What was once the 5 p.m. chime to go outside and play with my friends was reduced to a sinking feeling in my chest.

You know that part of a movie where the character is so miserable that the director has no choice but to turn it into a song segment, with the character time-skipping through mundane activities in a lame attempt to romanticise the suffering? I felt like my life was a sorry state of a montage for three years. I had friends, but only because a kid is supposed to have friends. My parents would invite them over for dinner occasionally, but never sent me to any hangouts, so I eventually gave up trying to feel included and slipped into a phase of isolation that followed me well into the depths of quarantine.

You would think it got better, but it did not. If my grades dropped even ever-so-slightly below a 90, all hell would break loose. I once came home with an 89.3 in Chemistry and spent the whole evening at the dining table trying to explain what had happened to the missing mark, as though a single percentage point indicated the inevitable beginning of my downfall.

An excruciating year filled with cut-throat discipline, regular 5:00 a.m. alarms and impossible deadlines finally led to an acceptable percentage in 10th grade; one that they could tell their friends about or display in the living room shelf. However, all it did for me was to be forced to choose a stream I was very much against. I remember the morning before we went to fill out the form. I remember how my eyes begged me in the mirror to stop it, to cry and plead until they gave in. I think a part of me always knew it was no use.

And so it began again.

Physics, chemistry, biology, and math. Over a grade I had already broken my back for.

I don’t like to think about those days; the bleak, rainy mornings, the bus ride back from coaching, when I was filled with an imminent hopelessness at having forever been stuck in rooms I hated. I did well. I moved on to the “flagship” batch or whatever the fuck they made up to keep up the incentives. I had tests every Sunday, and on weekdays I left the house at 7 a.m. and returned at 8:30 with barely an hour to spare for myself before I was hurled back into studying so that I could hit the daily 7-8 hours. Sleep was sparse, littered with nightmares and anxiety.

My parents were fairly neutral about all of this. It was expected of me; more was expected of me because, to them, this was only the beginning of a life already planned out.

So when I had a breakdown the following night, heaving on the kitchen floor, unable to breathe, severely unhappy with my life, with only a startling need for an escape—which seemed to take the shape of my dad’s prized Japanese cutting knife—my mother hugged me for the first time in years.

I have never cried like that again, and perhaps I never will.

There are multitudes to people, and for the first time, I noticed that my parents had kindness hidden in all the iron folds they displayed.

The next morning, I skipped school and went to withdraw my name from the flagship batch. And the coaching centre entirely. The car ride back was filled with radio silence, I remember how my father’s jaw was tense as he mechanically drove through familiar streets, ignoring his buzzing phone over a morning wasted on his emotionally fragile daughter, the way my mother’s gaze was glued to the window as she watched nothing. I remember how dizzy I felt, like a stone dropped in my stomach. I still have the diary entry from that day.

I wish I could hug that version of myself and tell her that it was the best decision I could have made for myself, that I made friends that following month who would stay with me for the years to come, that I would pursue a degree I loved and be on my way to move away from that house.

I spent years believing that disappointing my parents was the worst thing I could do. It turned out to be the first thing I ever did for myself.

It was the bravest thing I had done and I’m ever so grateful for it.

Thank you for reading!!

I’m a coffee person but I’ll make an exception: buymeachai.in/prachiharmalkar14

this piece is an ode to a life that got better, a brief encounter with hope.

I noticed that whenever my boyfriend and I go out for ice cream, he gets the chocolate-flavoured one and then complains that it’s too sweet. he always ends up liking my coffee walnut one more, so I feed him little bites of mine while sneakily stealing spoonfuls of his. and yet, every single time, he chooses the chocolate one anyway. the last time we went to get ice cream, he asked for the chocolate one, and I laughed and asked him why he doesn’t just get the same one as mine. he simply said, “so that you get to try two.” I told him I would write about that in my next Substack article, so here we are.

I will be getting a different flavour next time so that he can get the coffee walnut.

I surprisingly learnt a lot about love this year, even though I wholeheartedly believed it was supposed to be a year of abstinence from all emotional connections. but love always finds you in strange ways, and one day you’re sad and crying on the bathroom floor about how the loneliness never seems to leave you, and then a few days later, you find yourself quietly sitting beside someone watching the sunset on your favourite beach, and you can’t help but feel like everything just might turn out alright. maybe all that suffering was meant to lead you here.

my tryst with love begins with Bollywood. with a little girl shipping her dad with his childhood best friend upon the wish of her dead mother (I know, I was just as confused), with five-minute dance sequences, helping your lost best friend’s crush run away from her wedding, and meeting Jesus in the middle of an empty road. I was so wrapped up in this packaged version of love that I never noticed it had always been sleeping soundly in the simple moments all around me. when I was a kid, I loved the beach so much that, on most weekends, my parents and their lovely group of friends would take me to watch the sunset at the beach. we would chase little crabs, build sandcastles meant to collapse, play tag with the waves, and race each other till the entrance. then we would go on a long night drive, blasting Crazy Frog (still my fav song, btw) and Who Let The Dogs Out because I found it absolutely incredulous that it had actual dogs barking in it; before ending the night with ice cream on the way back. I used to wait for the weekends so much that, even while they were happening, I hated knowing that the night would eventually end. my genius solution to this problem was to carry a part of the beach back home with me. now, you’re probably thinking that, like any normal kid, I collected shells or rocks, but you would be wrong.

I collected sand.

just heaps and heaps of sand in used plastic bottles because I loved playing in it, and even now, it reminds me of some of the happiest days of my childhood. this little detail is important because it shaped two of the most fundamental understandings I have of what love means: first, at the ripe age of five, and then again when I turned eighteen.

my dad understood how much the sand meant to me and would always help me collect it, or make an excuse to buy water bottles on the way so that we could use them to bring sand back home. on one of these weekends, when I was five years old, my dad was sick and didn’t come to the beach with us. I remember eating my chocolate ice cream on the way back and telling one of my mum’s friends how sad I was that my dad couldn’t have some with us. that was the day I learnt that takeaway packages were a thing, so I got some butterscotch ice cream packed for my dad because that is his favourite flavour. I came home, however, to a little pit my dad had made for me with a blue sheet and a tub. all my plastic bottles filled with collected sand were standing beside it. that man had built me a sandpit for all the sand I had been collecting, and it was the first time I cried tears of joy. I remember happily emptying every plastic bottle full of sand into my new sandpit while my dad watched me as he happily ate his butterscotch ice cream.

on my eighteenth birthday, my best friend got me two presents, one of which was a tiny gift bag that barely weighed anything. during the lunch break, I opened it and found a small tub of sand. I had mentioned this childhood story to her maybe once, in passing—how much I loved that sandpit, and how we eventually had to take it down when the house was being renovated—and she remembered.

to be loved is to be known.

the other present was a silly T-shirt that said, “Master Has Given Dobby A Sock,” because of how much I liked socks, as well as harry potter.

I grew up in a household of very, very busy parents, so things like breakfast were never really a concrete concept. I usually had half of the smoothie my dad would make for himself (he always made a little extra even though I claimed to hate it), and by extension, my school tiffin was just leftovers from dinner or biscuits, etc. my bus friend used to carry a snack to eat on the school bus every day and happened to notice that my tiffin was just a sorry state of a mess that I did not care enough to remedy. and soon enough, magically, her mum started packing two of everything for her from the next day while she pretended to be surprised. I never had to tell her that I would get hungry by 2 PM or that I didn’t have time in the morning to pack a second tiffin, but the extra Flake chocolate or two energy bars instead of one taught me more about love than any amount of half-assed apology letters or grand gestures to remedy a mistake too far gone.

even in the simplest acts of kindness, I learnt so much about the beauty of the world around me: how my water bottle is somehow always filled because I once complained to my roommate about how much I hate holding the bottle up to the filter and how it makes my arm hurt; or the fact that the girl I had been friends with for barely two months took care of me when I was sick and stayed with me the whole night to make sure I did not run a high fever; or how my bench partner back in second grade would steal the hibiscus flowers his grandmother used to pick for her morning puja because I wrote about them in an essay and he happened to correct my spelling of hibiscus.

I grew up understanding that love is never in the elaborately worded declarations of a perfect forever; it is in the simple act of remembrance.

I still remember that my childhood best friend’s father passed away on Independence Day in 2015, and even though we don’t talk anymore, I still send up a quiet prayer for him every 15th of August. or the extra thirty-five rupees I would carry because I knew Soumya would want a chicken burger from the canteen, even though her mum packed her the most delicious lunch. or how my debate teammate would carry tissues for me before every competition because my palms always got sweaty right before we began. or how the first boy I ever fell in love with would walk me all the way home, only to turn around and walk back to school so he could collect his bike and ride home, just so we could steal those extra fifteen minutes together every day.

so when I got out of an awful year-long relationship last year, my understanding of love had been completely altered. all those childhood memories had been washed over with a twisted, transactional, and painful perception. I began to feel like love was simply a series of drawing the shorter straw and then learning to live with it; being selfless, making sacrifices, and constantly shrinking yourself to keep the other person happy. of course, I knew, rationally, that this was not what every relationship looked like. but I had reached a point where even the idea of a romantic connection felt like a burden, a liability. every romantic advance felt like the beginning of a trap. I still remember the three-hour lecture (mostly yelling) that he subjected me to because I was late to see him the morning he came all the way to my city on an overnight train. he had come after a particularly awful incident, as an apology for calling me a whore. I had a very important competition that morning, and it would have been impossible for me to make it on time, but he refused to push the date. I remember crying while he kept reminding me how far he had travelled and how I took him for granted because I wasn’t there when he wanted me to be. he measured the hours it took him to get there—ten, maybe twelve—and calculated how much that entitled him to in return. every bill was split, the ones that weren’t were eventually used against me. every mistake I had ever made was saved for the next argument. every act of kindness came with an invisible receipt as proof of effort.

after we broke up, I realised how absurd that way of thinking was. a friend I had known for about a month would ride his bike through the freezing cold to the station, then take a three-hour train from Kharghar to Colaba just to spend an hour or two with me, and never once made it an emotional burden for me to bear. or how I didn’t hesitate to take an impulsive overnight train just to give a friend a hug during one of the hardest times in her life. how my boyfriend, before we were even dating, drove 40 minutes to pick me up from a house party because I felt uncomfortable and made sure he fed me good food before making sure I got back home safe.

and despite all the beautiful memories that had once taught me what it meant to love someone, it took only a year to convince me otherwise.

I was made to burn memories, change the way I dressed, block almost all of my friends, and miss the chance to see a childhood friend one last time before he moved to London for the next three years, simply because he was a guy.

the worst part wasn’t even what I gave up. it was that I was made to believe I was the one who was wrong, that this was normal, that love was sacrifice, and that loving someone meant constantly forsaking yourself for them. on his birthday, I made him a hand-drawn comic strip based on his favourite childhood memory. he forgot my birthday present at home and I never really got it.

I loved people the way I remembered love to be and sometimes, unfortunately, it was exploited.

