And I wonder about dreams.

Crickets chirp outside.

…

Death came twice this year

Each time it caught me off guard,

Life likes it that way.

…

The ones who leave me

Never seem to say goodbye -

Except my old selves.

…

More pills, more sunshine

That’s what the doctor ordered.

I order brownies.

…

Would it be a sin?

If I can’t stop loving you?

No, it would be dim.

…

Our cat brings mouse heads

Puts them under the sofa,

We contend with fate.

…

One thing about me-

I read poems before bed.

Keeps the prose at bay.

…

If the season of

mangoes is over, then so’s

my season of love.

…

My body crumbles

Under the weight of falling

stars the shape of you.

…

What ends must begin,

And what begins must always

end where it began.

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Header photo from August five years ago in Barcelona, by the Mediterranean Sea.

- Joan Didion, My Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief is unfamiliar territory,” I kept repeating to myself on the day my cat, Noon, died. This is not really happening, we’re not actually here, he’s not actually dead. I could not believe that his heart had stopped beating, that he had been wrenched away from us and beyond our reach. Forever.

In the month since then, I’ve come to realize that this idea was not entirely accurate. There were some kinds of grief I was familiar with.

I know intimately the kind of grief that floods your senses when someone is alive but departs from your life. How it feels like when a close childhood playmate decides to cut contact, when someone you love romantically and devotedly breaks your heart one too many times and you decide to let them go, when a newly made friend says “I’ll call you tomorrow” and vanishes from your life without explanation.

I also know the kind of grief that comes when death is not altogether unexpected, such as when an older family member passes away. My paternal grandfather died when I was five years old. It was a July day, and a crowd of mourners had gathered in our garage. Shrouded in white, he lay on the floor as my grandmother and aunt sat weeping next to him. I remember my father holding me up so I could catch a glimpse past the mourners’ heads. I was relieved that I would no longer have to fight with him for control over the television. I could now watch cartoons without contest. Many years later, I sat alone in a room and cried my eyes out, grieving my grandfather’s death. There was shame for the relief I had felt back then, and regret that I never got to know him well.

When I was a teenager, we lost my maternal grandfather. The news from the hospital came early in the morning one sunny winter day. This time around, grief was less mysterious. I cried, I mourned, I wrote about him. My memories of him were fresh, and I understood that I had lost a part of my childhood forever. In adulthood, I grieved when family members who lived abroad passed away. Despite the bonds we shared, distance made it easier to absorb the shockwaves of grief.

But the grief that attacks you when you suddenly, unexpectedly, unfairly lose a loved one too soon, was unfamiliar to me. I had never been part of this universe before. I had never played this character before.

In February, one of my three cats went missing. He was the youngest, the liveliest, the quirkiest. He was fit, but he went on an adventure and never came back. We got news that he had died. I spent days imagining his last moments. I wrestled with guilt. I didn’t know that another death was coming.

What is grief, if not love, persevering?

- Laura Donney, WandaVision

Noon died two months shy of his second birthday. He was sick for three weeks, and we ran from pillar to post trying to fix him. We nursed him day and night, my brother and I. But we could not save him. The doctors’ advice did not work, the IV drips and injections and syrups and tablets did not work, my bargains with the universe did not work. He grew paler and thinner and weaker until on the morning of 24th June, as the para-vet was administering yet another round of saline solution, he started to fade. I sat next to him, crying, trying to feel his pulse, hoping for a miracle. I couldn’t find his pulse but I kept looking for it anyway, because my brain refused to accept that this was it. I couldn’t move from his side for hours as my family and friends prepped for his burial in our garden. I told them to clear his things from my room because I couldn’t bear to look at them. When it was time to put him in the ground, I chose not to watch.

Graves disconcert me. In my mind, incineration makes it easier to accept the irreversibility of death. The absoluteness of it, the unchangingness of it. With a grave, there is somewhere to go to. But actually there isn’t. There is and there isn’t. I visit Noon’s grave almost everyday. I say sorry for failing to save him. For knowing he wasn’t well but not taking him to the doctor sooner, for not giving him flea ointments on time, for not having enough money to take him to a better pet hospital in a different city. I believe that he died because of me. If I had done those things, then he would be alive. I wouldn’t be crouching at his grave visualizing him leaping from the ground to rub his head against my shins. I wouldn’t be reminded of him when I saw a bird hopping down the side of the road, or a dog running up to its owner. I wouldn’t be dissecting the types of grief and the degrees of my familiarity with each.

Noon was the apple of my eye. In the nearly two years I had with him, his affection was my refuge from life’s uncertainties. He was a talkative cat and he liked to sleep with his belly turned up. He would sleep next to me throughout the evening and into the night, occasionally waking up to demand pets. He loved being tickled under the chin. He was also easily spooked. I think I was his person. Once, he looked at me with so much love that my eyes watered in gratitude. That he could trust me so much was a great honour for me, a great privilege and blessing. I will never forget the connection I shared with him. “I’ll see you on the other side,” I say to him when I go to his grave. I don’t mean that we will meet again in another life, but that we will both become stardust eventually.

The world does not pause for the ending of yours.

- David Larbi, Life After The End

In the month since Noon’s death, life has done what it always does - gone on. I have been co-hosting events, making posters and videos, eating out at cafes, going to the movies, writing songs, trying to finish four books at the same time, taking a trip to Santiniketan, avoiding job applications, and overthinking myself to the point of exhaustion.

I was also prescribed ADHD medication for the second time (the first attempt three years ago did not yield positive results) and can’t stop myself from wondering if I would have made different decisions if I didn’t have this condition or if I had already been on this medication and therefore saved Noon’s life. I know this is a futile line of questioning that will only lead to a cul-de-sac of pain and self-blame, but this is grief baring its fangs, and I must look at it in the eye. I must stare it down, I must not blink even if my eyes water.

There is a part of me that wants Noon’s passing to be a catalyst for something— perhaps the emergence of a different version of me who has finally overcome what I consider to be my personal failings. But there is another part of me that knows that this too is a grief-strung response to a loss I still cannot fathom.

This past week, I’ve been glued to the news about student-led protests across the country. I’ve walked in rallies, shouted slogans, and spoken to reporters. I’ve shared countless social media posts. And in doing these things, in living through these moments alongside countless others, I’ve come to realize that there is yet another type of grief. This type of grief does not follow the death or loss of someone or something. This is grief for what was never born, what never existed, but could have.

We could have had a world where capitalist interests did not triumph over people and nature to the point of planetary ruin. We could have had a world that was not so devastatingly fractured by borders, nationality, race, language, religion, caste, class, and gender. We could have had a world where resources were shared fairly and equitably, where all people could live with dignity and hope, and where fascist political regimes were not brainwashing people into perpetuating their own dehumanization. We could have had a world where these conditions would not seem like an impossible, unachievable dream.

But we don’t, so I grieve for what could have been, as I grapple with the world that is. And in the world that is, this grief and all those other kinds of grief are as much a part of me as joy, as pleasure, as curiosity, as fear, as anger, as doubt, as optimism, just as they are for everybody else. With these keepsakes in our hearts, we must trudge on.

May the road be long and not too bumpy.

- Proiti

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As my cat Noon sits on my bed, skeletal, eyes half-closed, stomach bloated, I stare at him and ask myself this question hundreds of times a day. The answer is still yes. As I type, Noon is nestled against me, his breath rising and falling gently as his body battles a group of deadly bacteria called mycoplasma, which have attached themselves to his red blood cells with a vengeance. He has always been a frail-ish cat, timid and anxious, but very talkative and affectionate. His sister Morich, the other feline member of our household, is the one true unrequited love in my life (she bolts when I approach her), but Noon is the apple of my eye, and the turbulence of the past thirteen days forced me to confront the idea of a life without him.

Noon was at the hospital for ten days, where they ran tests and administered medicines via an IV drip twice a day. He briefly resumed eating, but stopped again, which is when we decided to bring him back and have the IV drip administered at home. It’s been two days, and he is still not eating by himself. Meanwhile, his belly is filling with fluid from liver damage, and a new vet has changed his medications in the hopes of improving his outcomes. The road ahead seems to be a long one, but as long as the destination is recovery, I’ll take it.

Strangely enough, this whole thing is happening at the same time that a long held dream of mine is coming true. For over fifteen years, my best friend Analina and I have been talking about “starting a business” together. Back in school, we’d list what we thought were genius business ideas, including a playground for adults with see-saws and slides, a vegan fast food chain, a rental service for paintbrushes, an insurance company and so on. Our first step in this direction was a food blog we created in Class 9 named “Asafoetida Massacre” (don’t ask because there is no explanation), which contained a single post detailing our failed attempt to make mayonnaise at home. Over the years, we made some more attempts, like writing copy for businesses, but none of these attempts endured. That is, until Out In Kolkata.

Last November, after endlessly ranting to each other about how some people erroneously believe that “nothing ever happens in Kolkata,” we set up an Instagram account called Out In Kolkata (@outinkolkata) to post lists of concerts, exhibitions, workshops, heritage walks, supper clubs, talks, dance recitals, plays, and other immersive experiences taking place in the city every week. Ever the wiser half of our duo, Analina suggested we use stock footage of iconic Kolkata locations to make videos and put all event details in the caption. This we did, and over the next few months, acquired a couple hundred followers. We also started an online book club, hosted a poetry workshop (where all except one of the participants were my friends and family members), and an online storytelling session facilitated by my other best friend, Subhalaxmi. Then came Tipsy Night School, a lecture-in-a-bar experience where an academic or expert delivers a talk in a bar, and ticket-buying audiences listen and ask questions while sipping on cocktails. The concept is pretty popular in the West and in other Indian metros, so Analina and I wanted to bring it to Kolkata.

We hosted our first (quite successful, might I add) edition at AMPM on Park Street, and have more editions coming up in the next couple of weeks (please buy tickets here). To promote Tipsy Night School, Analina and I reluctantly set aside our aversion to speaking on camera and recorded a reel or two to draw a bigger audience, which seems to have worked. We now have almost three thousand people following us across two accounts, with multiple organisations reaching out to us to collaborate and strangers expressing interest and appreciation for what we’re doing. Tipsy Night School also made it to the papers as a unique event sprucing up Kolkata’s bar scene. All of this was beyond my imagination even a couple of weeks ago, let alone during those years when Analina and I lamented our many joint failures and blamed the destructive procrastination habits we share.

Whether Out In Kolkata and Tipsy Night School will last in the long run, or whether this moment in time is lightning in a bottle like so many of life’s good things are — I don’t know. What I do know is that the mean voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough, not smart enough, not social enough, not resourceful enough, not creative enough, and not lovable enough has quietened a bit. It doesn’t really get to have a say when I’m coming up with ideas, talking to potential collaborators, meeting new people in new locations, making and ticking off to-do lists, navigating the complexities of curating and managing events, and sharing a whole lot of laughs with my best friend while doing it.

To have this long held “starting a business” dream come true at the same time as Noon’s protracted illness feels like life has involuntarily enrolled me in one of its impromptu training programmes focused on teaching me that there’s no such thing as happily ever after; that joy, hope, fear, and uncertainty can co-exist in our minds at the same time; that even as the horrors persist, so must I.