I went through a phase where I genuinely believed that giving parts of yourself to other people was a scam; that everyone hurts you in the end, and that friendships were just deception wrapped in the veil of good company.

it is bizarre how something that, in the grand scheme of your life, feels like only a moment can alter memories that will probably play in your final seven minutes. I am so grateful that I pulled myself out of what was, arguably, the most parasitic relationship of my life and found a kind of happiness I never thought I was capable of feeling again.

I found so much comfort in the friends I had abandoned because I convinced myself that being alone was the solution. I love my roommate so much. she is the older sister I never had. she has taught me what it means to be gentle, what patience looks like in practice, and given me a newfound appreciation for the art of noticing. on weekends sometimes when I sleep in, she gets me breakfast upstairs to our room and always makes sure to pick up the heel end of the bread because it’s my favourite part. before this semester began, I went through a phase where I desperately craved the karachi bakery Shrewsbury biscuits. eventually I forgot about them over the break because I live in the middle of nowhere and my city doesn’t have a karachi bakery. when I came back to college, there she was, waiting with a box of Shrewsbury biscuits from the karachi bakery in her city.

she remembered.

maybe that’s what love has always been.

not grand declarations but buying water bottles so your five-year-old can collect sand. or bringing home a box of cookies because someone mentioned craving them months ago. or ordering the chocolate ice cream you don’t even like, just so the person you love gets to taste two flavours.

to be loved is simply to be known.

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I have written so much in the last two months, and yet it is all unfinished. so much effort and nothing to show for it. read me, read me, read me, are you satisfied yet? shall I tell you about philosophy and the sad musings of my life? am I not enough just with an expression of the mundane?

I love watching the blue pigment-stained water wash into the drain when I shower, I hope it carries some of my grief along with it. my cat, he likes to take naps in my lap, he also hates it when I wear dangling earrings. I place them in my pocket whenever he’s around, I know that he knows they’re there, but I feel the weight of my own betrayal. this information has a metaphor in it somewhere, but I am yet to find it. I made dal the other day, I followed a recipe that would put the women before me to shame. I sautéed the lentils in ghee and jeera, then added crushed tomatoes and garlic. boiled it all down with haldi, water, and spices until it looked familiar. I did the same with my car. it smelled of lost destinations and bananas, I covered it up with the familiar air freshener I’ve been using for three years. my cousin, he’s seven, taught me that family does not come first. he cropped me out of a picture with his friends because I was too “unc.” I suppose the wise have no place in all the fun pictures (I am just dramatic and will be taking my hotwheels back from him). I got six new books, all of them from nietzsche—he did not give them to me, but he wrote them. I trust him because he understands god. enough about god, I always write about her too much and yet I never pray.

now watch me blatantly write some more about aforementioned “god”.

I went to three temples on my birthday and prayed to a church from the car window, my dad gave me a weird look and said that god is not one, because ours can never be as forgiving. chief seattle would agree. I remember reading that chapter in one sitting in the middle of english class, way ahead of what the teacher was reading, with tears brimming in my eyes. when I looked up, she did not say anything. I hope she’s doing well. it never left me, even after all those years.

adulthood brings with it a lot of incoherence, and a general lack of fucks for organizing things and making them presentable; it is good, it makes one embody their character better. I have not forgotten how to perform, I remember it all the same, and it is hardwired. I don’t want to write beautiful things that don’t mean anything, I would much rather ramble nonsense that carries a piece of my life in it.

I have not played the drums in a long time. I can feel them watching me as I sleep. perhaps I will greet them tomorrow morning. I did not get to eat my own birthday cake, but it looked like a dream. I hope it tasted just as good. my feet were hurting the entire time, beauty is pain, I suppose. less beauty, more pain, but oh well. it is quite a task to type with long nails, but I’m stuck with them for a while now, and I can’t resort to biting them in moments of anxiety. but it’s alright, the knots in my chest will only be a little bit tighter—beauty is pain, remember?

alas, I will try to sleep again. I will wake in four hours, as I have been doing for the past week. I naturally wake up in four hours, I feed the animals, and then I go back to sleep. I don’t know why I wake up, I just do. I hope the flowers I got don’t die soon, but nothing lasts forever. like love, or lemonade. I think lana del rey is a lyrical genius, but she plays off as a lovesick blonde chasing the american dream, to appeal to the masses and not let the government shoot her. I am tired. I wake up tired, I sleep tired. I have no purpose, and yet I have so many deadlines that lead nowhere.

conclusion.

yes, I wrote the word conclusion as a conclusion.

This was the primary hypothesis that governed my hangover. The night had fled like a drunken mistake, slipping out in the morning without saying goodbye, leaving behind only a dull throb at the base of my skull. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I had at least made it back to my own bed, for there was a bleak familiarity in its emptiness. I chalked up the twisting feeling in my chest and the general lack of spatial awareness, to dehydration (totally not the bottle rolling at the foot of my bed) and went to the kitchen in search of clean water. Memories of the previous night pitched forward on unsteady legs; determined, and yet doomed to collapse before ever reaching me. They dissolved into hazy images: clinking shot glasses, bodies swaying to overplayed techno, dried yellow vomit on the pavement stairs, and unfamiliar hands in all the wrong places.

The kitchen looked straight out of a horror film: pizza boxes posing proudly on the counter, bottles stacked on top of upturned paper cups (what kind of game even is that?), a foot dangling oddly out of a cupboard—which, upon investigation, revealed a cousin who had passed out mid-search for Cheez-Its. The sink had clearly suffered the worst of it, and carried an ecosystem of its own. My roommate of two years, seven months, and three days vehemently believed that all the sinks in this world are interconnected. As a result, she refused to leave her dishes in the sink, fearing that one day they might encounter the same germs that lingered on the dishes of President Trump. Regardless of my roommate's reservations about kitchen sinks, on mornings like these, which feel like the "Acknowledgements" pages at the end of a cherished book, I find a strange comfort in knowing that I am not alone. That my sink is connected to another. That the soap and grime from my hands may someday touch someone else's through this dystopian network of kitchen pipes. Funny, how I latch onto my sink's promise of a false connection to strangers, while I can barely manage to hold eye contact with the actual people upstairs.

I mechanically lathered the neon liquid soap on the sponge, watching the bubbles escape the ridges of my fingers as I squeezed the murky water out of it, spreading foam across a stained glass from the night before. No one talks about the eerie silence of a house filled with strangers. They mutter perfunctory greetings before slipping out the door, hunting for missing shoes and misplaced keys.

“Good morning, great party, gotta head out.”

“Good night, crashing on your couch, wake me up at noon.”

“Where is my girlfriend? Can I have this apple?” (Yes, Harsh, you can.)

I have been moving through time alongside so many people, our lives briefly intertwined, and yet somehow they all feel like strangers. I feel marooned, waving for ships that continue past without slowing. I think Shelley would understand my desperate need to feel seen; the desire for a companion so akin to yourself that retreating from the rest of the world together wouldn’t feel like loss.

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world. But on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!”1

I cannot ask my creator for a companion; she resides at the bottom of a bottle, diluted in grief and violence. As dramatic as it sounds, how can I find someone akin to me when my own existence flickers like a lone firefly against a city skyline? I am merely a singular light among thousands, inconsequential on its own and yet somehow still a part of the glow.

For a moment, I feel transported to a time when I would wake up to cold mornings devoid of a skyline, when fireflies roamed fields that felt endless. On those mornings, I often felt sorry for the scarecrows perched along the perimeter, so I’d sit in my grandmother’s lap, making beaded friendship bracelets for the one stationed among the tomatoes. He was called Tomat (टमाट) because they had painted his cheeks red to mimic the fervour of the coastal sun. I remember his dry straw hair blowing in the wind; I wondered whether the heat dried his tears as they fell. The crows pecked at his worn sleeves and stared, perplexed, at the pink bracelets hanging from his wooden arms, but he remained smiling. I understand it now: to stay content with someone who finds solace in your undoing, can feel easier than standing alone in a never-ending field.

There is a building now where Tomat once stood. I wonder if the crows still miss him. I wonder if they stole the bracelets.

It feels strange, to have lived so many lives, a sort of betrayal to myself for never staying in one place; constantly chasing change. A new hair colour, perhaps a scarecrow tattoo, a new hobby, a thousand unfinished books, and yet I had no idea what I was truly looking for. There was never really a purpose to the bottles or the bodies. But I remember the bracelets still, the innocence of wanting to make a scarecrow feel seen. I beaded a lot of bracelets back then; for statues, household pets, scarecrows, and once even for a weirdly shaped fork my cousins refused to use. I still make a point to always choose the slightly deformed cookie in a new box, or the fruit with a bit of scarring. I find an almost irrational sense of pleasure in choosing the things that have signs of wear and tear, of having been part of something, of having actually lived. I assign all this life to intangible things because I don’t find enough of it in myself. As sad as it is, at least it makes a good story. What, however, does not make a good story is that some bastard turned off the main refrigerator switch, so now there was no ice to add to the water, and I was left there standing on the cold and sticky kitchen floor with tapwater I did not trust, a disgusting sink, a potentially concussed cousin, and a harrowing need for spiritual purpose.

As for my roommate, I hope she never has to encounter President Trump. As for her dishes, I am more than happy to clean them for her until the inevitable death of said President, or perhaps by then she will develop a new fear. (sidenote: she doesn’t actually leave them inside the sink, she leaves them beside it, which is somehow worse but let’s not tell her that.) If anything, this rendezvous with vodka and dirty dishes has taught me to sleep in for longer after a hangover, and to never, never invite my cousins to house parties again.

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Note: I was going through a period of self-doubt where no matter what I wrote, it just felt completely pointless or unoriginal. Like I wasn't really bringing anything new to the table, but then I realised that it is literally my table, and I can pretty much bring whatever I want. Thank you for reading!!

I see the vixens with double-Ds and blonde pigtails,
flashing their brightest smiles on Halloween;
I see your sick eyes wandering by the yellow school bus,
striped blue socks pulled up to the knees.

come hither, come hither, the "respectable man"
with his six-figure salary and iron-clad reputation.
I see the glowing computer screen beside your sleeping wife;
ribbon bows, lollipops, lace frills,
big doe eyes and colourful uniforms;
does it appease you to dress your vile desires,
on pop-star posters streaked with "barely legal" labels?

to starve women until they are;
wire-thin, hairless, flawless—childlike
you infantilise your expectations,
before I learn what it means to have breasts.

come hither, come hither, the mistress of patriarchal paradise,
with your childish giggles and empowered slavery;
batting astrick lashes at the "big, strong man"
retching baby-pink glitter down foreign tongues,
with the Rolex watches they wrap around your throat;
fill the void until the man with his small di-
-amonds offers solace with a lifetime of sacrifice.

to be the ideal woman is to remain;
youthful, submissive, innocent—controlled
you make your daughters and mothers "cover up",
before they meet the eyes of men like you.

come hither, come hither, the "cool girl"
botox, ozempic, plastic surgeries, laser therapy,
get your OnlyFans safety deposit and
turn a blind eye to the children in Afghanistan and Africa,
being torn away from weeping mothers who;
do not have the privilege of empowerment and body positivity
to justify selling the divine shell of their bodies

to watch the children stare at abused bronze statues,
glinting in the waning sun beyond every horizon;
hush the bachelorette parties and delete your search history,
remember; you can run the Hollywood halls, but you can't hide.

come hither, come hither, the "nice guys"
knock on the “I’m just a girl” door until the babydoll dresses,
have shrouded your eyes; you want us delicate and petite,
with small appetites, no stretch marks, texture or personality
just vanilla-scented lifeless bodies blurring into each other
“is it pink?” “why is it brown?” pinning colour-coded labels;
to sacred forms beyond capitalist human ideation.

to be a little girl is to silently watch,
brothers, uncles and fathers joke at high tables; unharmed
and realise, as the dread slowly settles in, that
their schoolgirl fantasy was never cute, it was always pedophilia.