In between forcefully feeding Noon fish paste with a syringe, cleaning his litter box, massaging him with an old toothbrush, coaxing him to drink water, observing him non-stop for signs of further deterioration, wiping him down because he isn’t grooming himself as cats usually do, answering his frequent meows with as much enthusiasm as I can muster, coordinating his IV drips with medical assistants from the hospital, monitoring his poop and pee, taking him to new vets for second opinions, and cuddling with him as and when he pleases, I’m also working with Analina round the clock to secure venues and speakers for upcoming editions of Tipsy Night School, shooting videos for @outinkolkata, writing scripts, captions, and promotional copy for our events, drafting proposals for sponsors and collaborators, and monitoring (and obsessively worrying about) ticket sales.

It is, like I said, a strange time in my life. I only hope that when it passes, I can look back at it with more pleasure than pain.

As always, thank you for reading this extremely erratic newsletter. I could promise to do better but I probably won’t.

With love and gratitude,

Proiti

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To help the idea avoid that dreaded fate, I am turning to Substack — what was supposed to be a physical diary will now be a screen, and what was supposed to be passages copied out by hand will now be a patchwork of copy-pasted quotes, links, images, and rambling notes. These are fragments of beauty and inspiration I’ve picked up from the books and articles I read, the YouTube videos and reels I watch, the Instagram images and posts I save, the songs I listen to, the exhibitions I visit, and the conversations I have with friends, family, and myself. They are arranged in no particular order.

This might not exactly match the Commonplace Book I imagined myself keeping, but at least the diary will exist. And as life seems hell-bent on teaching me, that is more than enough.

“I want to unfold.

Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

(An excerpt I found on an Instagram page, part of a much longer poem.)

“গতিই জীবন। গতির দৈন্যই মৃত্যু।”

— বিভূতিভূষণ বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়

[“Movement is life. The poverty of movement is death.” — Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay]

(A line from a letter written by the author to his wife, displayed at an exhibition about his life and work at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity)

“There is a “natural self” and a “habitual” self. No infant is born thinking to itself, Why bother? Our natural state is curiosity, wanting to learn how to grow, hoping for some influence over our future. Our interpretation of experience produces a habit of thought, and habits are decisions that can be changed. We remain stuck in our depression when we continue these thought habits, and knowing they are habits gives us the power to transform them.”

— Dan Tomasulo

(Passage from a book about learned hopefulness that I was reading on my phone. I made a screenshot and saved it to my gallery.)

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.

— Jane Hirshfield

(A poem I discovered in a collection of poetry by Hirshfield. I was reading the book on my phone and kept a screenshot of this poem in my gallery, intending to send it to my mother because this made me think of her. Didn’t get around to sending it, but here goes, I guess.)

‘There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant’

— Jorge Luis Borges

(This passage appeared in the epilogue of a book I was either reading or browsing on my phone — I kept the screenshot but I can’t remember what book it was. I come back to it often.)

“যে পথ দিয়ে যেতেছিলেম ভুলিয়ে দিল তারে, আবার কোথা চলতে হবে গভীর অন্ধকারে।

বুঝি বা এই বজ্ররবে নূতন পথের বার্তা কবে, কোন্‌ পুরীতে গিয়ে তবে প্রভাত হবে রাতি।”

— রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর

[“I have lost the path I was travelling on, I must find another path in the depths of darkness / Perhaps the thunder will have a message about a new path/ In which city will the night turn into dawn?” — Rabindranath Tagore]

(I could have an entire Commonplace Book, or several, filled only with lines from Rabindrasangeet and other Tagore texts. These lines has been on my mind lately, as I navigate a particularly uncertain time in my life. You can listen to the full song here.)

“I am devoured with restlessness and fever. I cannot be quiet. I am wildly dreaming of escape, voyages, love, wildly craving love.”

— Anaïs Nin

(Found this on an Instagram page that posts fragments from poems and essays. These lines echo my own feelings so closely that I had to save them. Maybe one day I’ll find and read the larger text from which the lines have been extracted.)

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken; you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

— Ethan Hawke

(This is a beautiful — and viral — response that the actor Ethan Hawke gave to Amelia Dimoldenberg when she asked him, on the Oscars red carpet, what advice he had for people who have a “bit of an unrequited love theme in their lives.” Having recently experienced some unrequited affection myself, this quote comforts and grounds me when sadness tries to sneak in.)

“What are you afraid of losing when nothing in the world belongs to you?”

(Another Instagram find. The post ascribed this quote to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, but there seems to be a dispute about its origins. Some have also ascribed it to another stoic philosopher, Epictetus, and others have traced it back to the Bhagavad Gita.)

Mission

The wind went over
me
saying
Why are you so distressed

Oh I said I
can’t seem to make
anything
round enough to last

But why
the wind
said
should you be so distressed

as if anything here belonged to you
as if anything here were your concern

— A.R. Ammons

(This poem is one of many I screenshotted from a collection of A.R. Ammons poems I was reading on my phone. It echoes the same idea as the stoic quote above, and really drives the point home with the phrase “as if.” I can never have too many reminders of my insignificant role in the cosmic circus.)

— Dhaka, Bangladesh

(I went to Bangladesh for the first time this April. I have waited all my life to visit the country. It was a short but wonderful trip. These are a few of the countless photographs I took on my phone. I am woefully bad at taking photos, so I call it documenting instead of photographing.)

(This is a playlist I made last month as a goodbye present for a friend leaving the city. The playlist includes fifteen songs created, produced, and recorded in Kolkata in the 21st century. I plan to expand the playlist and host a listening party titled ‘Made in Kolkata’ at some point in the near future. I also plan to create a Whatsapp/Instagram channel where I share one song made in Kolkata everyday and maybe include some behind-the-scenes anecdotes or trivia about the artists etc. Let’s see when these plans come to fruition. Meanwhile, you can click on the photograph to listen to the playlist.)

— Bhaskar Chakraborty

[“At last, the desires have vanished

Dreams, face down, lie here and there

What can you do

O mad one

Except write and write, all day and night”]

(I took this photograph from a book of Bhaskar Chakraborty’s poems I spotted at a friend’s house last month. He is my favourite poet, and makes me feel grateful that I was born into the Bangla language.)

(I took this photograph of a photograph of a photograph last evening when I went to see my maternal grandmother’s cousin sister to learn more about Pritilata Waddedar (centre), regarded as the first female martyr in India’s freedom struggle. Pritilata and my great-grandmother Shantilata (centre-right) were siblings, and can be seen here with their other sister, Kanaklata (centre-left), and their father, Jagabandhu (bottom-right) and one of his brothers. Pritilata was part of the Chittagong Revolutionary Army marshalled by Masterda Surya Sen, and took her own life after leading a successful attack on the Pahartali European Club in September 1932. By martyring herself, she sought to show everyone that women could be just as fierce and capable as men in armed revolution against the British Empire, and inspire more women to join.)

Thank you for leafing through my Commonplace Book. I know this was different from my usual posts, but I enjoyed the process of putting this together. If you derived enjoyment or inspiration or anything at all from this, let me know in the comments. I might do this again from time to time.

As always, my deepest gratitude and love to everyone who reads, shares, subscribes, and comments on my Substack.

— Proiti

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…

Every single day
is just like the day before-
shame’s a skilled sculptor.

…

Perhaps love will come
when I least expect it to-
just as the blues do.

…

Ripe dreams rot like fruit
left out in the humid sun -
loudly the flies buzz.

…

Enough is enough,
I tell my rambunctious brain-
God gets the giggles.

…

Save what you can save
of this wretched, ruined earth -
lone heaven standing.

…

Swap places with me,
bird by bird I’ll fill the sky -
Sun bellowing bright.

…

If I could, I would
hold your face between my palms,
and ask for springtime.

…

Ogling at the moon
I wonder if it feels me,
hoping against hope.

…

No stone left unturned,
no sea of light unexplored-
still the darkness reigns.

…

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…

You return home after a long day out. You are too tired to change out of our clothes. You just want to sit down and scroll on your phone. You come into your room and overturn a part of the mattress on the bed so you will not feel guilty about sitting on your bedding with your outside clothes still on. One of your cats saunters into your room, leaps onto your bed, nestles against your pillow, and simply stares at you. You read so much love in his eyes, the thought of removing him from the fresh sheets does not even cross your mind.

…

You go to your psychiatrist for a check-up four months after your last visit. You tell him about the fear you have been feeling in your chest lately, the way it comes in waves even when you are alone in your room on a seemingly normal day. You tell him about the guilt you feel for not working on the personal projects you thought you would work on when you quit your job seven months ago. You tell him that you find it too difficult to be a person in this world, that you might not be cut out for it. “You are trying too hard,” he says. “Let yourself be, and see what happens.”

…

You go into your grandmother’s room as you do at least once a day on most days. She holds your hand and asks if you have eaten. She is almost ninety. These days, she is often sick. You know her body is giving up. Very slowly, but surely. You wonder if you can grieve someone who is still here. You do not wonder – you know it is possible. At times, she is delirious. She cannot tell if it is night or day. She mistakes her daughter for a distant relative. But she never forgets to hold your hand.

…

You are on a video call with your best friend. After years of making lofty plans to “start a business,” you have finally managed to create an Instagram page together. You have hosted a poetry workshop that the participants claim to have enjoyed. While discussing what to do next, she suddenly asks you to show her the t-shirt you are wearing, because it seems familiar. “That’s because it’s yours,” you tell her. It is the alumni t-shirt from her university. You reckon you’ve been wearing it for almost a decade. Neither of you can recall how it changed hands.

…

You perform a set at an open mic at a jazz club with your brother. A bunch of friends come to cheer you on. You are nervous all evening, but have a good time on stage when your turn arrives after everyone else’s. Later, a stranger compliments your voice and asks for your Instagram. You give it to him, and he notices your profile bio: “I will not say sorry for my graceless striving.” He praises the line, but you regret not remembering the name of the poet who wrote it. Then you drink a couple of gin cocktails and let loose with your friends. When it’s time to leave, you finally tell one of those friends that you like him in a “more than friends” kind of way. He doesn’t reciprocate, but you feel light and free.

…

Three days later, you learn that your youngest cat, the one who would sit on your bed and stare at you, has passed away. He had been missing for a few days, and you would go searching for him around the neighbourhood and call his name from your balcony. But now, your worst nightmare has come true. Your father gives you the news, and you rush to your room so no one can see you cry. You can’t stop thinking about his yellow eyes, his one black ear and black tail, his half-throated meows, his constant need to swat at your slippers and bite random objects, and his peculiar habit of walking diagonally across everyone’s paths and baiting them to trip over him. You avoid imagining what his last moments were like. You try to spin this into a lesson from the universe about loving without attachment, but know in your heart that you will never learn.

…

You call up a Sanskrit scholar to interview him for an article you are writing about digital religious practices. He shares his insights in detail, and you thank him for his time. Before ending the conversation, he asks you what your name means. You have been answering this question all your life. “It means driving force,” you say confidently. He chuckles, asking if you have a few moments to spare. You say yes, and he launches into a complicated explanation about the Sanskrit root of the word. Indignant, you google your name to see what the dictionary has to say. The dictionary corroborates what you know. It also lists an additional meaning you hadn’t known until now. Meanwhile, he says, “Your name comes from the word ‘Preeti,’”. “Preeti means love, doesn’t it?” you ask. “Yes,” he says, “’Proiti,’ therefore, means full of love.” Once you get over the shock of not knowing this other meaning until the age of twenty-nine, you commend your parents for their clairvoyance.