Thank you for reading!!

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I have not spoken to you in a week. I suppose we are equally used to these silences now.

I wanted to call you last night. to cry and apologise until you finally forgave me for never being the daughter you wanted. but I did not know what to say. there is so much left unsaid that it has all become a tangled mess. the words die in my mouth before they reach you, a cemetery on my tongue; abandoned.

I remember the early mornings on your white Activa, when you drove me to school all the way from the Yellow House, because you were having an argument with Papa. it used to be so cold in the fog. I was on a bike the other day and my hands were freezing, as they always do. I thought of how you would gently place them into the pockets of your brown sweater and ask me to hug you as tightly as possible while I sat perched behind you.

I still cut out the sudoku section from the newspaper sometimes, because they remind me of how you would snuggle up on the couch after dinner every night and patiently solve them. unfortunately, your patience never extended beyond sudoku. I still haven’t learned how to play. I am afraid, you see, that it makes me closer to you.

I received flowers the other day—bright purple orchids. did you know they are my favourite flowers because you told me, when I was five, that they were your favourite? I cut the stems diagonally, the way you used to. I filled the water a little below halfway and kept them in a shady spot by the window with just enough sun.

are you proud of me?

I listen to the Backstreet Boys now and then, you always mumble the lyrics in the car. did you know I made you that playlist? after a year of paying close attention to the songs you sang. I still have the list in my Notes App.

you did not wish me at midnight last year on my birthday. or the year before that. I remembered instead all the Titan watches, Jungle Magic perfumes, and Harry Potter box sets you used to get me. my dark bedroom lighting up at midnight. chocolate cake (the belgian chocolate one from the bakery behind The Circle), birthday songs sung by two voices in sync, and all the presents.

nine presents when I turned nine.

ten when I turned ten.

eleven when I turned eleven.

I remember thinking it was preposterous to receive twelve whole presents, but you still did it anyway.

then something shifted, didn’t it?

I started noticing the other things. how thirteen presents did not make up for the scars brandished onto my hands, or the hate letters in my diary, family members growing concerned about the way you spoke to me, all the threats to drive away and never return. the moments when, in anger, you wished I was never born.

a thousand presents could not make up for it.

I am sorry. I know you tried your best.

I felt the hot flashes wash over me the other day during a phone call with a dear friend. I kept having to overexplain something mundane to him. I did not snap, though. I was reminded instead of the incident in the kitchen, one of many, when I saw you snap for the first time. blinding heat on my cheek. the slow trail of blood. milk overspilling on the stove. the disgusting burnt smell of LPG mixed with dairy.

I remember the night before you left for Chennai. I should have cried, but I felt peaceful. it was not that I was sad to see you leave. I was just afraid she would come back with you.

it felt strange then, how every song seemed to be about you. while kids my age stayed up crying over crushes and one-sided puppy love, I lay awake wondering why my own mother could not bring herself to love me. I remember staring at the fire when you burned the box of all my favourite things. did you know it had the green froggie bag you gifted me on your birthday? I still remember how hard I laughed at you.

“you’re so silly, Mumma. on your birthday, you do not give presents. you receive them!!”

you told me I was the best gift you had ever received and then I watched you throw all the birthday cards I made for you into the fire. it stopped hurting after a while. the bruises faded too. somehow, words have always had a way of sticking to my skin. they have never left me. you show up in everything I write.

I had known for three days before you told me, when you got diagnosed.

I also knew, somehow, that you would blame me for it. it was convenient to place it all on a child who was(/is) willing to do anything for you. I thought I was prepared to hear it, but I suppose I never had the courage to hear it from you directly. to blame me for all the chemicals they forced under your skin, to watch the monster drain the life out of you. it was heartbreaking to watch you hate yourself, and then turn to me and shift the blame. I still pray for you, to a God who never showed up when I needed Her.

you taught me every unkindness I have ever known, all the cruelty I now try so desperately to escape each day. it is easier to wake from the nightmares, the dreams only remind me of something I can never have.

I think of you so often it hurts. I walk around carrying the weight of never having someone to call when I need help. of not being able to put my head in your lap and cry. I did not hug you at the airport, and even though I know it’s stupid, I get so worried. so ridiculously worried that we do not have enough time.

but God, you make it so hard to love you.

it kills me to be able to love you, and yet it is still the only thing I have ever known.

everyone who has ever truly cared about me has known exactly where to twist the knife. they have all said it eventually—the final straw.

“you are just like your mother.”

I know.

we are the same. I am made of you, mother. every fibre of my being is tied to you, and yet you are so far away.

it breaks my heart to watch my friends call their parents every day, complaining about inconsequential things, wishing them good morning and goodnight. I never had that.

I have been on my own for so long that I do not even remember what I miss anymore.

I wish you would just understand.

I wish you wanted to know me.

I keep weaving parts of myself into everything in an attempt to be seen. what use is any of it if it never reaches you?

I have a voice recording from the long drive from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. I can never bring myself to listen to it. I am afraid that if I hear it one more time, I will never speak to you again.

I choke on every morsel of love you occasionally offer. it tastes unfamiliar and bitter, as though unwilling to become a part of me. mother’s day is always the worst of it. I scrolled past all the overly cheesy WhatsApp stories—“you are my lifeline,” “I don’t know what I would do without you,” “I love you, ma.” all of it left a sour aftertaste in my mouth and my phone reeked of betrayal.

did you know that we do not have any old photos together? you burned all of them that same day. I only have one family photo left, and I barely recognise you in it at all. you look so alive, and you look at me like I am the best thing that has ever happened to you.

I have so much more to say, and yet nothing at all. none of it ever feels good enough, as though I am betraying this story by failing to write it the way it deserves to be written.

I am afraid that, in the end, this is all we are;

two people trying desperately not to turn into each other.

-

I’m a coffee person but I’ll make an exception: buymeachai.in/prachiharmalkar14

there is really not much left to it, but the nostalgia cascades in a tyranny of memories onslaught. fuck the fig tree, and everything in between. not even just the notion that I will choose to eat all the figs, because I barely even have the energy to reach the ones on the floor, rotting with me. the sweet stench is almost comforting, in the sense that even in death, we are made of sweet things. nurturing critters, who do not understand death or demise, only survival and hunger. I often chastise God, but I understand She is just as responsible as we are; She neither creates nor destroys. it is perhaps in human nature to avoid responsibility; with handwritten letters, manicured flowers, or songs rehearsed to perfection. I envy the figs rotting beside me; they don’t fear the deformities scavenging their body, not even for their own demise; I am too aware, and none the better for it. I watch; I am always watching everything. dark eyes, dark hair, lithe hands; all moving in a symphony of mannerisms, reflective. mine don’t look like that; I am sluggish, slow—dead. I do not know when I came to become like this; all I remember is a white floor, chequered, with the edges brown and dirty, smelling faintly of phenyl and wet-dog. I remember the knife slicing over bare flesh, so decadent and beautiful; the blood flowing in little rivulets, like family jewels passed down with love—red, on a bride for her wedding day. I write of brides often; perhaps a personal betrothal to my aversion towards weddings manifests in a reflective grief of those who never came to avoid it.

I sit in classrooms, knowing vaguely what is expected of me, but unable to move; it is like my skull is a membrane in itself, devoid of the fancies of the external world; untouched by walls of any kind. it shows up in fleeting shadows in the corners of my eyes, lingering at the edge of doors or the curves where walls meet the wood-plastered flooring; it’s always accompanied with the gushing feeling in my chest, like being underwater. it laps hungrily over my senses, in a gentle hum that reverberates through my hands.

the steady tap, tap, tap of shoes against the footrest.

drumming fingers on the desk,

squeezing my palms together as if to magically get rid of the suffocating feeling \ it’s so easy to miss.

so easy that I ignore it, all until the dreaded clock lights up to 2:18 a.m., and suddenly no amount of work is enough of a distraction. I need to crawl on my hands and knees, heaving, until I’m under the table, with my head hung low between shaking knees, wounded hands wrapped around myself. the steady table fan pattering against the rain outside, mirroring my heartbeat until I am so far gone that I hurl the scissors into the selfish blades of the fan just to make it stop; they are lodged there the next morning as I open the door to let my roommate in, chirpy conversations with no evidence of the previous night except for the scissors that ‘accidentally’ fell into the fan.

how strange,

that such things happen so often.

innumerable times;

I have sat through clammy hands, locked in a bathroom stall, trying not to choke through sobs. I think something deep inside me was broken, probably on the sidewalk in 2009 outside Palladium, with the white car and glove-clad hands; I remember it so vividly, it winds through the fickle chords of my mind, firing at a speed I cannot comprehend / out of my reach before I can even begin to grasp at it. they were right in the 90s—people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

these chords in my mind are much like the wanton feelings, waiting to latch greedily onto an ever-unfurling Thanatos bait. adding sparks to start a forest fire / it greedily laps at words, smells, sounds; what was once a reminder of my own failure slowly transforms into conviction. conviction that I am irredeemable; my Vienna-dreams will die on the bedroom floor with the piles of dirty laundry and broken sodium lamps. there are brief moments of respite; it often manifests as a to-do list. what is a to-do list if not a false promise meant to satiate the hunger of a perpetually starved child?

I find fleeting solace in morning walks, a stiff, almost relentless promise in the summer breeze, sticking to the sweat on my skin in bands of hope.

it does not last long. I enjoy my showers scorching, enough to feel baptised and reborn, until my skin is not my own anymore; merely a gnawed red mass meant to contain the filthy blood pumping through a long-failed heart.

I do not know what pushes me to the edge every so often; it used to be an amalgamation of material, external factors. but I have waded my way out of it, some semblance of normalcy to play-pretend among the rest of them. this too, does not last long. I inevitably come back to my own devices—the burning water, blades lost to time, daimon 6:00 a.m. alarms;

all of it / none of it.

I am not in need of a saviour, a companion, an older/wiser being to sort through my bullshit. I simply need a way out of the mundane; unfortunately, we are all destined for mediocrity, and the harrowing reality of it wraps its icy fingers around my ribs, tugging until the cage-anchor turns into a puppeteer hand, mercilessly yanking at my heart.

perhaps it is too late to stop it; and I have never had it in me to accept a fate I dislike / I would much rather succumb to a(n) (un)timely death.

until then, I am merely a puppet waiting to fall apart.

Growing up, I would beg guests to stay the night. I hated it when my dog curled up in his little corner and tucked himself in. Which is ironic, because at the same time, I despised people. They always seemed to lead such different lives; full lives, so unlike my own. They had real connections with the people they loved, they had smile lines, and they cried when something upset them. They did not just linger in corners like shadows, perpetually hidden by a light they couldn’t borrow. My distaste for company and my inherent need to be surrounded, has developed into a kind of coexistence Ponzi scheme, where I usually find myself in social settings; completely nonverbal, and with a strong urge to leave.

I really envy Charles Bukowski (not really, he was a raging alcoholic, deeply misogynistic, and an abusive partner) only in this one regard. As I follow this train of thought, it’s hitting me that perhaps Bukowski is a terrible example to quote here, but forgive me, this one passage has been stuck in my head like an itch on the inside of your gums that won’t go away.

Although I’m fairly certain that in his case, this outlook stemmed from narcissism. What’s ironic though, is that in the full quote, he mentions Henrik Ibsen, who held views almost polar to his own, at least in how one should treat women. It feels like the modern equivalent of a performative man parading around the metro with a copy of Clarice Lispector.

The point being; people often treat loneliness as a means to an end. A journey, a process, or a train leading somewhere meaningful. Even Dostoevsky frames it as a medium for discovering one’s own strength, a preferable alternative to maintaining hollow pretences with others. I don’t disagree. My contention, however, is that we fail to acknowledge just how unbearable that journey actually is. Loneliness becomes the part of a film compressed into a montage, with motivational music swelling as time skips forward, because even cinema cannot endure showing it in its raw form. What gets omitted are the mundane moments, the jarring return to reality after three hours of continuous doomscrolling, when it suddenly hits you that you are actively wasting the one irreversible thing you cannot control—time; the silence of standing still after a shower, wrapped in a towel and staring at a wall, unable to move because you know it will all feel the same again; turning off a 6:30 a.m. alarm because, even half-asleep, you understand that waking up early will not fill the gaping void in your life; opening the Calculator app in a group setting just to have something to look at, rather than forcing yourself into a conversation that brings neither joy nor interest.

Then comes the harrowing realization that perhaps it will always be the same. It doesn’t matter if I move out, finish college, get a job, or live in a new city; none of it can actually pull the thread out of my spine. I talk to the same people over and over. I watch the bottles on the shelf slowly drain themselves dry. Hours pass in chatty classrooms where I make mental notes amidst shallow conversations to not show my teeth too quick. I nod, I speak, I move one foot after the other, every single day. Sometimes there is a sense of purpose; in writing a piece, an article, a research paper, or even just carefully painting my face before going out. But it feels like a rat being handed a poisonous piece of cheese to make up for its inherent absurdity, only for it to end up dead and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, much like the rest of us.

The desperation is what really gets to me. It winds itself around me like a tightrope, a second skin, forcing me to stay in situations I would otherwise leave in a heartbeat. If I were to live in Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, these places and these people would stop being memories and become a hard-wired routine I cannot escape. This same life, lived over and over again. In trying to escape, I would only be turning the hell of an afterlife into the supposed gift of my own mortality, and even that would feel hollow. No amount of regret can undo the damage, yet I can’t fully blame myself either. I did what seemed best at the time, what felt necessary to keep me from going over the edge, not realizing I was already there the entire time. It’s easy to lose myself, even if only for a moment, in inebriated conversations. To create fleeting connections over shared, surface-level bullshit; until it’s 2:00 a.m. and I realize Nietzsche never took The Strokes into consideration when he came up with eternal recurrence.

I don’t mean to bore you with this attempt to capture something in a word document with 1099 words filled with nothing tangible to show for it. This is not a “think piece” meant to make you feel profoundly understood because someone else has felt the same way.

I’m trying to draw your attention to how deeply tied we all are, despite the spaces we keep placing between each other. It’s this constant struggle to be better than the person next to you, the individualistic belief that your pain makes you superior.

It doesn’t.

And believing that it does only isolates you further, thereby feeding the cycle.

I remember how much time I spent convincing myself that I was different, because it’s so easy to feel like a black, rotting spot in a group of people seemingly untouched by reality. It is so, so easy to hide and play a part.

But what is the point?

My life felt like an elaborate organized crime, with everyone I’ve ever loved as the main characters. Old friends, long forgotten, they all wait at the bottom. We hurt, kill, and betray each other. Then, in my head, the curtains close and it’s all over before it even began; bodies upon bodies, held in the euphoria of having finished a play. But reality does not work that way. The curtains never close, because we keep pretending until, one by one, everyone leaves the room.

There are moments when it feels like things could be better; brief moments where there is life beating out of my heart, bleeding into my veins. It shows up in ugly laughter at the dinner table, in the cool night air against my skin on a speeding bike, in standing at a cliff and realizing for the first time that—maybe, just maybe—I don’t want to jump. It hit me yesterday when I was looking for a shirt I hadn’t worn in a long time, only to realize it had been my “depression shirt” just a few weeks ago, and now I wanted to wear it to a mundane celebration. It is almost alarming just how quickly life changes.

My essays here usually begin in a depressing place and end in an even more depressing one. This feels like a rare instance of hope, not only because something external has shifted, but mostly because, as redundant as it sounds, sometimes I need to learn to at least acknowledge the good parts, however fleeting they are. It’s easy to romanticize the flaws, to write about a hopeless life steeped in sorrow and regret, to make vague references to Shakespeare and the Bible. But that, too, is just a part of the same sorrowful life.

I’ll leave you now, not with hope or even understanding, but to entreat you to try, however you can, to carve out small gaps of peace within this loneliness. It is frighteningly easy to slip into oblivion, where a single bad day quietly stretches into a month lost to guilty smoke on a balcony ledge. The real poison isn’t hope; it’s surrender. The kind of defeat that isn’t palpable until it’s too late and you’re already falling over the edge; it settles in far too early before you can even realize it has wrapped unyielding fingers around your throat.

You don’t have to pull out every thread lodged in your spine, all at once, but these small glimmers loosen them, if only a little.

I don’t have all the answers, I’m simply in this with you.

If you’ve made it this far, then something in you is still resisting that pull. Please listen to it, don’t go over the ledge.

Cover Image: Bird on Money by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1981) | The New Abnormal by The Strokes, RCA Records (2020)

The cover and certain lines in this piece are inspired by something I once wrote in my Notes App:

Thank you for reading!!

One would think that it started this evening, when I saw a friend I knew back in grade school at the grocery store. She was with her father, a man who had played multiple concerts at school fests with his “boy band.” There was a familiarity in the way he sofly bent his head to talk to her, the way they mechanically unloaded the items from the cart onto the counter, and also in the way I looked away when her eyes flashed at me just for a second.

It was uninvited, this foreign kindness. I had never been a part of it.

I cried in the aisle filled with packaged spices as they billed their weekly supplies. Cardamom and turmeric intruding all my senses to further trigger the floodgates.

Or maybe it started in a hospital waiting room, I cannot tell you which one. There have been too many since last year.

But you must know, I really did try.

I abandoned all liquid courage, the cigarettes, even the sugar—all of it. I burned the midnight oil and went on morning walks to watch the sunrise. I called my mother from time to time, narrating the day’s meals, refurbished rants from professors, promising to drink more water. I went out, talked to more people, made an effort to date. I made small talk in the elevator, about shared deadlines and wasted concert tickets. I did all of it, and more. I mimicked the people around me, one foot at a time—breathe in, breathe out; a hundred times over.

But I am so tired now. I cannot go any further.

It is my childhood bedroom all over again. I keep building Lego cities only for others to break them down. I watch the elaborate buildings fall and then wade through the rubble to replace them with better ones—stronger foundations, more defences.

It is too late, there is no use now. My city was always built to fall.

Now it is yet another hospital waiting room. I have blackout shades covering my eyes; they are infected. There is a parasite in my blood(line)—genetics, I was told. There is not much room to disagree with your doctor.

Supplements, tonics, teas, and tablets.

Morning, noon, evening, and night.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

And then it all comes crashing back into you, like a punch to the gut; in the isle with all the spices, on an inconsequencial Monday evening. I am nineteen again, nursing after my mother, staring at the blue waves outside the window—so far away—from the hospital room. Watching angels in spotless white carry in chicken broth, steaming dal, blueberry chocolate pudding, and the big rolled-up bundles of colorful pills. I remember the broken bottles, the fallen grey-handled walking stick, followed by red footprints on the cold floor. I have phantom marks from when I watched my hands clutch the armchair. I was forced to wait outside. The screaming on the phone line slowly morphing into a ringing echo in my ears.

Everyone always wanted more.
I, always wanted more.

I don’t know what any of it means. I never did. I don’t think all the residual grief makes you a better person, it only teaches you to live through clutched fists. I don’t know if I will make it out of this dark room—the walls are closing in. I pray for all those lost, who carried the burden of hurting me. I grieve their absence, for the suffering that brought me care.

All I can bring myself to do is write. My vision is blurry and I don’t know how much longer I have left before my hands give up. This foreign pain is not mine to claim.

I would say more, but the voices are all just mush in my head, and there is a whistling somewhere in the corner of my ear. I cannot tell if it is real or if I have conjured it up.

Tomorrow morning, when the curtains close, remind them to water the plants and leave the house key by the window. Don’t open the blue-binded notebook.

The oilspill of my soul is in there somewhere.

if I closed my eyes, it sounded almost like the steady patter of rain on a tin roof. hard, merciless enamel fighting itself to beat a foreigner’s cold. I tried to call out to a God rooted in forgiveness, but I was told that my tears did not bring Her enough salt. this deity, She promised me absolution as a gift; in carving my lungs out on Sunday morning before church, God willing, if the monochrome nurses fled their venerated brothels.

my father, he works with shovels, covering the sins of others with fertile dirt. I think of the coffee grinds he mindlessly sheds every morning; more dirt in a defiant act to deliver his benign service. I have a shovel of my own, and I rake it through my bones with sick devotion. I dig until I find all the soft parts that separate me from the dead.

if you were to run my soul through a centrifuge, the need to be forgotten would separate out in unmistakable bands of black ink.

I think of the cemetery down the street when I make my eggs—crisp, runny, asymmetrical—an unborn child garnished with chives. I watch the fork dig into the yellow decadence pooling over an ivory bed; yet another shovel raking through the dead.

one step, two steps, three steps down the hill; will they take my soul to a field stained with the blood of Cain? the benevolent snakes won’t hesitate before leading you to the well. remember this, forever.

I nudge myself to breathe every now and then, to harbour this burden of existence. I think of Eve from when we shared the ripe flesh of the rotten fig together; her hands so gentle as she cradled our Temptation. I was warned, you see, but I wasn’t paying attention. what use is a warning when heaven whispers at your virgin lips?

the wise men, they sealed my neck with a scarf; to keep away Temptation, they said. I did not ask if it were mine or theirs, but the scars answered my questions ten years too late. what fickle noise all this hope makes, threading through the walls only on sunny afternoons. the threads, like little worms crawling into my skin—the dead, remember them. for they never leave us, not even on our brightest days. they linger in conversations trailed off, glasses forged to be broken, and patrius songs lost to time. I would have better chances of forgetting, or rather succeeding, if I asked for a silver dagger at a dive bar. alas, nobody brings those anymore; we are too wrapped up in gunfights.

my brother, he often says that I talk in my sleep. I haven’t slept in years; he doesn’t know I spend the night calling out to an earthen God. you see, my brother also says that he is a man of God. I think perhaps that is why he is a sinner.

as a child, I spent a lot of time with flowers. fresh petals melting their scent onto my soiled fingers;

do people inside coffins smell like the flowers dressed above them?