…

You sit on the porch steps stroking one of your two remaining cats under an unusually hot late- February sun. He rolls around, purrs, and meows, presumably from happiness and pleasure. As you scratch his head, you can’t help but look towards the gate. Maybe the other cat, the one who left too soon, will come running into the garden as he always did, plop himself down on the pathway by the grass and fall into a gentle slumber. Your wishes don’t come true, but a flutter of white butterflies appears out of nowhere and drifts through the still-cool spring air.

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As we grew up, the room changed with us. For starters, it became more mine than my brother’s, who (only quite recently, if I’m being honest) got his own room after bouncing around the house sharing space with other members of our family. The bunk bed, our precious sanctuary for all these years, was dismantled. The ferro cement bathroom door was replaced with a generic one made of plastic after it came off its hinges and fell on me. A couple of years down the line, in my early twenties, I had the exposed brick painted over with a shockingly bright yellow. The curved-edge bed fixed to the wall was remade into a standard twin bed with wheels. As summers became hotter, I moved my bed to the center of the room so that it could be under the fan. The multi-coloured cupboards made way for sensible brown ones. The yellow walls turned off-white. Every couple of years, I added and removed a variety of bookshelves and desks, hoping each time, to completely transform the room — only for it to remain mostly the same.

This was the room that saw me through school and college— the main stage on which my life’s everyday dramas played out as I moved from one era to another. Countless last-minute study sessions and paper-writing sprees, phone conversations that began in the afternoon and went on till night, teary fights and fervent reconciliations with lovers now lost, boisterous sleepovers with friends who made the room their own, long hours of sulking and weeping in the aftermath of a jarring heartbreak, taunts from my brother about working in bed, rebukes from my mother for keeping the curtains drawn during the day, and all the little successes and failures that descend on us humans as we trudge from one day to the next.

This is the room where, time after time, I sank deep into a quicksand of darkness, and also the room where I surfaced, wanting to feel the sun on my face again. When I left home for two years, making other rooms my own in other countries as the pandemic raged on, this room stayed as it was, a reminder of all things constant in a world in turmoil.

In the four years since I returned home and moved back into this room again, I have blamed it repeatedly for making me feel stagnated. I have called it a vortex, a dead zone where all my drive and ambition are replaced by a singular devotion to comfort and convenience. I have been advised, rightfully so, not to spend all of my time in this room, to set up a workspace in a different part of the house. And yet, the room has a strange hold over me that I cannot explain. No matter how much I complain about its paralysing properties, this is still the only place that can make me feel calm and composed enough to focus on work of any kind. This is still the only place I want to slink into after a tiring day out and about. This is still the first place I want to show a new friend visiting my house for the first time.

In a few months, I will turn thirty years old. While I don’t subscribe to societal diktats about reaching certain milestones by certain ages, it is difficult to resist the conditioning that teaches me to consider living in the same room at thirteen and thirty as some kind of failure. At the same time, I know just how much of a privilege it is to have a room like this, a stable home like this, and a loving family that has made it all possible. On certain days, the air in my room might feel heavier than I can bear. But on other days, when I do manage to open the curtains, the sunlight streams in just like it used to on those languorous summer holiday afternoons, and for a fleeting moment I see the shadows of two children on the wall, perhaps colouring or reading together, lost in their own worlds in the way only children can be lost.

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Since my last post in early November (a poem I wrote about having a crush that my crush almost entirely ignored — because why should the universe help me out?), I failed to write anything else for this Substack. Not that I didn’t try. My drafts are full of introductory paragraphs on various topics that I could not see through to the end, and the days piled up.

This time around, my mental state and creative ability were paralyzed by the following solvable problem: a progressively loud voice in my head asking “Is this too self-indulgent?” about whatever topic I considered writing about. The straightforward solution to this problem would have been to write one post in its entirety, and then try to answer the question this voice was asking. But my mind (or whatever demon controls it) rarely opts for the straightforward solution when another, much more self-torturous path is available. In this case, this path was the path of constantly rejecting every idea I came up with as self-indulgent and waiting for that one perfect “selfless” idea, which, as any sane person knows, does not exist.

After being forced by this inner demon to walk said path for the past two months, and sharing my conundrum with Analina (who, as wisely as always, called out my “Catholic guilt,” adding, “It’s your personal blog. If there is a space to be self-indulgent, then this it it.”), I am finally attempting to power through with the straightforward solution of actually writing something and seeing where it goes.

I don’t think I can escape self-indulgence. Our world is mired in it. The Hindutva goons running riot across the country destroying Christmas decorations and attacking youngsters at birthday parties are self-indulgent. The mobs in Bangladesh lynching Hindus, and the many, many mobs in India lynching Muslims are self-indulgent. The politicians egging them on are self-indulgent. The policy-makers mutilating environmental protections to help rich industrialists make more profits are self-indulgent. The Bollywood superstars producing jingoistic movies are self-indulgent. The influencers selling tons and tons of makeup and gadgets that nobody could ever need are self-indulgent. The psychopathic tech-bros making empty promises as they destroy the planet and its people in the name of artificial intelligence are self-indulgent. Self-indulgence is our way of life — capitalism’s most potent ideological poison injected into our veins.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not comparing the act of writing a personal newsletter (or other kinds of everyday self-indulgences we all engage in) with the type of self-indulgence that ruins lives and ecosystems. But every little thing adds up, doesn’t it? Every time we look at our phones even when a friend or family member is sitting next to us, when we turn away to avoid beggars rapping on our car windows, when we honk in traffic because everyone else is, when we stay quiet when someone makes a casteist remark, we move further into a state of complete enmeshment with self-indulgence. I believe that that is where we are headed as a collective, because the institutions and structures that control us and shape our lives are pushing us in that direction, and that direction only.

In the year-end post I wrote in 2024, I acknowledged that we are in the end times, but I tempered my cynicism with some amount of hope and tenderness. This time around, I am struggling to feel optimistic. We are people who watch genocide unfold on our phone screens, fellow humans get labelled as “illegal” and thrown out of their homes, ancient forests razed to the ground in the name of “development” and still go about our day as if nothing happened. Anybody who still has faith that things can get better, that we can save this dying planet and redeem ourselves is blinded by their own self-indulgence.

Or perhaps it is my pessimism that is self-indulgent. People who don’t have the privileges I have, the ones who have to fight everyday to survive, don’t get to lose hope. They don’t get to slink into the shadows of endless despair, because they have to show up on the frontlines. They cannot afford the self-indulgence of despondency.

As we ring in the new year, I leave you to make your own judgements, as I make mine. Self-indulgent or not, may we all make more time and space in our lives for art, for friends, for family, for love, for the trees and the skies and the lakes, for dogs, cats, and birds, for the food we savour and the music that pulls our heartstrings, and the silence between each dogged breath.

With love and hugs for sticking around,

Proiti

For the past two months, I’ve thought everyday of writing about the rest of my travels for this newsletter, but my tendency to overwhelm myself by setting impossibly lofty and unrealistic targets got in the way and how.

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of friends who encourage and admonish in equal measure, I have finally managed to put it together. Here we go:

I began my fifth week in London with a trip to Grovelands Park, where I sat on the steps of a lake and watched a leaf float by, ducks dip their heads in and out of the water, and a pigeon couple canoodling each other in the glow of the afternoon sun. In the evening I made roast chicken with the help of Ema Mashi, who spatchcocked the chicken and gave me gloves so I could put my fingers underneath the skin to stuff the bird with minced garlic and spices.

That week, I also went down to the Crypt gallery underneath the St. Pancras Church, where an Indian artist projected video footage of groups of labourers toiling away by the sea, and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at the University College, London, which houses thousands and thousands of ancient Egyptian artefacts like jewellery, tablets, sarcophagi and even a skeleton collected by William Flinders Petrie and others.

To cool off after my head was buzzing from seeing all those objects, I walked into a Waterstones bookstore right opposite, and ended up reading three whole collections of poetry by Wendy Cope (she is an absolute delight). Afterwards, I walked through the Theatre District and made my way to the Institute of Contemporary Arts to see an exhibition of artworks and personal documents by London’s notable black and brown women artists. Finally, before heading home, I stopped at Ole and Steen, a Danish bakery, to grab a cinnamon Danish like the ones I used to have almost everyday during my time living in Denmark in 2020. Nothing like food to trigger nostalgia.

The next day, I took the tube to central London once again to attend a piano concert at the Westminster Library, after which I roamed around Chinatown for more than half an hour trying to decide what to have for lunch with a taro boba in hand. Once I managed to force myself to make a choice (a pork bao), I walked to St. James’s Park with my food and sat down under a tree overlooking the lake. Sitting soon seemed like a tedious position, and I lay down on the grass to read under the open sky. And because I take my leisure very seriously, I went to Green Park after spending a few hours at St. James’s Park to do the same thing.

That week I also went to the British Telecom archives in Holborn to see an exhibition about the history of the telegraph system in colonial India, told through books and other documents left behind by British telegraphists hired to run India’s communication lines. Just outside the building was a man selling ice-cream, and I opted for a chocolate sorbet, which I didn’t know was a thing until then.

My next stop was the Somerset House, which was hosting a somewhat creepy exhibition about the ups and downs of our lives in the virtual realm. In the late afternoon, I went into the Courtauld Gallery with a free ticket for “Under 18s.” I was lucky that the usher didn’t ask me for ID, because then I would have to pretend to not know English to justify why me, a 29-year old, had booked that ticket. Thankfully, my babyface saved the day and I spent a solid hour or two looking at some of the most famous paintings of all time, like Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

As evening fell, I took a bus to the Westminster Abbey, which was hosting a summer fête in its cloisters, which are usually restricted to the public. Inside, I walked around the corridors, looking at plaques dedicated to hundreds of people from all walks of life, including a large plaque commemorating the “civil services of the Crown in India.” The one I was most thrilled to see was the writer Aphra Behn’s plaque, because it took me back to my undergraduate days when we studied her novel Oroonoko. After spending some time in the cloisters listening to a woman sing Florence and the Machine songs and making a dodgy collage at the crafts table, I left Westminster Abbey to walk towards the Big Ben and then onto Westminster Bridge. Against the backdrop of a marmalade sky the British Parliament stood out like the giant it is — I wrestled with contrasting feelings of awe at its architectural grandeur and bitterness at the violence and exploitation it stands for.

In the last week of August, Ema Mashi and I set off for Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales to see her younger sister Seema Mashi, my other aunt, who I would be meeting for the first time. We boarded a train from London Paddington and arrived at Birmingham New Street, from where we took a train to Shrewsbury, an English town near the Welsh border. At the platform on Shrewsbury, I was incredibly touched to notice a plaque commemorating the exact spot where Arwel Hughes, a Welsh composer, composed a particular hymn tune.

From this platform, we boarded a tiny little train with two coaches, part of the ‘Heart of Wales’ line, which took us across the border through quaint little towns and yellowing pastures with grazing sheep. An hour into the journey, Ema Mashi remarked that we might even reach before the scheduled time, with how fast the train was trudging along. As a passenger haunted by the ways of the Indian Railways, this seemed to me to be too good to be true. “It might just stop for a long time at one of the stations,” I said. Immediately, the train screeched to a halt. As I wondered why the universe had chosen this moment to reveal my psychic powers to me, I heard the driver try again and again to restart the engine, only for it to shut down every time. After multiple attempts, the conductor came around to tell us we would be going back to the nearest station, Knighton, and we would be put on a bus.

At Knighton station (essentially a platform, a shed and an old stone cottage), we waited for the bus while petting the station cat, only to be told that no bus could be arranged: the train would take us all the way back to Shrewsbury and Transport for Wales would pay our taxi fares to go to our destinations.

When Seema Mashi heard this over the phone, she told us she would drive down to Knighton in an hour and pick us up, so Ema Mashi and I waited in the station shed instead of going back to Shrewsbury on the train. Soon enough, we were in her car: I was in the passenger seat, and Ema Mashi sat with Dave, Seema Mashi’s partner, and their ten year old labradoodle Koji. We drove through rolling green hills and farmlands with more grazing sheep with black faces, and horses. The scenery reminded me so much of illustrated books from my childhood that I was stunned into silence. By the time we pulled into Meadowway, Seema Mashi’s house at the edge of the little town, my wonder had truly consumed me- I could hardly believe my own eyes. Spread out across two acres, her garden is home to more than a thousand species of plants. After putting down our bags, we went to pick strawberries and raspberries from the greenhouse, which Ema Mashi put into a delicious Eton Mess.

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The next few days were idyllic: chatting around a wood fire in their cosy living room, a walk through the nearby Irfon Forest, where Koji played in the river as my aunts and I stopped along the way to marvel at various plants and flowers; a trip to the seaside town of Aberaeron, (which was hosting its annual carnival), where we ate honey ice cream and fish and chips; climbing on a ladder to help Seema Mashi pluck hundreds of plums from her glorious plum tree (some of which made a delicious crumble); endlessly gazing at the lush green landscapes from the garden, changing colours in the alternating bouts of rain and sun.

Despite my sincere affection for London, returning to the city after a trip to the fairytale that was Llanwrtyd Wells was somewhat difficult.

The day after I got back, I went to the London Archives to attend a talk about Keats’ Life in London told via archival documents like his family’s letters and insurance policies (and some nasty reviews written about his poetry by some jealous losers). I also explored an exhibition on London during World War II, where a special feature taught me that an ambulance station recruiting South Asians had been set up in 1939, which received responses from more than hundred people volunteering their services.

On my way from the London Archives to the Guildhall Art Gallery, I took shelter from some light rain in the garden of The Priory Church of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which was consecrated in 1185 and destroyed during the war in 1941. At the gallery, I saw a range of Victorian paintings and sculpture, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata. Under the gallery lay the ruins of London’s Roman Amphitheatre, dating back to AD 70, re-discovered in 1988.

Next to the Guildhall Gallery was the church, St. Lawrence Jewry, where I sat for a while as an organist was teaching a lesson. I felt a bit like an intruder even though the church was open for everybody, but the white and gold interiors were too grand not to sit and soak in. Further up the street was the quaint little Postman’s Park, which has a famous wall with plaques commemorating those who gave their lives to save others from death, starting way back in the 1800s to now.

Over the next couple of days, in between bouts of obsessing over how to “make the most of my stay” and berating myself for not doing any writing, I managed to do some cooking (Za’atar cod with relish, gochujang chicken with lemon salt), took a Jack the Ripper tour in Whitechapel where the guide told fascinating stories about poor women’s lives in Victorian London, spent a rainy afternoon among the topsy-turvy, ivy-laced gravestones at the Abney Park Cemetery, and journaled about my days at a public desk at the British Library.

With the arrival of September, the alarm bells in my mind started going off — I had only twenty-five days left of my trip. To start off the month, I went to the Whitechapel Gallery to see the archives of British Pakistani artist Hamad Butt (this was also an excuse for me to visit a twenty-four hour bagel shop in Brick Lane and have salmon-cream cheese bagels with lemon salt) and then took a meditation class at the London Buddhist Centre (where a white man taught us Metta Bhavana- Loving Kindness meditation in front of a giant golden statue of the Buddha).

I also made a pilgrimage to the National Gallery, having learnt from my father that no visit to London is complete without a viewing of Canaletto’s Venice paintings and the post-impressionist works of Van Gogh, Monet, Gaugin and the rest. For the umpteenth time, I stood in awe in front of Akseli Gallen Kellela’s Lake Keitele, Camille Pissaro’s The Boulevard Montmartre At Night and Monet’s lilies. Once the gallery closed and the sky darkened, I took refuge inside a Waterstones and spent a solid hour reading Imtiaz Dharker’s poems, waiting for the rain to stop.

When the weather improved a day or two later, I took the tube to South Kensington, first visiting the Science Museum, (which houses, among its many treasures, the world’s oldest rotative engine built by James Watt and the Vickers Vimy aircraft that made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean) and then the museum at the Royal College of Music, where you can see the world’s oldest guitar. After spending some time watching the sun set next to the Round Lake at the Kensington Gardens opposite the RCM, I made my way home.

To close out the week, I made tracks to the British Museum, where, I’ll admit, I was too distracted by recurring thoughts of the questionable ways those objects got there in the first place to truly notice the objects themselves (they’ve got entire temples and stupas inside — can you really blame me?). Nevertheless, no matter how many times you see the Rosetta Stone, Babylonian bricks inscribed with the titles of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Parthenon sculptures or the ruins of Amaravati, or the thousands of Egyptian statues and sarcophagi, you come away with the same sense of distilled wonder.

Over the weekend, to welcome Analina to town, I made a plum galette and a tuna spaghetti, thus heralding the beginning of three weeks of joint activities including watching The Lion King at the West End, cloud-gazing and sandwich-chomping in Hampstead Heath, admiring Vermeer at Kenwood House, powering through seven-hour, multiple-bus commutes to attend the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall (thanks to tube strikes), basking in the sun at Kensington Gardens, browsing the shelves at Daunt Books and shaking our heads at the opulence of riches at the Wallace Collection.

One lucky day we even found a ten-pound note on the pavement, which we spent on a babka and iced-chocolate at a newly opened Gail’s bakery in Marylebone, whose staff very kindly also gave us a San Francisco sourdough loaf and two cinnamon rolls for free because it was their first day!

We paid a visit to the newly opened Victoria and Albert East Storehouse, whose layout allows you to look at a variety of paintings, furniture, sculptures, clothes and instruments up-close, and also houses the grand Agra Colonnade, originally part of a bathhouse at Agra Fort (the audacity of colonial Brits is unmatched).

The gallery visits were accompanied by nights drinking gin and elderflower soda under the cold moonlight, recording a “podcast” while lying on the grass in my aunt’s garden, spotting double rainbows, making shortcut jhol momos with rice paper, and finally singing All Too Well at a Karaoke Bar after years and years of dreaming about it.

Our two weeks together in London was rounded off with a trip to the Tate Modern to see Dali, Degas and Duchamp, a violin and piano concert at the Victorian-era Wigmore Hall, and a quick drop-in at the National Portrait Gallery (primarily so I could sit and eat my Chinatown mango sticky rice in peace).

Analina and I then got on the train to go to Warrington to her sister’s place, getting drenched in a bout of torrential rain the moment we got off. Over the next few days, we “recovered” from our hectic London schedule by lounging around watching The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime, making a day trip to Manchester to drop by the store at Old Trafford, see C.S. Lowry and Quentin Blake’s art at The Lowry (including the original illustrations for Matilda - I couldn’t believe my eyes) and attend a performance of the Swan Lake ballet.

Later that week, we also went to the Lake District, exploring Wordsworth’s family home and gardens at Rydal Mount, his grave at St Oswald’s Churchyard in Grasmere, and mountain top views of Derwentwater.

Finally it was time to say goodbye to Analina and take the train from Manchester to Southport to see my uncle, Asif Mama. I managed to squeeze in a trip to the Manchester Art Gallery before it was time to walk to the station, dragging my suitcase across its two floors housing a stunning painting of Sappho by Auguste Charles Mengin and a view of Calcutta from the 1790s by William Hodges, among many, many other artworks. When I was nearly done with my visit, I received an email from the train company telling me that my train had been cancelled, so I speed-walked to the station in the rain in the hope of catching the train right before or after. With some help from the station attendants, I managed to figure out a new route, and made it to Southport.

The next day, Ema Mashi (who joined from London), Asif Mama, his partner Kim, and I drove to a village an hour away to see Asif Mama’s son Adam, his wife Sarah and their three children — four-year old Joshua and almost two-year old twins Jessica and Ellie. The day’s activities were led by the children, beginning with a round of make-believe camping, followed by an extended round of a game where Joshua was an ice-cream seller selling his (wooden toy) ice-creams at exorbitant prices and asking his customers to exchange their purchases among each other. In the afternoon, we walked to a nearby pub, which I will remember as the spot for my first-ever experience of a Sunday roast. Outside the pub, the dazzling sunlight was falling on tall trees full of big, red apples.

After lunch, we walked back home to play some more games with the children, and then made our way back to Southport as twilight draped the languorous meadows we passed.

The next day, Ema Mashi and I took a train to Liverpool to join the Magical Mystery Bus Tour. As Ema Mashi put it, we were “proper tourists” that day, queueing up in front of the gigantic yellow bus at the Liverpool docks that would take us to all the famous sites associated with The Beatles. The first stop on the tour was Ringo Starr’s neighbourhood, with one of the houses he lived in covered in a huge, colourful mural of his face, which made me tear up unexpectedly.

These seemingly ordinary young men, living in these ordinary neighbourhoods were making music because they loved it so much — they didn’t set out to change the world, that they did. So much so that these houses they lived in, these pavements and streets, are now historical sites that millions of people visit every year.

From there we went down to Penny Lane, where the guide pointed out the roundabout where McCartney and Lennon used to meet. The next stop was the house where George Harrison was born, situated on a lane called Arnold Grove. The lane was closed off to the public (no doubt by residents sick and tired of tourists like us), but you could still see the tiny, two-storied house at the end of the street. The bus then drove us to Strawberry Field, a compound that used to house an orphanage when Lennon climbed over the back wall to socialize with its boarders as a teen. Now a training centre operated by the Salvation Army, Strawberry Field is not quite the dreamy, psychedelic location you might have imagined based on the song, but worth a visit nevertheless.

The next two stops were Lennon and McCartney’s childhood homes, which we didn’t enter but looked on from outside at the bedrooms where they spent many a day composing some of their earliest music. The final stop was the Cavern Club, where The Beatles performed 292 times between 1961 and 1963. This is where Brian Epstein saw them perform and then became their manager.

It is difficult for me to adequately express in words what seeing these places meant to me as someone who has spent all of her life surrounded by musicians, witnessing the blood, sweat, tears that go into creating, recording, and performing music. I only wish that our country’s vast musical heritage would be preserved with at least a smidge of the care and attention with which the city of Liverpool has preserved The Beatles’ history among its lanes its and bylanes.