I remember the sharp pain nidificating along my cheek when I asked my uncle this question at grandmother’s funeral.

“irredeemable, just like your mother,” he spat.
but I thought of the bruises under his wife’s eyes and the blooming red lines on my brother’s legs. my uncle, I realised, was also a man of God.

at fifteen, they pulled a white veil over my eyes, shimmering above the docked boat. I remember watching the water through the familiar, sickening stench of flowers. it lapped against the boat’s keel, hungry and lustful. when I looked up, I saw the water reflected in a stranger’s eyes. that night was no different, in the sense that my helpless cries never reached God’s ears. I envied Magdalene, blissfully forgotten by these men of God. I prayed for her, and all of her lost children.

sixteen ushered along with it the wails of children, it washed away the pails of blood that varnished the curves between my legs. all the blood lost at the hands of a man preaching the sanctity of a new life, discarding my own now that I served an evangelion purpose.

one year, two years, three years down the hill; they shovelled father’s dirt on my polished mahogany coffin. teeth snapped shut together as they chattered at my last breath, bones cold and heavy in the unrelenting downpour. they read rehearsed lines at a sermon, as men of God beat their wives next door. the church bells tolled, and my children wept to no cause.

my cries had been heard at last, by a foolish God who believed absolution to be a possession of the dead; immortality had evidently taught them nothing of suffering.

surrender is always pensive; waiting. I felt the last gnawing scrape of the shovel against the fresh dirt, falling softly on the wood. I heard the songbirds, trailing their chimes along the hushed cries of weeping mothers.

earth to earth,

ashes to ashes,

dust to dust;

in sure and certain hope

of the Resurrection to eternal life

eternal life.

not even the prayers would spare us this fate; of existence rooted in death.

cover image: Smith, A (2017). Big Bang

Note: I have been sitting with a distinctly strange feeling for some time now, this was just a feeble attempt to put words to it. Also, given that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, it felt right to highlight abuse that is often disguised as tradition in many cultures. Lastly, thank you for reading, it truly means the world to me.

the poems have gone stale,
in bed, before dusk called upon us;
and the birds don't sing anymore.

I wish I had left sooner.
I wish I had slit the lovebirds’ throats in their serene sleep.
I am a beggar for affection, affliction;
and your filthy affluence.
I want to rip my own beating heart out of my chest,
eat it before your solemn eyes,
on my knees, just how you like it;
will that prove my honesty to you?
would you have loved me more had I left sooner,
fled your rattrap before it ensnared me?
it smells like roses and whispering babys' breath.

I remember your nails digging into my back,
the morning after your fingers curled around mine.
remember when you held my hand in your sleep?
does she elude you like I did?
baring my soul to you was just canvas,
like a gleeful child, you soiled it with your whims and demands.
were my clothes too brash?
does she “cover up” more?
wrap my carcass in white, head to toe;
perhaps that will satiate your need to keep me hidden.

I pray for your parents,
for the disasters they clean after you.
I hope your mother finds cruel solace,
after your indefinite absence.
the tapes in your camera should reflect;
the pieces you broke, bit by bit,
to amuse your ego.
think of me when the waves wash up to your ears,
when your lungs stop working,
and you gasp for air.
think of me when you greedily lick your fingers—
slick, nauseating, decadent.

think of me on your deathbed,
when the flowers have wilted;
and the lovebirds sing again.

I have always associated summer with mangoes, long before I was sucked into the world of literature that idealised the innate romanticism of seasonal fruit. I have never cared much for the tender, almost amorous effort it takes to peel a pomegranate. I grew up watching erudite hands meticulously pick the perfectly ripe mango; the delectable hay-strewn mass weighed and turned, pressed gently at the ends for sweetness. I remember watching the blade glint briefly in the florid afternoon light, before slicing through the yielding edges with a knife faintly smelling of garlic and steel. Digging my teeth into the fibrous core before hitting the rigid pit in the centre, the sweetness still lingers on my tongue even at the cusp of adulthood, along with the phantom mango fibres once wedged stubbornly between milk teeth. The dripping nectar leaving sticky, amber shadows on my hands, wiped unsparingly with the airy cotton dupattas of mamis and chachis who turned a blind eye to their own perspiring vanity.

I remember the cool timber scraping lightly against my bare feet as I bounded down the stairs, before winding through coir mats bursting to the brim with vibrant red chillies, their skins wrinkled and blistering in the incessant heat, and slabs of dried jackfruit simmering in their faintly acidic, fermented sweetness into the thick coastal air. The jet-black Hindustan Ambassador winked at the sun as it bathed in all its glory in the shade of Gulmohar trees, the fiery orange flowers whispering in scattered pools around her prickly tyres, like garlands carrying forlorn wishes at the feet of a sleeping idol.

There was an ornate sagwan swing on the front porch, and a brass fauji statue at the door. Aati, my father’s elder sister, would tell us about a popularised rumour that there used to be not one, but two fauji statues before it’s counterpart was lost to time. They were said to be almost sentient, charging all the way to the main street on their stout, fearless horses, but after one statue was stolen, the other slept forever, grief freezing him in time. At the naïve age of five, I did not completely understand loneliness, I only knew that something was wrong. So, I made a matching pink friendship-bracelet for the statue, a result of the 24 Hobbies For Creative Children beading set that had been a birthday present from Aati herself. I looped it around the sharp spear, as if it could keep the brass artifact company. My older cousins ridiculed the tacky beads and my insistence on giving life to something they hardly spared a glance. Years later, when I read Shelley, I understood why the statue had gone to sleep forever. There is little use in speaking when no one is left to listen.

You see, the statue had found a monster cut from the same cloth as him. The blood on their hands was shared, and the ghosts did not follow them into the late hours of the night. Once his better half (and I only say this because the existing statue was covered in a film of patina) was lost, he had no more reason to stay awake. There was no one to share the misty mornings with, no one to ride into fog-hewn battles alongside the pale-bellied bullfrogs and gaggling mosquitoes.

For something to be stolen, it must first exist. I have feared that my Creator never made me a counterpart, that the blood on my hands was mine alone. I regret never pressing my ear to the carved crest on the statue’s torso, checking for a heartbeat akin to mine. I feel certain that I am the lost brass statue, with no counterpart and no pink friendship bracelet looped around my wrist. I am abandoned in a scrapyard, among dark green trunks full of used equipment, discarded sofa sets inhabiting ecosystems of their own, and life-sized trophies surrendered to time. All that is left of me now are the memories of a summer from too long ago— vanilla ice cream that tasted like fresh paper, the pungent sting of bilimbi pickle, and lying in the grass beside Ajoba’s chocolate-brown Labrador, Richie, his fur (carrying the misguided trace of aftershave some mama believed was a good idea) impossibly soft under my cheek.

It is all so vivid in my head.

After fifteen years of shifting cities, homes, schools, friends, and worst of all, pets, I ache for the Old House. On days when the thought of leaving the burner on feels less frightening than the silence, I cut open a fresh mango as April begins its slow descent. It is sweet; the flesh so palpable and alive in the sense that it feels cannibalistic to prey on nostalgia so carelessly. But it is not the same. These mangoes taste like shadows, and the summer air is disgustingly putrid. The sweat feels unnatural on my skin, sickly and foreign, thick with the nauseating breath of a city I can never call home. I reminisce about desperate afternoons spent driving for hours from one junkyard to another, showing pictures of the statue to enthusiastic men in dingy stores, hoping to find its missing half. It is strange that our entire family referred to it as a half, as though they were incomplete without each other.

“Heavy in the hand, proper casting, no cracks, see the shine? This one will outlast your children, Madam.” I know, Ramesh-and-Sons-Antiques salesman. I know.

Alas, I never found it. Some things are meant to be lost to time; others are fated for solitude, left with nothing but the aftertaste of a bittersweet past. Perhaps the statue and I share that fate, where the silence does not descend all at once but settles slowly, until you wake to find you have stopped speaking altogether. Perhaps that is why my journals remain blank, my friendships dissolve into brief hellos and practiced goodbyes, why no one has tied a friendship bracelet around my wrist in years. What use was existence without companionship? Even Achilles might have renounced life midway through his training with Chiron had he not met Patroclus in Phthia. I began to understand what it meant to lose hope; I understood why men turned to prayer. So I drove to Chowpathi at dawn and watched the collar-shackled men bow in prayer, whispering to gods who had never learned to listen. The unfamiliar sun rose behind them, casting pale halos around their bent heads. Soon they shackled themselves once more to laptop bags and steaming Tupperware dabbas, rushing to catch trains that led nowhere, the food gone cold by noon. I knew that I was no different; I had been doing the same, mistaking a lost cause for eternal salvation, searching junkyards for a statue’s missing counterpart to quiet the insatiable void in my own chest. The seagulls were no better, perched on jagged rocks, their yellow eyes fixed on the horizon, waiting endlessly with a hunger that matched the void I felt. I remember feeling that same sun at Ajoba’s funeral, Papa and Aati crying in the verandah, the Old House crawling with critical lawyers and harried doctors, the day I knew everything would change. Richie did not eat that day. I realised, quite suddenly, that he had lost his fauji statue counterpart. So I spent the morning carefully threading blue beads, a matching pair in Ajoba’s favourite colour; one for me, and one for Richie.

Time is cruel in her merciless way. Fifteen brutal years later, I was left with only a beat-up Chevy and the glittering sea for company.

Sometimes I wondered how easy it would be to step forward, to give the collar-shackled men something new to look at as the sea closed quietly over me. Or perhaps I would walk to the market instead and buy fresh mangoes, cut them into neat slices, play the familiar strains of Carnatic music, light sandalwood incense, and thread friendship bracelets in the afternoon sun. For a brief, indulgent hour, I could almost believe I was back in the Old House, that everything might be all right again. And then it struck me, sharp as the afternoon light, there had never been another statue. It was only a story we told ourselves, a small mercy to suggest the fauji had not always stood alone. It was only a popularised rumour, invented to soothe the hearts of children afraid of being alone. Even Frankenstein’s Creature never found his counterpart. You see, monsters3 like us are meant to be alone. In April, when the sun tastes of salt and the sea shimmers too brightly, companionship exists only in children’s stories.

Author’s Note: Just when I thought the winter seasonal depression was over, the humid cusp of summer brought back an entirely different set of memories. I hope you enjoyed reading this little trip down memory lane. How I wish I had a picture of the statue, but unfortunately, the house was divided and sold for parts quite some time ago, and the statue was lost along with it.

the Giants, they never said it would be easy, but they failed to mention how much it would take from you.

to wake up every day, already buried;

to brush your teeth and comb your hair,

find a matching pair of navy blues,

swallow all the abdominous textbooks—and cry;

the downpour wouldn’t stop.

so you ate your own heart during recess, by the broken wooden staircase in the east building. I wish I had taken care of you the way you deserved. I wish I had fought harder, shown my grim teeth, licked my wounds and come back stronger. I wish I had not pushed you so far away just to protect you.

I wish you were, dead.

I suppose in a lot of ways, you were right. we are only alive if we are remembered, you and I were born to be forgotten. my radiant Achilles, I am sorry for making you jump off the ledge; we should have grown roots in the sky instead.

but the wolves did not leave;

please do not get my blood on your innocent hands.

I know you hated cigarettes;

please do not check my bag.

I am sorry, that I couldn’t be a mother; we only ever had Mother. she will be with us forever. I know you dreamed of me, of running into my arms on the salty beach—cheek-to-cheek, far away from the rest of them. I never grew my hair that long, you know; and the shoes did not get any bigger. I failed you, and it kills me every day.

I couldn’t protect you, my dove. so I caged you instead.

I hope you like the iron bars; I picked them out myself—blue, only for you.

don’t look for me, please. not even in dreams. I was only a lie you made to escape that house. I think the house has lodged itself in my throat; it sings Grandmother’s santalum songs about God and fire. they will carry my remains today to the fire, and Grandmother is not singing anymore.

you were never a burden. you were my boat, little dove.

think of the lights we saw, and the stars. they will take care of you now,
because I never could.

The human brain is nearly 60 percent fat.

fattyacidsareamongthemostcrucialmoleculesthatdetermineyourbrain’sintegrityandabilitytoperformessentialfattyacids(EFAs)arerequiredformaintenanceofoptimalhealthb—

That is too much fat; sixty percent is overkill. I make a mental note to start skipping breakfast, maybe forsake lunch too; let myself indulge only at dinner and feast directly on my greedy stomach. I secretly find that I revel in the joy of carving it out with my bare hands, laying the soft flesh on fine silver with trembling hands, the supple meat braised in low-fat butter—anything to satiate my need for opulence and nourishment. After all, my stomach is a traitor; she rumbles sweet lullabies as I try to fall asleep (I make a mental note to replace these sweet lullabies with sugar-free ones). Yes, that will be good. To make things better, I will dine on half my brain the next day to reduce any excess fat, that way we cut the issue at its very source.

You see, I had been avoiding mirrors; they usually tend to mutter age-old canards when I meet their solemn gaze. But alas, the time had finally come when I was forced to look my dreaded reflection in the eyes, not in passing but with repulsively deliberate attention. I had to adorn myself in fabric and makeup, somehow arrange the placid features into a presentable smile that did not deter people.

this7dayketodietwillchangeyourlifehowtoglowupin10daysisbulimianormalinGenZfollowmythirteenstepnightlyskincareroutineorremainugl—I felt a sharp sting across my jaw. Light travels faster than sound. The flash came first, a burst of blinding white at the edge of my vision; and only then the sound, which bloomed into a dull ringing in my right ear. I tasted iron and had to blink back tears before I could focus. When my vision cleared, I saw my own reflection staring back at me, palm still half-raised, my jaw red like cherries in spring.

It had been my own hand. I must have done it to quiet the noise.

This noise, it had been my companion for quite some time now, I don’t remember when it got here, and no matter how hard I tried; the voices never let me be alone. I realized why Van Gogh cut off his left ear, sometimes it is easier to pursue tangible solutions rather than simply hoping that the world will eventually stop caving in on you. The whole thing was so absurd I could almost laugh.

Pseudobulbar affect, also called PBA, is a brain condition in which a person suddenly starts to laugh or cry and cannot manage the reaction. The term “pseudobulbar” refers to a lesion in the brainstem’s corticobulbar pathway—You see, I knew all this information. So much of it was stored neatly in my brain, categorized and labelled, yet I could do nothing with it.

What use is all this knowledge if your own mind keeps playing Cupid with Death?

My mind, had been too crowded with the ambition of looking akin to a corpse. It was sick. I once happened to see a cadaver, and to my horror, the first thing I noticed had not been the distinct metallic stench or the pale, lifeless skin; it was the sharpness of the cheekbones, the way the skin tightened over bone, fresh—almost youthful—even in death.

I had already slipped into a dress long enough to cover the curve where my hips met my thighs, but it was tight and my sullen flesh protested relentlessly against the fabric. It felt vile to possess any flesh at all, as though it were an abomination not to be bones lined with raw skin.

Obesity is possibly the most commonly occurring cause of adipose tissue remodeling, in the best case generating only “love handles,” but far more often manifesting in morbid obesi—The Americans have a strange way of disguising the things they hate with quirky terms: muffin-tops, smile lines, thunder-thighs, collateral damage. These are all acceptable until it’s time to publish an “inclusive” portfolio to appease the public.

I knew all of this, really, I did. But I did not know how to stop.

Sometimes all I wished for, was to be stranded on an island, with no food or water. That way, when the vultures found me, they would marvel at my chiseled jawline and hourglass hips. I am sure “The Industry” would be quite proud of me then. I would get fashion magazine and news features with bizarre headlines like:

I forced the concealer over the deep-set dark lines cocooning my eyes, watching it seep into my skin and let black consume my waterline, and pinched my cheeks until I achieved the effortless “freshly-fucked” glow that “The Media” incessantly sought after. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder; the beholders were merely porn-addict pedophiles, utterly devoid of mercy toward the female form. Then came the hair straightener. It lapped hungrily at the lengths of my hair, occasionally exhaling fumes like a dragon satisfied with its feast. I fried my hair to a crisp before slathering it with keratin, attempting to make the carcass appear less lifeless. After all, a burnt child does love the fire. My feet were confined in shoes that seemed entirely oblivious to the existence of toes, and I paced the room while the sharp edges gouged into them. I envied those whose partners carried their shoes at night; I would have rather drowned in a shady creek than allow a man near my deformed body. It was strange, this hatred I carried for the patriarchy, and yet I endured a million deaths each day, molding myself to appeal to the male gaze. I chimed on and on about how “The System” had failed women, yet I winced at my reflection at the first hint of excess fat beneath my chin, or if my arms appeared insufficiently toned, or my calves failed to betray a childhood spent entirely in ballet.

I stared at my reflection and took a step back— I hated her. I despised her lifeless, pudgy face, the way her cheeks puffed up, the sagginess of her chest, full and flat at the same time like dying figs ready to fall into imminent rot, the awkward curve of her waist before it dipped at her hips, the dreaded pouch that betrayed the presence of a stomach; then the sheer horror of thighs that looked as though they would rip my tights at any moment, calves not thin enough, disproportionate arms, eyes that held no light. No amount of glitter, blush, or keto diets could save me.

twoweekthighgapchallengefortonedandsli— SHUT UP. SHUT UP. SHUT UP.

I begged my mind to stop, but it replayed an unending montage: sinking my teeth into a sugary doughnut, the soft dough melting on my tongue, the sugar dissolving and igniting some impossible warmth in my chest. The salty, sizzling crunch of fries, digging into a hearty bowl of pasta; carbs and sugar burning like a hearth in my body, refusing to let go. Colours, words, tastes; they all blurred together, each sensation sharper and more urgent than the last, until I felt pushed out of my own skin, the pain in my feet barely registering over the swarm of voices inhabiting my head.

Darling, a moment on the lips, forever on the hips — STOP. STOP. STOP.

I needed a rope and an empty room, so I would never again have to witness the pathetic pandemonium of my life.

I turned away before I unzipped the dress; I had seen enough. Any more, and the fabric would begin to look useful, compliant, eager to twist itself into a comfortable DIY noose waiting to press against the fragile column of my neck. I wondered if there was already an overzealous woman on YouTube, smiling brightly beneath a ring light, explaining in a step-by-step tutorial how to turn all your old clothes into a noose. Knowing the internet, there probably was. There is always someone willing to monetize despair. Perhaps I should make one myself, offer it as a final contribution before ridding the world of myself and my repulsive body. A fitting end. I almost considered it, but the image repulsed me; a mass shaped like myself suspended from a rope, reduced to something purely physical and limp. The thought of being so easily deprived of air felt less tragic than humiliating. What unsettled me most was the vulnerability of it, the spectacle of my body observed from a distance, strangers handling it clinically, dragging it away for “examination” as though it were evidence rather than a person.

20-Year-Old Woman Dies of Asphyxiation; Weight Cited as Contributing Factor.

I let go of the unsparing eulogies and abandoned the idea. I had a party to attend and people to please; somehow, that list never included myself. I rummaged through the expulsion of fabrics on my floor, sifting through the discarded skins, searching for something decent enough to wear to my own quiet disappearance.

Like many other primates, humans possess trichromatic vision, which allows us to fully discriminate the visible light spectrum. Black absorbs visible light, creating shadows that obscure contours and produce the illusion of diminished shape.I decided that black would be my chosen discourse. I pulled on black tights and a black dress to match, all the while wishing the colour would swallow me whole until I became nothing more than a floating, formless entity with no obligation to appear desirable. I wiped away all the makeup in hasty, aggressive strokes, as though punishing my face for arranging itself into such timid features. Then I redid the work, contouring the edges until I resembled nothing of myself. I looked gaunt and starved — I looked perfect.

I wished they would invent a contour stick large enough to sculpt my entire body. Next came the tape. I wrapped it around my thighs with the precision of a surgeon on drugs; I donned a corset and tightened it until breathing was no longer even an option. I dragged the gua sha across my arms until the skin flushed raw, and finally, I was content. There was a certain madness in my eyes that not even curated glitter eyeshadow could conceal. I forced my lips into a smile before redrawing them entirely in shades of red. I muttered senseless vows to myself, promising that one day I would earn enough to send our Almighty Creator to art school, so that those who came after me might be spared the same anatomical misfortune Finally, I grabbed my purse and ran downstairs, ignoring the ache radiating through my body and the dull headache blooming from my sixteen-hour fast.

It’s okay, I told myself. Beauty is pain.

I was not hungry anymore. I had picked up all the niche interests in the world and swallowed them whole. There is a certain sadness in feeling perpetually unfulfilled. It drives even the most rational among us to pick up a poison of their choosing—gambling, sugar, cigarettes, origami, writing—and if luck allows, sometimes this poison can put food on the table. I did not need to worry about that. I only needed Ozempic and corsets for a living.

By the time I ran out the front door, the sun was already falling, brushing the street in delectable shades of pink and gold. But I only had eyes for her—past my building, a woman walking her dog. She moved with effortless grace that could make the world pause; skin glowing, body lithe, hair catching the light like it had a life of its own. I felt a stab of envy, sharp and immediate. How easily she existed in her own body, while I had spent the last hour in ritualistic torment, coaxing myself into something resembling perfection. I flipped my phone open, checking the step count; ten thousand steps, my daily goal was yet to be met. Mentally, I calculated whether I was in a calorie deficit, I had to walk around two more blocks before I could allow myself some rest. Perhaps dancing at the party would help, dancing for one hour burns up to seven hundred calories. My head throbbed. My feet felt light, unsteady. My body was weakened. Famished. That was the word, and yet I could not eat or drink for another two hours. Hunger was just a primitive survival instinct; I need not pay it any heed. I decided to turn around the corner to walk the extra steps, but before I could even look up, a flash of yellow came barrelling down the street. There was no time, no escape.