That evening, Asif Mama cooked lamb biriyani for us, and regaled us with tales of his days as the British ambassador to Thailand, where, among other things, he stopped a coup by exchanging childhood stories about helping their respective mothers and grandmothers by crushing betel nuts for paan with the country’s most senior army general.

The next day, Ema Mashi and I went back to London, and I spent the evening packing my suitcase to make sure it didn’t cross the 25kg mark (this was not easy).

On my final day in London, I went to a classical guitar concert at the church of St. James’ Piccadilly, famous for being the location of poet William Blake’s baptism. After the concert, I tried pierogis from a stall in the yard (I had always wanted to try them, and now that I have, I know I wasn’t missing out on anything good), and then treated myself to a sweet rice cake called Mamedaifuku from a quaint Japanese shop I found nearby. I also spent some time at a Waterstones reading a collection of poetry (why can’t Indian bookshop chains have decent poetry sections?), before walking down to the Thames.

On my way to the Thames, I was walking by the National Gallery, and decided to have one last look at ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ by Monet. As I was climbing up the stairs to go to the Impressionist gallery, I realised that children are truly destined to turn into their parents, because this is exactly what I’ve always rolled my eyes at my father for doing (visiting the National Gallery multiple times to see the same paintings).

From the gallery, I made my way to the Thames, getting hit by a cyclist on the way (it was not my fault, I think). As the sun set on the river’s grey waters, my heart sank at the thought of leaving this magical city and returning to my “real life,” as I’ve been calling it.

The next morning, on the 25th of September, I said goodbye to Ema Mashi and began my long journey home, arriving in Kolkata on the morning of the 26th, ready to drown my post-London blues with Durga Pujo fervour.

Now that Durga Pujo is over too, I am struggling to return to the routine of everydayness, daydreaming about all the sights I saw, the food I ate (I miss brown sugar boba the most), the streets I walked, and the lightness I felt.

Once I manage to snap out of sulking mode, I hope to replicate some of those feelings of lightness (and some of the food too) in my “real life,” which, despite my whining, is as blessed and abundant as it always was.

If you’ve read this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this huge piece.

With love,

Proiti

P.S. If you are still not stick of me and my writing, you might want to check out this piece I wrote for Travel + Leisure India & South Asia about the time I spent in London’s parks. This is my first byline in a fancy print magazine, so I’m pretty chuffed about it.

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Since I quit my job and submitted myself to the whims of the universe, time hasn’t felt all that real.

A little more than three weeks ago, I arrived in London for a two-month stay with Ema Mashi, my mother’s cousin. I had been hoping to return to London since October 2021, when I said goodbye to Ema Mashi, my uncle David and Mamoni (my grandmother’s older sister) and went back home to finish my master’s thesis. I didn’t know then that it would be my last time seeing David and Mamoni. The house feels incomplete without them, and I find myself startled by a neighbour’s cough mistaking it for David’s, or staring too long at a green-stemmed wine glass that Mamoni would have next to her plate at the dinner table every evening.

London, however, is as it always was: brimming with possibility, paralysing me with its countless choices of museums, galleries, parks, streets, neighbourhoods, cafes and restaurants.

In my first week, I rediscovered the everyday joys that had defined the pandemic months I spent here: going to the supermarket with Ema Mashi like I used to with David, exploring the nearby Grovelands Park, looking out for the foxes that frequent the garden, gorging on hot chicken flavoured chips and experimenting in the kitchen overlooking the garden where roses and hydrangeas are in full bloom (open sandwiches with prosciutto, blue cheese and mustard, tomato-mango-cucumber salad, blitzed strawberries with soda, cod in a coconut gravy). I also went to see the artist Arpita Singh’s first major exhibition outside India at the Serpentine Gallery, trudging along the Serpentine Lake where families from around the world were boating under a bright blue sky. Outside the gallery, I chanced upon A Capsule in Time, a wooden installation by Dhaka based architect Marina Tabassum, inspired by the structure of a Shamiyana, where visitors were invited to browse books about the Bengal delta in the glow of soft daylight filtering in through the awning.

The week after, Ema Mashi and I went to Hackney in East London, walking down the famous Ridley Road market when shop owners, mostly African and Caribbean migrants, were winding up their stalls selling fruits, fish, meat, wigs, jewellery, clothes and shoes. From there, after a quick stop for some patatas bravas and cocktails at a roadside bar, we went to the Earth Theatre, an art-deco cinema hall turned edgy arts venue to see Ema Mashi’s daughter and journalist, my cousin Ash, interview historian William Dalrymple. Dalrymple spoke eloquently about ancient India’s intimate connections with the West and the East, strengthened along sea-based trade routes that saw merchant ships carrying mountains of pepper, ivory, cotton and other luxurious goods in exchange for gold.

The next day, we took a train to Cambridge, making our way first to the Wren library at Trinity College, waiting in line to see Isaac Newton's first edition copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his notes for the second edition (as well as his walking stick, and a lock of his hair!), A. A. Milne's manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh, Srinivasa Ramanujan’s ‘lost notebook’ and other precious manuscripts. From there, we strolled into the central market square, lunching on grilled meats, lemon tarts and a delightful Elderflower sparkling water that made it to the top of my list of cola rivals.

After lunch, we took a tour of the King’s College Chapel. A Gothic masterpiece, the chapel was constructed between 1446 to 1515 by a series of English kings, boasting the world’s largest fan vault, and housing a gigantic organ gifted by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, etched with their initials. Next to the chapel, we saw punts gliding along the River Cam carrying tourists, with punters doubling as guides sharing stories about the many historic sites along the banks.

Our last stop of the day was Fitzwilliam Museum, whose collection was so large and varied that we decided to stick with one particular exhibition: Discovering Dürer, featuring a wide selection of works by pioneering German printmaker Albrecht Dürer, who took the artform to new heights during the Northern Renaissance towards the end of the fifteenth century.

That week, I also went to the National Portrait Gallery, where, among the hundreds of portraits of kings, queens, generals, writers, artists and notable figures, I was most excited to stand before a portrait of Charlotte Brontë whose reproductions I had seen throughout my childhood - to see it in person felt particularly thrilling. I was also struck by a portrait of Colonel James Skinner, born in Calcutta in 1778 to a Scottish father and Indian mother. Ineligible for service in the East India Company army because of his mixed-race origins, Skinner raised his own mercenary army called ‘Skinner’s Horse,’ helping the British take control in the 1820s. I slipped in and out of the portrait gallery to my favourite church of all time next door, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, to listen to the choir sing hymns under its gold-laced ceiling.

With the arrival of August, it was time for a four-day poetry workshop at City Lit in Covent Garden, where, for the first time in my life, I wrote poems in a classroom setting and studied tone, form, pacing and style alongside retired teachers, established spoken word poets and corporate workers from across the city. We wrote by hand, and I surprised myself by being able to churn out a couple of not-absolute-rubbish poems.

The same week, Analina came down to London from Warrington with her parents, and everyday after class, we ventured on a range of activities: browsing poetry shelves at Judd Books, snacking on supermarket Sushi and zaatar bread from a local Lebanese bakery at Russell Square, dining with her parents at a Turkish restaurant where a Sylheti man on staff chatted with us about reading Samaresh Majumdar novels as a college student, attending a stunning flamenco performance by legendary Spanish guitarist Paco Pena and his ensemble of guitarists, percussionists, singers and dancers (who, I was convinced by the end of the show, are no less than Olympic-level athletes), and grabbing tall glasses of chilled brown sugar milk with brown sugar boba and black grass jelly from a specialist Taiwanese store.

The day after the course was over, we set off to visit the Wallace Collection, only for me to realise that I had left my glasses at home, forcing us to go back all the way to get them. Shifting gears, we made our way to the Leadenhall Market, one of the city’s oldest, to eat mussels and beef tacos, before heading to the European headquarters of Bloomberg nearby, under which lie the ruins of the Temple of Mithras. Most members of this mysterious Roman cult were soldiers, and the museum inside told a fascinating tale of secret meetings in the windowless sanctum dedicated to worshipping a figure of Mithras slaughtering a bull and feasting in his name. That evening, we had the time of our lives as groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe, watching an enthralling performance of Twelfth Night, and the English Lit grad inside me almost couldn’t believe what I was witnessing and where.

Over the weekend, we took the train to Dover, where Analina and I, questioningly dressed in all-black winter outfits, hiked across the chalky white cliffs on a sunny, windy day, stopping repeatedly to gaze at (and photograph) the stupefyingly blue waters of the English Channel and the faint silhouette of France in the horizon. On our way up, we tried to write a poem about what we were experiencing (it’s still a work in progress), and ate what we think were wild blackberries growing in the grass (hoping against hope that they weren’t poisonous). After around two hours, we reached the Victorian-era South Foreland Lighthouse, where I got salted caramel ice-cream from a place with a very Enid Blyton-esque name: Mrs. Knott’s Tea Room. At the lighthouse visitor centre, we asked for directions to the St. Margaret’s Bay, which, according to a local cab driver, would be another 15-minute downhill walk.

Analina and I are steadfast believers in staying true to ourselves, so we honoured our lack of directional sense by going the wrong way for several minutes before backtracking and opting for the right path to the bay. Once we were at the bay, we chucked rocks into the ocean and rolled our eyes at children playing in the water. By this time, it was too late to hike back to the starting point where we had left her parents, so we made the heart wrenching decision to book a £35 cab ride to their hotel in the neighbouring town of Folkstone. After waiting for the cab for half an hour, we decided to adopt a You Only Live Once attitude and started walking towards a nearby pub, when our cab literally stopped us in our tracks, and picked us up.

After a brief stop at Featherstone beach, where we shared cheesy fries and Limoncello spritz, I made my way back to London while Analina stayed back with her parents.

I spent all of next morning making friends with Anaya, Ema Mashi’s grand-daughter from her other daughter Sushi. We played bath time with her doll (the poor soul was made to take no less than five baths in a span of two minutes), and I was granted the privilege of reading to Anaya (‘Hairy McLary From Donaldson’s Dairy’). We also did some colouring together, with a pink flower I drew receiving high praise from the discerning three-year old.

On Analina’s last day in London, we took the tube to the Senate House Library at the University of London to see an exhibition called Spineless Wonders: The Power of Print Unbound. After looking at historic pamphlets, zines, chapbooks and postcards from across the world, we sat on a bench outside campus trying to make the very serious decision of Where To Eat. After much back and forth, we settled on a family-run pasta joint on Goodge Street. We ordered two portions of handmade pasta with cheese, bacon and Sicilian sausages which left us nearly immobile after the meal was over. Somehow, after stopping on the way to dilly dally at some shops on Tottenham Court Road, we arrived at Soho Square, where, like many others, we lay down on the grass with our bags under our heads and fell into a nap.

Before I dozed off, I was admiring just how vast the sky looks when you’re looking at it from down below while lying down, and telling myself that I need to do this more.