It hit me; not just the bus, but everything I had chased, caged, and starved for. Youth, beauty, control; my own obsession had become the instrument of my end. Blood pooled on the asphalt, but it bore no trace of my suffering. Blood and flesh were all the same in the end; we burned down to the fundamentals we had tried so desperately to control. Camus wrote of the guillotine, the hypocrisy of preserving life at the cost of living it; here, the principle came full circle. In Reflections on the Guillotine, he brilliantly presents the fundamental flaw behind the logic of capital punishment by exposing the state’s profound hypocrisy; in its attempt to condemn killing, the state merely institutionalizes it. This structural contradiction, where the means used directly undermine the ends they claim to uphold, finds a compelling, albeit more intimate, parallel in the ethics of self-denial. It hit me (perhaps too late) that to pursue a "fulfilled" or morally superior life through the deliberate starvation and diminution of the self is to engage in a form of internalized punishment masquerading as virtue.

Lying there, staring at the waning pink sky, my body trembling uncontrollably, I was also awakened by the ruthless realisation that freedom was never in the merciless constraint of desire. It was in release. The rules, the diets, the corsets, the steps; they meant nothing now. Hunger was my only mortal companion, a signal that the organs I had starved so desperately, were still mechanically sustaining me. The corset pressed against my ribs like a cage; I could have laughed at the absurdity of it outdoing the integrity of my skull. There was a joke in there somewhere, but I was too starved to find it.

For the first time in a long while, I tasted something new; happiness, glee, joy. I imagined the headline:

20-Year-Old Woman Dies Before Completing Her Daily 10k Steps; The Horrors Persist

I could hear the crowd shuffling, the futility of trying to avoid vulnerability now hurled straight into its heart. Sirens wailed. Voices cried. Even in my strange mixture of freedom and despair, I wished desperately there had been no children on the bus—it was so late, surely there had been none. Bodies gathered around me, shoes scuttling like ants, my vision blurring as the blood drained from me. A man leaned down, lips moving frantically, eyes panic-stricken:

“Can you hear me?”

“Can you see me?”

-

“Can you breathe?”

No. I could not breathe. The noose had set itself long before I had even conjured it.

References:

Chang, C.-Y., Ke, D.-S. & Chen, J.-Y. (2009) ‘Essential fatty acids and human brain’, Nutrition, 18(4), pp. 231–241.

Moser, C.A. (2021) Different perspectives of metabolism: Gut feelings and love handles. [Doctoral thesis] ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Fančovičová, J. & Prokop, P. (2024) ‘Slimming shades: Investigating the allure of black clothing on women’s aesthetics’, Environment and Social Psychology, 9(9). doi: 10.59429/esp.v9i9.3037.

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Cover Image: Alexandria Zlatar, à la king, 4″ x 6″ acrylic on print, (2020)

Author’s Note: Yeah. Don’t even ask. This was way too personal.

PSA: I do not condone or encourage disordered eating, self-harm, or any behavior that puts physical or mental health at risk. This work is a personal, literary exploration and should not be interpreted as guidance, endorsement, or inspiration for harmful practices. I also do not support or promote toxic body image standards, diet culture, or any messaging that shames or pressures individuals based on appearance, weight, or shape. If you are struggling with body image, eating disorders, or mental health challenges, please seek professional help. Support is available through licensed therapists, counselors, and local health services. You are not alone, and your well-being is far more important than societal expectations or fleeting ideals.

You would think that three hundred and thirty-one days are enough to know a person for who they really are, but you would be wrong. It takes only one conversation—and one strong blunt; the warm body nestled beside me was living proof of that.

There was a certain chill in the room, the kind that seeped through the comforter and into my bones. I sank deeper into the covers and my eyes shifted to the monotonous beige wall beside the bed, it’s textured exterior adorned with a sliver of the sodium haze borrowed from the streetlight beneath the window. It blinked and sputtered as sparks flew across the twisted wires wrapped like a noose around its neck. The three hundred and thirty-one days meant nothing. What is a body without flesh? What is a blunt without breaths shared in quiet spaces? What is existence without essence? It is just another pair of faded Levis on an alien bedroom floor, a dangerous cocktail of laughter and summer nights with no deadlines, guitar strings plucked with eyes lingering on hushed lips. Do things have to mean something simply because they seem beautiful? Their existence alone does not grant them essence. Beauty does not insist upon meaning, we are the ones who burden it with one.

You can tell a great deal about a person by the way they sleep, so I refused my weary eyes the respite of surrender. I did not want strangers to see me cocooned in the fetal position, trying not to claw at my own skin. It was easy to feign smiles in a dimly-lit bars, to talk about jazz and philosophy while ignoring the hand brushing against my thighs. I wonder if those hands were watchful, would they see the scars beneath my red tights? Not the alluring ones we flaunt as art, but their ugly couterparts that we wish to carve out with kitchen knives. I let these Iron Duke mouths speak their tainted gospels—about failed start-ups, Quentin Tarantino, and how they rightfully deserved to be in an IIT—the same repeated prophecies swarming my head. It took Herculean effort to stay seated, to maintain eye contact and methodically bat my eyelashes, to refrain from mentioning that the structural integrity of their contrived whiskey mirrored their sense of humour. Then came the claims of “spontaneity” and the tendency to “do the hard thing,” as though this were a curated interrogation room infested with shallow paparazzi. It was almost amusing, the abundance of answers to questions I would never care to ask. Three hundred and thirty-one days of repeated leather jackets, aviator spectacles, and silver accessories were somehow much worse than the entire circus of tote bags, Sally Rooney, and stale matcha.

I wanted to go home, but I was born an orphan. So I settled for these pseudo-romantic foster care systems. I labelled them with expiry dates and refused to discard them long after they were safe for use. I was stuck in the body of an ouroboros, endlessly collecting wood for my own funeral pyre. And yet I tried to withdraw from this final theatrical act, my magnum opus of lost hope. I refused to capitulate too easily, always leaving the important parts of myself for discovery, like fragments waiting to be unearthed: a childhood spent with mismatched Legos, a distaste for Rooh Afza, and humid afternoons wasted on dentist visits. But innocence is always the easiest to disguise. My soul transformed into a virgin dressed as Bonnie Blue, she longed for intimacy in a burning brothel.

I think I learned at a young age that adults do not spend hours assembling a puzzle, they simply leave the box untouched. As a result of these empirical findings, I learned to keep the puzzle intact, pieces hidden in vaults few would bother to search for. I felt like Portia’s gold casket, ornate and adorned, only to secretly house death beneath its opulence.

I think “many a man”2 only ever look for fool’s gold on dating apps littered with masked faces and pubs peddling the cheapest drink menus. In that case, if I dance before them in pink lingerie, would they know how long it took me to like pink again? To dance knowing no one is truly watching? To live knowing there is no one awaiting my return?

When an amalgamation of loneliness and boredom finds itself in this mosh pit of foreign ceilings and failed foster-care systems, downing tequila shots is far easier than admitting that a sinkhole of its own pathos has opened beneath the calm surface. It is this desperate attempt not to fall through, that makes me indulge in the follies of others—to mourn cruel fathers, crashed BMWs, family watches lost in infinity pools, and “whores”3 who broke their hearts by choosing peace.

I long for the women who escaped, only to be remembered by crude labels meant to soothe impetuously bruised egos. I hope the scars on their thighs have grown teeth. I hope wearing pink comes naturally to them. I hope they walk barefoot with untied hair, refuse to dwell on accusations from lying mouths, and cover their ears when the ouroboros begins to sing again.

Author’s Note: This had been sleeping in my Notes app for the past two weeks, please pardon the hazy imagery and contemporary metaphors. I did think about expanding it into a longer essay, but that felt inauthentic to the original (very messy) idea behind this piece. No philosophical monologues this time about Nietzsche or Camus, just good old Shakespeare and a sprinkling of Sartre.

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As any rational person does, I began to hallucinate, a strange coping mechanism as an attempt to beg my sanity to stay the night. It began when I started to see shadows of a past I had meticulously burned down to the bone; perhaps they appeared as a desperate ray of hope for a less drab future. As I sat at the foot of my couch, I saw her again, standing by the kitchen door. She wore my eyes with conviction, and my clothes did not fall off her proud shoulders as they often drooped over my own. She never wore the same blue sweater I had been living in for two days; her hands were less calloused, and her feet bore no cuts from broken bottles. As I stared at her, I felt a wave of nausea rise from within me. I wanted to gouge the twisted happiness from her eyes, to watch with satisfaction as she realised that the monster had always been a part of her, and not apart from her. I bared my teeth at her, but she did not flinch. She did not look at me with pity or empathy; she simply accepted my vile suffering with grace.

Particles behave differently when observed1, and so the silence decided to abandon her lips.

“What should I have, to give you-” she started, but at the sound of her voice the bottle sprang from my trembling hands and flew, missing her by a hair’s breadth, only to softly kiss her cheek as it shattered into an open cabinet of wine glasses. The damage was done. I had drawn first blood, and it trickled down her face. A light burned behind her, setting a pale halo around her frame and making her glow in a way that felt almost angelic. I had the eerie feeling that I was peering into a mirror, not in the sense that we shared the same face or the same red hair, but that my tears mirrored the blood tainting the curve where her ear met her jaw.

“What should I have to give you.” She continued, “But let me go quickly, that I may take nothing from you.”

I leapt across the coffee table, for she was no saint. It was the same ornate table we had selected together because of its pristine wooden carvings. I wanted to slam her head against it, to watch her bones break inside her small body, to see the false skin fall away and expose the vermin beneath. I dug my nails into her shoulders; it almost felt wrong to taint her clean clothes with my unkempt nails caked with mud. I screamed at her, warning her that she was no saint. But she remained unaffected and brought her lips close to my ear.

“I make songs and sing them. And when I make songs, I laugh, weep and mutter the Praise God with singing, weeping, laughing and muttering.”

It was not mechanical, the manner in which she spoke; it was almost sacred. She whispered it to me like a promise made in the ripeness of youth. I despised her for her resilience, the way her hands remained at her sides while I raked my own through her skin as though it were clay. I knew too well the words that would come from her mouth next, we had scribbled them on a sticky note when we were thirteen.

“I praise God. Who is my God?”

I scraped the remnants of her ribs and plunged my hand into her hollow chest, but I did not find what I was looking for. Her eyes met mine in that moment, and we both knew; it would never be found again.

My hands were shaking, and I could feel my frail heart threatening to escape through my throat, but what was the point? It felt empty, not even asleep, just a deep void of nothingness. Rage felt much easier, and so I channelled it toward her. I plunged my hands into her eyes as her lips kept repeating the familiar words,

“But what do you bring as a gift?”

My nails dug in deeper, but there was no blood, only clay where a glorious past had once taken my shape.

But what do you bring as a gift?

But what do you bring as a gift?

But what do you bring as a gift?

I screamed until my lungs felt as though they were on fire, but the voices did not stop. It was no longer my own, the words warped all around me. My father’s voice singing me to sleep, blurring into my mother’s whispers at my awaiting deathbed. But I religiously continued to do the one thing I had always been good at—destroying myself before anyone else did.

I was never the saint.

I was Zarathustra, sitting in the ruins of a self I had destroyed, scraping through the remnants of flesh, clay and bones until there was nothing whole to hold onto. I had not shed myself as a form of rebirth the way a snake does; which was ironic, considering I had always worn the past like a second skin. I shed it the way a merciful Madonna sacrifices her child, before he ever leaves the shelter of her divine body.