I spent the rest of the week trying to put all of this down into a piece for the newsletter, and also failed spectacularly at arriving on time to join a Partition Heritage walking tour near Westminster, catching only the tail end when the group was heading to the steps of Caxton Hall, where Sardar Udham Singh assassinated Michael O'Dwyer to avenge the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre in 1940.

On Friday, Ema Mashi and I went to the Southbank Centre to see almost two hundred teenagers play steel drums, brass instruments and dance like there’s no tomorrow . After the show, we sipped on cocktails and watched the sky darken over the Thames, as Ema Mashi told me stories of growing up in the 70s.

The past four weeks have felt like a long, pleasurable dream, with a voice in my head (and my bank account) occasionally reminding me that this is “not my real life” and that I need to “get a grip” before long. With a couple more weeks to go before I return home, I hope to do all I can to savour this dream, this unearned blessing, this glimmering dewdrop on a blade of grass.

…

As always, thanks for sticking around! This newsletter now has a hundred subscribers, which honestly seems unbelievable. Thank you to everyone who’s subscribed.

Please like, comment and share if you enjoy reading it!

With love,

Proiti

Why did I put in my papers? If you’ve been reading my Substack, especially if you read the last newsletter I sent out, you’ll know that I had some qualms (to put it very, very mildly) about the subject matter it required me to engage with. Spending forty hours a week immersed in American politics and business news made me feel very cynical about the world and our collective future (I challenge you not to feel that way when you learn just how many billions of dollars are currently being spent by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations to develop and deploy AI weapons).

At the end of each workday, I would be drained and despair about not being able to perk myself up and work on my own writing projects. This became an endless cycle until I morphed into a chronically complaining person suffocating under the weight of her myriad unlived lives.

In my heart I knew I would have to let go of the money and the stability if I was going to write the things I wanted to write; to rediscover the hope I have for this world; and to feel remotely like myself again. And so, after weeks of intense, violent wrestling matches with my worst fears and lengthy discussions with wise friends, I cut the cord.

For the next six months (that’s how long I told my money manager I wanted to go without having to earn money), I intend to orient my days around one single goal: to reconnect with the inherent joy that comes from building a life aligned with one’s purpose.

I know it is a lofty goal - scoff-worthy even, when you factor in just how hard it is to make a living with the arts. I know my savings will take a considerable hit, and I will have to give up on everyday luxuries I currently take for granted. But, as one of my best friends pointed out, this is the “normal” I have always known. I was born to two people whose lives have been shaped by their respective callings, who repeatedly defied the convenient trappings of nine-to-five to stay true to their passions, and, despite an endless number of challenges, continue to pursue new directions in their fields. I never needed to watch a biopic or read a moving memoir to be inspired to follow my heart, I witness it everyday in my own home.

Unlike me, who is financially responsible only for herself (and her two cats), my parents supported their own parents (and my brother and me) as they navigated their journeys. My mother’s work in the social sector has taken her across the country to help child labourers in the mica mines of Jharkhand, to remote villages in Rajasthan where Panchayat leaders don’t like women who speak, to the storm-battered Sunderbans where teenagers are desperate for better lives, to the red light areas of Kolkata where working mothers dream of real futures for their children. She has trained countless teachers, set up a chain of schools, written lyrics for major artists, crafted textbooks in Bangla and English, translated children’s fiction, organized multiple concerts and initiated a thousand other projects that would be impossible to list in full.

My father, on the other hand, left his job when my mother was pregnant with me to finally pursue his calling in music. And while that might have been a reckless move, what a loss it would have been for him and for the world at large, if he had not dared to take that step. To say he is devoted to his craft would be a gross understatement, and there are no sentences I am capable of conjuring that could describe his artistry — but to have been born and raised as his daughter has been a lifelong lesson in the power and joy of sādhanā, answering only to an internal call, untouched by the external and ephemeral trappings of accolades and numbers.

While I do not even dream of reaching the heights of passion and perseverance my parents have, I believe that all the privileges I have are direct outcomes of their decision to live according to their purpose. As my brother pursues his own calling in a new city, I too, hope to pursue mine — as far as my chaotic brain and deep-seated fears will allow. If you have read this far, please accept my heartfelt gratitude, because every word read is one more drop in the sea of possibilities unfolding before me: some of which may finally, at long last, manifest into the reality I have dreamed of all my life.

With love,

Proiti

When will I stop having dreams about *insert name of individual I was once close with but no longer talk to*?

Does it have to be this hot and humid all the time?

Is the universe listening?

Will I make it to the gym today?

Where should I place my laptop to maximise comfort and minimise the possibility of maintaining good posture?

What are Trump and Musk up to today?

How did I end up at a job that requires me to keep tabs on Trump and Musk and all these other evil billionaires?

Is A.I. making me stupid?

What am I doing with my life?

Why do so many people have partners but not me?

Why can’t I focus on the many, many things I do have in my life instead of the things I don’t?

Should I take a nap?

Why are so many people okay with living according to arbitrarily established societal rules that rob them of their agency?

Is there a cap on the number of thoughts I can have per second?

Am I fat?

Was I actually not that fat back when I thought I was fat?

In the future, will I look at my photos from the present time and think the same?

How many gratitude lists do I need to write before that feeling of gratitude really kicks in?

How many minutes of meditation are enough?

Will I ever get to see the Northern Lights?

Will I ever get to visit Bangladesh?

When will Morich gain weight?

Should I quit my job?

What if I quit my job but then waste all my time and regret everything?

Should I get that lip gloss Instagram just advertised to me?

What does it feel like not to bash yourself?

To which of my friends should I send this reel?

What is the point of all this?

Should I get a new pair of glasses?

Will I ever write a poem again?

How do I become a disciplined person?

Can I throw my laptop out of the window?

Does God exist?

If yes, what’s up, God?

What if I never get to do the things I want to do with my life?

Why do the worst people in the world seem to have the most money?

How do I stop myself from crossing the line between having realistic expectations from a person or situation and being delusional?

How are some people so focused and optimistic?

Would it all feel easier if I were religious?

Am I crazy?

Why aren’t we collectively freaking out about the fact that every single day, the world’s richest people, corporations and governments are pouring billions and billions of dollars into murdering people, decimating the environment and building destructive technology?

Blue Lays or no?

Do antidepressants even work?

How do I start keeping my promises to myself?

Would it be selfish if I stopped earning money?

Am I a selfish person with first-world problems who just needs to shut up and do her job and stop whining?

Seriously, what is the point?

Is this just PMS, or is this how I always am?

Will any of my dreams come true?

Can I even write?

Should I order gelato?

Does everyone feel like this?

There will be many lonely evenings with toast and not much else. The city will rave outside, but you will not have a place in its mirth. Watch it from afar, without sadness or resentment — your joy is in queue.

Prepare to forgive. Many will let you down. Forgiveness will be your wand. Wave it over the pain and watch it slink back into the shadows. Sometimes, the wand will not be powerful enough. Rely then, on the expanse of your heart, and the sureness of another day in the sun.

Hope is a self-refilling matchbox. Carry it in your pocket wherever you go. You never know when you’ll have to light a candle (or a cigarette), and for whom. Protect the flames you light from brazen winds that know no mercy.

Remember what it took to get here, to this point in time and space. Remember the daydreams, the fantasies, the delusions. Those were the dinghies that kept rowing during high tide despite the warnings, desperate for a catch. And catch they did.

Let your questions lead you. Ask what you can do for the world, and move through it in search of answers. If you can’t find all the answers, ask even more questions. Curiosity is the bridge over all the earth’s troubled waters.

Anchor yourself to the life you’re leaving behind. Trust that the wonders of your childhood will never cease to sustain you. Return again and again to the wisdom of your blood.

Always pick love. The love of your family, your friends, your hometown and your art will nourish you as you create more love through the choices you make, the paths you defy. Nothing else matters in this fickle universe.

This week’s newsletter is going to be a bit different. Instead of a long rant masquerading as an essay, I’m going to share (after much trepidation and self-doubt) some things I made using my hands. They are nothing fancy, as you will see, but everything I create does not have to be a masterpiece (no matter what that tyrannical voice in my head tells me).

The positive impact of working with your hands on your mental health is well-documented. Activities like fiddling with watercolours or cooking help me feel a relative sense of calm (I’m saying relative because I never feel calm—never ever!).

Two weeks ago, I had a mini-meltdown about not wanting to do my job anymore, but that was most likely PMS-induced, which means I won’t be writing my resignation letter yet (but I mentioned it so I could shamelessly plug a little thing I had written about experiencing PMS in a different newsletter).

The next day, as an experiment, I set up two desks before logging in to work. The desk in front of me was for my laptop, and on the table next to me, I kept a drawing book, some paintbrushes, sketch pens, watercolours, and a palette. Throughout the day, when I’d had enough of Trump’s tariffs or some billionaire’s tone deaf statement about how they raised their kids “middle-class”, I would take a break to paint skies and flowers on paper. At the end of my eight hours, I realised that this was the most mentally peaceful work day I’d had in months.

I planned to set up two desks every day, but naturally, the plan fell through — but at least I know what to do in case work feels unbearable again.

Anyway, here are 5 things I made with my hands in the past two weeks.

A painting of a plant based on an artwork I saw on Pinterest:

My first attempt at blackout poetry inspired by Austin Kleon:

Rice paper dumplings with minced chicken, alongside a dipping sauce made with Vietnamese fish sauce, lemon juice, honey, and water.

Another attempt at blackout poetry:

A painting of flowers made with watercolours I found in my mother’s study. I was particularly pleased to find these watercolours because I’d been planning to buy these shades of pink and blue, and now I don’t have to!

Thank you for reading!

With love,

Proiti

As with every edition of this newsletter, I’ll begin by acknowledging just how overdue it is. This time around, I’ve hit the ball out of the park by skipping an entire month (and a few more weeks) before finally sitting down to write a new edition. Am I ashamed? Very much. Am I confident that I will not repeat this? Not quite. Nevertheless, I must persist.

The past couple of weeks were packed with a bunch of activities and experiences, and I have emerged from them with an armful of lessons and memories that I intend to share with you, if you’re still interested.

The most challenging experience that befell me in the period of my absence from Substack was an episode featuring my two kittens, Noon and Morich. This March, they turned seven months old, and like clockwork, Morich went into heat, disappearing for longer hours than usual and driving me mad with worry. For two consecutive days, she did not return home, and I was convinced that she was either dead or pregnant. My cat-owning friends did their best to reassure me of her safety (“she’s cozying up with a local tomcat”), but I was not convinced and spent those two days in a state of constant stress which consolidated my belief that deciding to have children is one of the most absurd things any human being can do.

Morich returned just when I was reaching the end of my ability to search for cosmic lessons about letting go/giving up control etc. from this situation, and thus began the second phase of the ordeal. If you’ve ever had to keep a kitten in heat who’s usually free to roam wherever she pleases captive, you can imagine what it was like, forcing her to stay inside. I kept Noon (not in heat) inside too, to keep her company, and the three of us spent a very long and difficult night in my room adjusting to this new reality. I must credit the two of them for taking to the litter box immediately — at least this new reality did not include me cleaning cat excretions from the surfaces of my prized possessions in the wee hours of the morning. It did include cleaning cat litter multiple times a day, which is a humbling experience that shows you your place in the world and never lets you forget it.