The rage had spent itself. The fragments lay everywhere, indistinguishable chunks of clay, parts of my favourite sweater, earrings passed down from my grandmother—and blood. I pressed into it, my hands moving over what once had form, tasting the metallic tang of my own undoing. I wept then, over the destroyed shell of what had always been my greatest burden and my finest gift. I wished to see her one last time, feel her warm breath against my skin as she whispered her last words,

“But what do you bring as a gift?

What should I have to give you, but let me go quickly, that I may take nothing from you.”

“What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Classics, 1978), Part I, “The Bestowing Virtue.”

Let me explain.

Philosophy, vague or otherwise, always asks for a certain willingness to suspend disbelief, and I ask the same of you for the brief time it takes to read this. Imagine having everything you have ever wanted, in material terms. For me, it looks like a sunlit apartment with tall French windows, houseplants I don’t forget to water regularly, the gentle chaos of a city humming beneath me, wealth that is ever-present without being overimposing, and a black cat called Layla. The pessimism casserole begins precisely here: despite having arrived at this imagined finish line, I remain deeply unhappy. And because that imagined unhappiness feels inevitable, my ambition collapses before it even has the chance to form. Structurally, the casserole is simple. The meat and gravy are my wants i.e. material comfort, freedom and abundance; but they never exist on their own. They are always sealed beneath a layer of baked cheese, which essentially is the pessimism that convinces me none of it will ever be enough. I kept imagining myself inside this “dream life” I claimed to want, and in every version of it I was profoundly alone. I could buy whatever I liked, meet countless people each day, travel anywhere in the world, and still the experience felt colourless, ashy, and grey; hollowed out by the absence of emotional fulfilment. This innate loneliness would engulf my entire being, rendering everything else meaningless. It was this thought that led me to a strange and persistent theory: that my final thought before death will be something absurdly misplaced. Why, you may ask? Because even in the middle of this existential spiral, I found myself thinking about Napoleon Bonaparte after the Battle of Austerlitz, a moment widely regarded as the height of his tactical brilliance. At the same time, his personal life was quietly falling apart, his marriage collapsing after Josephine’s infidelity and faked pregnancy to avoid joining him at the front. I was lying on my bedroom floor wondering whether he could truly have celebrated. I do not offer this out of sympathy for him, but because it reminded me of something deeply unsettling. We do not live inside our achievements. We live almost entirely inside our own heads.

I have felt this on a smaller, more personal scale. At thirteen, during my first “academic comeback” for my tenth-grade board exams, I crossed the godforsaken ninety-percent threshold I had set for myself, only to feel utterly depleted. I had destroyed myself in pursuit of a goal meant to prove my worth, only to realise it was built on comparison and resentment rather than a thirst for knowledge. It all felt like a waste of my time and emotional endurance. Years later, in the middle of the same pattern repeating itself, I watched two very iconic films-Whiplash and Black Swan-back to back in the same night. What once served as validation for my glorified version of loneliness and self-destruction suddenly felt like a slap in the face. It forced me to confront the possibility that greatness does not merely coexist with suffering, but is often propped up by it, even when the suffering leads nowhere.

It made me wonder whether a peaceful state of mind was the real paradise that we have been chasing all along. Maybe Kendrick Lamar had always been onto something,

“I hope you find some peace of mind in this lifetime;

I hope you find, some paradise.”

I don’t know about the 1,855 days between good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly, but it feels like my mind has been racing for all 7,503 days that I have lived on this shallow planet. The saddest correlation I drew during my musings, between loneliness and greatness; is that both stem from the same gnawing need to find something solid to anchor yourself to.

I grew up in big houses, feeling severely homeless. There is an innate sadness in wanting to go home yet never truly having a place to call one. It made me realise that much of my hunger for ambition was rooted in the search for purpose. That sense of purpose became a temporary home. Choosing passion as my hearth and ambition as the tinder that fuelled it, I found an estranged contentment in my own suffering. It was sad, but it kept me warm through the ceaseless winter I called my teenage years. This pursuit of greatness, and by extension a home, taught me very early on that people were temporary. Paired with my abandonment issues, something I only came to acknowledge quite recently, it formed a kind of toxic isolation. I often wish I were more like Anaïs Nin in this regard, unafraid of loneliness and never compelled to justify her feelings to herself1. Yet over the past two years, loneliness has become my greatest fear: the fear of living an endlessly dead life with hollow friends, scattered across the diaspora I call home. In that future, my ambitions would slowly dissolve into delusion, and I would be confronted all at once by the four truths of existentialism: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Hopefully in that order, because isolation without death feels like nothing short of a descent into hell.

To circle back to the imagined scenario from the beginning of this essay, it would end with me lying on a large, obnoxiously comfortable bed, surrounded by all the tangible nothings I had ever desired, yet with no one to call. The phone would never truly ring, and despite all the warmth, the bed would remain cold. That sad thought became the heat that baked my strange pessimism casserole. It is perhaps the only family recipe I will ever pass down to my nephews and nieces, since I highly doubt I want children of my own. Not to mention the whole ordeal of finding love and making a marriage work, not even Napoleon could manage that, but that is material for another essay on existentialism.

To conclude, I will ask you to look in the mirror. Look past your clothes, the posters littering your walls, all the curated “niche” interests, and especially past that guitar if you play one (I am so tired of people making a musical instrument their entire damned personality). Really peer into your own head. What did you love as a kid? What passions did you hide to be “cool”? What books did you read before Goodreads? What movies did you watch before shackling yourself to a performative Letterboxd?

It is all these things that matter, my love. Not the indie music, not the underground films, not the cigarettes you light so you don’t burn yourself. Greatness is whatever you make of your genuine passion for life. It is the choice between a pack of pills and your morning coffee. I hope that, after reading this, you choose the coffee.

Thank you for reading. I wrote this piece overnight, born from my own frustration with inaction fuelled by the crippling fear of failure. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this idea, and please do subscribe if you’d like to read more of these late-night musings on abstract topics.

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My family lost a close friend to the tragic bombings at Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Station in 2006. This article is dedicated to his memory and to all the innocent lives lost on that fateful day, in the hope that their stories will never be forgotten.

I dragged my suitcase behind me as the low rumble of engines swarmed my head with an eerie sense of alienation. My beat-up shoes trailed across the dirty concrete and I looked up to see the silhouette of a herculean hunk of metal shrouded in smoke. The air around it reverberated with a force that sent tremors down my spine. The station was bustling with the dreary calls of hawkers offering to sell tangible nothings, colourful fabrics fleeted across the corners of my eyes and an infant aimlessly wailed in the distance. I pushed past the dirty pavement and stepped into my coach. The pandemonium of sounds was now replaced by the whirring sounds of the metal beast’s insides and I gladly let it swallow me whole as I searched for my seat. The train was still stationary and my watch glared at me by displaying a stark 11 July 2006 18:20. The City of Dreams, they called it, but I only saw a city slowly rotting with each passing monsoon like a forgotten apple in an abandoned orchard basket. I scooted towards the window and leaned my head against the cool glass in an attempt to escape from my bleak reality. I was about to doze off when I felt a tap against the glass which peeled my tired eyelids back open. I was met with a set of curious eyes and an innocent face partially covered in mud and grime. His tiny hands clutched desperately onto a steel kettle that was almost as big as him, and he carried a tainted styrofoam snake on his shoulder. I saw faintly that he was trying to say something while holding up the steaming kettle which was now fogging up the window. I slid the glass pane open and was immediately greeted by a gust of cold wind brushing it’s talons straight past my hair and into the seam of my thin sweatshirt. However, it was short-lived because the young boy held the hot kettle towards me and I was momentarily engulfed in it’s warmth, the distinct smell of tea taking over my senses.

“Didi, chai?” He asked, his voice was tired, mixed with the dust of the station. It was as though he had repeated those words in an endless loop for a century. This young Sisyphus, upholding a kettle for a boulder, was now staring at me with hopeful eyes and suddenly all I wanted to do was buy the tea. With every last semblance of my being, I wanted to break the loop. So, I nodded my head and saw his eyes light up with the same empty hope again. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and tell him to run, I wanted to tell him that this was no City of Dreams. But I kept my lips sealed shut and reached out my hand to take the cup. Suddenly, there was a sharp pain above my eyes that made my ears ring with a melody so painful I could barely sit up straight. I opened my eyes to what could only be described as sheer horror. The mud on the boy’s face was now a river of blood and burnt flesh. His tiny hand was now melting into the cup as his mouth was open in a silent scream of terror. I could feel the blood draining out of my face as I stared at the sight, completely paralysed. I tried to scream, but there was an invisible rope around my neck. I reached my hand out towards the boy, but he wasn’t a boy anymore. His face was receding into a mass of blood and I could see a pale bone jutting out of his skull.

Just like that, it was gone. I blinked up at my surroundings which were exactly as I had seen them before.

“Didi, chai?” He repeated again, this time holding a hot cup of tea towards me, the empty hope still swirling in the depths of his eyes.

I couldn’t breathe, I had to get out. I stood up abruptly, scrambling to get out of my seat and ran towards the door past the people filling up the crowded aisles of the train. I pushed past a newlywed dressed in red, she looked no younger than ten, the scent of jasmines sheathing her imminent fear; a man in a business suit was busy negotiating empty lies over his cell phone; a hefty man in a white turban stood with his arms folded, blocking the doorway. My ears were still ringing and all I could think of was the boy bathed in blood. All these different people were about to meet his impending fate. I had to warn them. I screamed at the young bride, I pleaded the man in the suit to listen, I tried to drag them out but they paid no attention to me. Perhaps they had already surrendered themselves to the City of Dreams. I reached the door and jumped out of the train, running towards the exit as fast as possible.

Then it happened.

I heard the screams before I saw the flames. The megalith of metal tore itself apart, a mesh of flesh and luggage imitating the flailing bits of the train. The hawker’s calls were now replaced with the wails of the dead, the once rotting City of Dreams now turned into a living nightmare. My lungs filled with smoke and my legs were begging to give out under me, all I knew was that I had to keep running. I dared to turn around to take one last look at inferno blazing behind me. The train which had once seemed like a metal beast was now in shreds, the bride was nowhere to be seen and the scent of jasmines was long forgotten in the scorching fumes. I saw a lone styrofoam cup rush towards me amidst the wreckage. I picked it up, clutching it to my chest as I ran past the exit. I fell to my knees, the violent sobs escaping me against my will. The tiny cup was all that was left of that little boy’s life of hard work. So many lives lost at the cost of a dispensable religious war. What wouldn’t I trade for the monotonous sounds of the coolies carrying around lives packed in suitcases, the children crying to get their hands on shiny toys, or working mothers rushing to catch trains in order to put three meals on the table. It felt like all the sorrows on the world had condensed into the City of Dreams, pooling onto the bleak railway terminal. The cool breeze had fled along with me, it’s talons still latched onto my back. All that was left behind was hell. Hell and the empty hope in the eyes of a forgotten Sisyphus.

If you made it till the end, thank you so much for reading!! I also run a silly poetry (r.a. meme) account on Instagram @schrodingers_catastrophe_