The next day, I transferred them to the guest room, where they stayed, like the brave soldiers they are, for another week, before I dropped them off at the clinic to get neutered. Once they were back a week later, they had to stay in the guest room again. I felt guilty for restricting their movement for so long, but once again, the wisdom and guidance from my cat-owning friends saw me through. The universe seems to have designed this episode as a curriculum for me to learn how to be patient, flexible, and resilient, but my biggest takeaway is: spay your cats before they go into heat (sorry, Universe!).

This entire episode took place at the same time as full-fledged rehearsals for a concert celebrating ten years of Naiyor, a group I’m part of that has been making music in living rooms, rooftops, cafes, and auditoriums in Kolkata since 2015. We’re seven friends who met as kids and were brought together by our parents, eventually coming into our own and forming a collective to perform Bangla music — including covers and originals. Most of you who are reading this already know about us and have been to our concerts (or are part of Naiyor itself), but on the off-chance that a stranger has discovered my newsletter and made it this far into the text, I feel the need to offer a cohesive introduction.

Rehearsals for the concert began around December. By the time March came around, we had multiple rehearsals each week, and the crippling panic that usually grips me when I have to sing in front of people made its presence known and how. On the day before the concert, I spent most of my time in bed feeling nauseous. As the clock struck six-thirty p.m. on the 23rd of March and the curtains drew back, I felt my anxiety take over— it had less control over me compared to years past, but it still visits me on the reg and overstays its welcome every time.

In the next two hours, I simultaneously tried my best to keep the wobbling in my voice to a minimum (I have a long way to go in this regard), enjoy the experience of singing with my friends, and also stay on top of all the cues — all while continuing to adjust to the ever-changing balance of sounds emanating from the on-stage monitor. The audience seemed to love our show, but, as with any concert, everyone in the team and behind the scenes had a whole range of intense opinions, (me included), but this is not the place for that discussion.

What I will say is that the next morning, in that liminal state between sleep and waking, I had a sort of epiphany about how the experience of rehearsing for and staging this show could be a metaphor for life itself. Just like we learnt from Mahabharata’s Krishna and pop icon Miley Cyrus, it is the journey that counts- the process itself is the prize. The fulfillment of our journey with Naiyor came from the months and months of rehearsals— all our debates about which songs to include in the setlist, the learning and forgetting and relearning (and re-forgetting and re-learning) of main lines and harmonies, the inane inside jokes, the feasting on momos and popcorn chicken, the quarreling over musical arrangements and chord charts, the bumbling through alaaps and taans until we finally got them (kinda) right, the photographing and videographing for posters and social media content, the post-rehearsal descent into sheer madness—these are what made the experience memorable.

You can practice and prepare all you want, but a live stage show has a mind of its own. Once the ball rolls, you have to play by its mutating rules and arbitrary demands, even if that means making abrupt changes to what you rehearsed for all those months. This too is a lesson for life— no amount of planning can help you ensure everything goes according to your imagination. It just won’t. Curveballs will be thrown at you, and you have to dodge them or catch them, depending on what kind of game you’re playing in this metaphor.

Lastly, my epiphany also included perhaps the most important and meaningful lesson of them all - that life is nothing without the people you love, and getting to live it alongside your friends and family is the greatest privilege. The story of Naiyor is a story of love and friendship. The seven of us are surrounded by a larger circle of friends, family, and listeners who made this concert possible: including our parents who raised funds, organised logistics, and relentlessly promoted the event; our friends who supported us by managing crucial aspects like ticketing, seating, designing posters and emceeing; and listeners who paid for the tickets with their hard-earned money and showed up on the day of the show to celebrate these ten years with us.

Days after the concert, I took off on a long-awaited trip to Spiti Valley with another group of friends. Spiti Valley had been on my bucket list for several years, owing to my fascination with snow-capped landscapes, which I had never traversed before this trip. The trip began on a Traveler bus from Chandigarh, driven by a reticent man named Lucky, and within four days we were in Kaza, the highest point in our trip (12,500 feet)— at a hotel without running water in temperatures as low as minus twenty-two degrees centigrade. My body’s willingness to cooperate with me was inversely proportional to the beauty of the surroundings as we traveled upwards, and I spent the first full day in Kaza in bed, looking out at a towering range of mountains shrouded in powdery-white snow against the backdrop of an intensely azure sky. In Spiti, everywhere you look is a scene of mind-numbing beauty, and any attempt to describe its ethereal quality will fall short. I can only tell you that the crystal blue of the Spiti River waters, the sheer expanse of the bare rock surfaces, and the vast stretches of snow might make a believer out of the strictest skeptic.

As we journeyed for hours on end through empty, rocky terrains, I felt a deep sense of gratitude in my bones, for the opportunity not only to be in Spiti, but on this planet, in this time, and with people I care about. I also arrived at the conclusion that if you really want to see the world, really see it, a nine-to-five job with twelve or so vacation days isn’t going to cut it. The next time I’m in a place like Spiti, I hope I’m out of the hamster wheel and free from the shackles of concepts like ‘holidays’ and ‘workdays’ (let me delulu in peace).

I returned home early on Sunday morning, and have since resolved to try harder to tailor my life according to my desires (my day job, which requires me to cover American politics, is not helping). One of those desires is to write more often, and, armed with all the lessons and epiphanies and conclusions and realisations from everything that took place over the last couple of weeks, I hope you will see more of me on Substack from now on (and I will see more of you).

With love,

Proiti

P.S. If you’ve read the whole thing, you must leave a comment here. If you don’t, I’m coming for you in the dms.

This morning I took part in a marathon. I never thought I’d type this sentence, given that I regard running as a particularly tedious activity — one that I would never engage in willingly unless I found myself in a life-threatening situation.

But when my friend Hiya, who ran her first 5K marathon back in January told me that she wanted to go for another one this month, I found myself expressing the desire to go along with her, and I did. Sharp at 6.10 am, we joined around a few hundred others to half-run, half-speedwalk a 5km route through Sector V, completing our course within 51 minutes.

During the run, Hiya pointed out to me that this time around, the five kilometers didn’t feel as long as they did to her the first time when she ran alone. “It’s probably because we’re doing this together”, she said. Just last night, I came across an Instagram post about a research study that found that steep hills seem less steep and daunting to people when they’re standing next to their friends. The closer the friendship, the less steep the hill seems. What Hiya and I experienced today was just that — simply put, hard things feel less hard when you’re doing them with your friends.

This got me thinking about all the hard things that I’ve had the privilege to do with my friends throughout my life. Back in school, when Analina and I were at the height of our co-dependency (and a KFC obsession that certainly caused lasting damage to our digestive systems ), we would procrastinate studying for exams, calling each other up the night before to see how far the other had advanced through the syllabus.

To say that we drew strength from the fact that neither of us had made much progress when the midnight hour was looming would be an understatement. It is my belief that this mutual reassurance, more than the actual studying, is what gave us the confidence to show up for the exams and ace them with flying colours (most of the time). (Note to Analina: Please share your thoughts in the comments section).

The pinnacle of this tendency came with our school-leaving board exams, when we both wasted two whole days before the history test, finally opening our books twenty-four hours before we were supposed to arrive at the exam hall. It might sound silly now, but at the time, those twenty-four hours were probably the most intense twenty-four hours in our lives. We stayed up studying all night, calling each other at regular intervals to share progress reports, and secretly procuring a can or two of Red Bull to keep the momentum going.

The next morning, outside the school building, we chugged the remaining Red Bull (that we had poured into pet bottles to avoid getting caught by our parents) and walked up eight flights of stairs (we didn’t want to take the stairs because some teacher had said that boys should take the stairs and girls should take the lift, so naturally, we absolutely HAD TO make a point and fix gender stereotyping forever) and poured out whatever we had crammed into our brains (which was a lot, because we both got great scores).

In the eleven years that have passed since then, Analina and I have done other hard things together (learned German, climbed to the top of a hill in Vietnam, wrote and performed spoken word poetry in front of possibly judgemental strangers, reconfigured our relationship after some difficult moments and so on), but the Red Bull story is still the first that comes to mind when I think of how lucky I have been when it comes to meeting challenges with friends by my side.

Other, more “grown-up” challenges have also been easier to deal with because of friends. When another close friend was going through the process of buying an apartment with her husband and getting scammed by skeezy lawyers and loan agents, a bunch of us went with them to retrieve their money, stalking the scammers’ offices all day to make sure they couldn’t escape. When the same friend’s pet cat met with an accident, we banded together to take him to the hospital and stayed on the incompetent handlers until he got the care he needed. In times of medical emergencies within my immediate family, I have counted on my friends for emotional and logistical support without hesitation. During the pandemic, when I was living alone abroad, unable to return to Kolkata even if I wanted to, my friends kept me sane (take that word with a pinch of salt) via texts, phone, and video calls, despite their own struggles back home. As I moved through the uncertainties created by the rapidly changing circumstances, my untreated depression, my confusing situationship and eventual heartbreak, I never felt alone or helpless for a single moment, courtesy of the people who continue to fill my days with joy, excitement and love.

Analina and I often joke about how being born into generational wealth would have made life so much breezier- we wouldn’t have to work for money, could finally put all our myriad business ideas into action (mocktail bar/themed dinner party hosting startup/quaint bookstore/local goods gift shop/ content strategy agency) without worrying about making a profit, and go to Japan without breaking our banks. But those chats always end with us acknowledging that having supportive parents is the type of generational wealth that really matters, and we’ve both been extremely lucky in that regard. To this idea of wealth, I would add what we call “Bondhu-Bhagya” in Bangla— the luck of having good friends.

Whether you’re running a 5K, arguing with a customer service agent, crying over a card written by someone who said they’d be around but aren’t, bleeding from the knees after falling down chasing your cat down a rugged concrete path, feeling like your soul is dying because your job requires you to care about cryptocurrency (or at least pretend to), or getting hit by a wave so hard that you’re thrown off your kayak and it goes over your head in the Arabian Sea, “Bondhu-Bhagya” makes all the difference.

With love (and gratitude for sticking around),

Proiti

I don’t blame you if you forgot that this newsletter exists and that you’re subscribed to it. This was supposed to be a weekly thing, and now it’s become a monthly (at the risk of becoming quarterly) project at best. All of January seems to have passed me by at a ridiculous speed, and although I did think of sitting down to bust out one of these a couple of times this month, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to write about, so that was it.

At the beginning of the year, most of us (the normies at least) are prone to making grandiose plans designed to shift the paradigms of our lives in unprecedented ways. As someone who makes grandiose plans throughout the year (and never follows through), January feels like a time when I’m not alone on this (usually futile and heartbreaking) path. For those of you do manage to execute your plans, you have my genuine admiration. Count yourselves supremely lucky for having brains that actually listen to you and do what you ask of them. Despite not having one of those brains, I continue to dedicate copious amounts of time and energy to making plans, because what is life if not a continuum of prayer at the altar of hope?

My main plan this year is to feel like my daily life aligns with my values and interests in a more coherent way than it currently does. To call it a “plan” sounds quite intimidating— it’s more of a wish at this point. It’s what I repeat in my head when I find a fallen eyelash, put it on the back of my palm, and blow it into the wind. It’s what I whispered to myself when I touched the bark of an old baobab tree in the Botanical Gardens when I visited earlier this month (the guide said the tree is known for its wish-fulfilling properties. I pretend not to believe that kind of thing, but I do).

Previously, my approach to sharing such personal plans would be to limit it to a close group of friends. But now, I’ve decided to take the more-the-merrier route. Perhaps, if I repeat it loudly enough to as many people as I can, my wish will come true (or maybe I’ll regret putting this here and feel like a loser next January when I find that it hasn’t). Perhaps, by sharing my plan with those who are reading this, I can gently, respectfully nudge the inscrutable forces that govern our puny lives towards benevolence.

For you, if you’re still reading, I wish slow mornings with hot coffee and quiet sunlight streaming in through your kitchen window, clear night skies so you can finally spot all the stars whose names you know, unexpected holidays to locations yet untouched by the pandemic of influencers, lots of uninterrupted, screen-free time spent with pets, friends, and lovers old and new, sudden bursts of inspiration to write haikus, paint almirahs or fold paper boats, nostalgic rendezvous with old friends you randomly meet on the street or the metro, and a whole bunch of laughter — the kind that makes tears pour down your cheeks.

And, if it’s not too late, I wish you a happy new year.

With love, and gratitude for still being here,

Proiti

Look who’s back after five weeks of not publishing new editions of her *weekly* newsletter.

To the surprise of no one (most of all myself), I procrastinated and time slipped through my fingers like it always does. So here I am, a whole month (plus six days) later, settling into a new season (my favourite), and finally writing a new edition.

My doctor ascribed my absence to the concerningly low levels of iron and vitamin D in my blood, which make me feel abnormally tired (and my mother lose sleep). I should probably be upset or at least perturbed by this piece of information (or was it a joke?) - but I’m thrilled to have a doctor who reads my newsletter.

My own diagnosis of the situation points to a habit I’ve long nurtured: putting things off for later. When I say ‘nurtured’, I mean it. This is not a habit that developed on its own. I fed, clothed, watered and smothered it with attention until it became a spoilt child that won’t let me lead the life I want to (remind me why people have children again?).

Unlike a human child (who I could abandon at an amusement park or at least send away to boarding school), this habit will not be discarded easily. I must make peace with it, handle its quirks with unending patience, and haggle with its stubbornness without losing my mind. It means accepting that even though my newsletter is supposed to be weekly, it might not actually come out every week. And that’s okay. (Not like it’s changing the world — yet).

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In my late teens and early twenties, this time of the year was particularly special to me. “I measure my life in Decembers”, I once wrote in an Instagram caption, waxing poetic about many a romantic rendezvous and holiday happenstance that somehow took place in the same weeks in different calendar years. This December (the last couple of Decembers, to be honest), romance eludes me, and measuring my life according to any metric will inevitably lead to an existential crisis, so it’s best avoided.

Nevertheless, it is still a special time. Not because of the experiences that came with it (attending a friend’s wedding in Bhopal! Visiting the Sanchi Stupa! Starting a new, seemingly more effective anti-depressant! An upcoming trip to Vietnam!), but for the fact that it exists at all.

I’m one of those people who believes that the end times are near- for us humans and for the planet as well. While I don’t think that the world will end tomorrow, I also don’t see how we can come back from the utter devastation we’ve wrecked on each other and our environment. We took something great and then installed a system bound to decimate it. The system isn’t broken - it’s working just fine. A new year isn’t going to change that, it’ll only add more bodies to the graveyard of capitalism.

That’s why this December is special to me. As cliche as it sounds, every moment truly is a miracle. The fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading this at all is a miracle. The months and years we get to exist with each other, to partake in the rituals that count as living, to create meaning from the embers of our encounters with everything around us, are all miracles.

Despite my seething hatred of my neighbour who listens to his radio at an abnormally high volume at odd hours of night and day, despite my horror at how the world is egging on the genocide of Palestinians, despite my anxieties about my aging parents and grandparents, despite my outrage at the denial of justice for a doctor assaulted and killed on duty in my city, despite my frustration with myself for putting things off for a mythical ‘later’ that never appears, I do believe that the moments that are yet to come are all miracles-in-waiting.

I can say this with conviction either because of my new anti-depressant (the miracle of modern medicine), or the unbelievable amount of love and warmth that has enveloped me throughout my life. My money’s on the latter, but it’s anybody’s guess!

Now, before anyone takes me for some kind of delusional optimist, I would like to reiterate my staunch belief that we are done for. There’s no hope for this earth, the damage is done. No amount of LLMs, 80-hour workweeks, Mars missions, new social media platforms, temples “buried” under medieval mosques, 10-minute grocery deliveries or smart cities will save us from our collective doom.

But there is still a childhood friend having a baby, a brother writing a new song, a colleague making a kind gesture, a grandparent asking when I’ll come home, and an anxious kitten finally purring on my lap to live for.

That will do for now.

With love,

Proiti

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I don’t know if you noticed, but I skipped an edition last week. I knew what I wanted to write about, but I just kept procrastinating- and cruelly, unfairly, unexpectedly (!), a whole week went by and now it is Friday again.

Anyway, this week I’m celebrating a special milestone. For those of you who have come across my writing on Substack before (or, more likely, have received links from me pestering you to read what I write), you might recall a certain piece I wrote for Just One Thing, another newsletter my colleagues and I used to write that’s currently on pause.

This piece was written two years ago, soon after a particularly devastating experience that knocked the life out of me. It was called ‘First Aid Kit: Heartbreak Edition’. If the Captain Obvious title didn’t make it clear, that short essay (or diary entry/word vomit) was my way of trying to cope with someone’s decision to give up on a very close relationship I had with them.

In the two years that have gone by since then, I wrote another edition of Just One Thing dedicated to my memories of this person, which I will plug here because self-promotion is very important to me, especially in this day and age: ‘The Cookbook That Never Was’.

In the present moment, while the emotions I expressed in those older pieces of writing still remain, I feel like celebrations are in order to commemorate the lessons I learnt from this cataclysmic affair:

1. There is so much power in learning to regulate your own emotions. Every single thing we ever do is emotionally charged (some high, some low), and being able to control how you let emotions affect your decisions and actions is a superior life skill we should all be striving to pick up. I’m a big believer in feeling your feelings but not letting them spearhead what you do. In the past two years, I’ve had all kinds of sentimental feelings and fantasies about this person, but I managed to separate those from the reality of the situation. Way to go, me!

2. You can’t change how people feel and what they do. This is a hard one to digest, but it’s the god’s honest truth. You can love someone to the ends of this earth but they’re still an entirely separate person with their own inner lives and all that stuff. You’ve got to let them be, and when the time comes, you’ve got to let them go. In the immortal words of Miley Cyrus, “You know nothing hurts like losing, when you know it’s really gone/Except for the pain of choosing to hold too long.” Preach.

3. There is no shortcut to feeling less hurt. If you’re hurt, you’re hurt. For days and weeks and months, that hurt is going to cut you deep. Over time, very slowly, it will sting less. You’ll think you’ve finally made it to the other side. Then BAM! You’re tearing up over a Khakra (of all things!) in a grocery store because it reminds you of the time you went Khakra shopping with this person in their hometown. But then a couple more days and weeks and months pass by, and maybe it’s not so bad. This keeps happening and then two years have gone by and you’re writing a newsletter about how it all changed you. Such is life.

4. I’m kind of saying the same thing again, but grief has no timeline. There are no stages you should reach within certain stipulated periods of time. If you’re grieving something or someone that was deeply, hauntingly meaningful for you, you have to let it take its own sweet time. There is no accelerator to press, no 2x button to speed it up. And that can be frustrating. I’m often annoyed at myself for still having so many feelings and thoughts about this person. But hey, that’s just what happens when you wear your heart on your sleeve. As long as there are other thoughts and feelings you’re having about other things in your life, it’s alright.

Apart from these monumental, life-changing lessons that I will hopefully apply to whatever life throws at me in the future, there are some short and quick ones I’d like to jot down:

If you find yourself deliberately not taking photos of someone you’re constantly hanging out with because your gut tells you that one day you’ll have to sit and delete them from all your files and folders, listen to your gut! This person WILL flake!

If someone tells you they’ve never been able to open themselves up to anyone as much as they opened up to you, but then they can never be “sure” about how they feel about you, run away! Just run away (especially if they’re an almost- 30-year-old adult).

If a person whose opinion you value tells you they don’t think you can do something you’ve dreamt of doing since you were a kid, don’t take it to heart. This is very difficult, and chances are you’re going to have to attend multiple therapy sessions before you even get close to believing that they may not have known what they were talking about. Sorry about that. It’s tough out there.

If you’ve read this far (I WILL quiz you), thanks for attending this class disguised as a newsletter edition. And if you’re one of those people who’s been by my side in these two years, helping me navigate all this emotional goop, I love you.

Proiti

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This time last week, I was thrilled to finally start my newsletter. But then life did what it does best - throw, nay, launch a curveball at me- and here I am writing something akin to an eulogy as my third post.

Darchini died this morning. She was one of three kittens born in our garden in early August to a tuxedo cat who notably bit two members of my household, including me, last year. The mother kept her litter in the garden shed for a few days, and then expertly transported them to a corner under the stairs inside the house without anyone noticing. For the next couple of weeks, the kittens stayed put in that cramped corner, safe from the wandering tomcats keen to defend their territory from new entrants. Soon, the mother cat moved her kids to our shoe rack, and life at Meghmuluk (that’s what our house is named) took a turn for the feline.

Darchini, along with her siblings Nun and Morich (I christened them based on the colour of their coats) slowly expanded the boundaries of their operations as they grew, and by week four, the ground floor of the house was theirs. Eventually, after a couple of, umm, fecal “accidents”, the trio and their mother were shifted to the courtyard outside the house. That’s where the rest of the family still remains, even after Darchini’s passing.

When Darchini was around three weeks old, she developed some kind of eye infection. I consulted a vet online, who, based on a few pictures and videos, prescribed over eight medications, including antibiotics. I chose not to put her through the ordeal of being force-fed multiple times a day, opting only for the drop the doctor recommended for her eyes. Thus began my habit (which later turned into a compulsion almost), of picking her up and holding her in my arms. She allowed me to do this with utmost grace and patience, unlike her siblings, who were either inexplicably scared or unimaginably restless. Until yesterday, picking her up and stroking her head was one of the highlights of my daily, not-at-all-soul-crushing work-from-home routine.

I don’t know how Darchini died. She was found lying motionless on the floor of our garage this morning by Sabita Mashi, our cook. Sabita Mashi was bitten by a cat (not Darchini’s mother) not too long ago, but she got over her fear of cats and bonded closely with the cat family in a matter of days. Hers was the voice Darchini and her siblings ran to most readily, and she played with them every evening with a bunch of plastic flowers with long stems the kittens were desperate to catch.

With today’s cyclonic weather making everything worse, Darchini was finally buried late in the evening by the coconut tree in our garden, under a string she loved to bite and hang from with her siblings. Here, she will remain until the earth turns her into itself again, and the winds will carry her to all the places she had yet to explore in her short life.

So long, Darchini.

See you on the other side.

Proiti

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