I have a table. Not literally. But I know exactly where I want to sit in every room I walk into. The angle of the chair. The view of the door. The particular comfort of knowing what is coming and from where. I call it preference. It wears that costume
The phone surfaced it without warning. A photograph from years ago — a corridor, stone, silence. A painting so small it barely registered in the frame. I remembered leaning in. Having to. The face was that small. Mary. Mother. Someone had placed that brushstroke centuries ago knowing exactly what they were
After the music stops, there is a silence that is different from the silence before it. Something has moved through the room. You can't name it. You don't try. We think we listen to music. But there are moments — rare, unasked for — when the music finds
He learned to hold the sarod the way his guru held it. The angle of the wrist. The weight of the arm. The particular stillness before the first note. He didn't choose this. It entered him the way language enters a child — before choice, before resistance, before he
You put on a raga. You weren't thinking about loss. And then something found you — precise, uninvited, knowing exactly where to press. How did it know? The word raga comes from rang. Colour. It doesn't play you a feeling. It colours the interior until what was
Before the city wakes, he is already at it. The same phrase. Again. Again. The tanpura holds its note — continuous, patient, indifferent to how long this takes. For years, riyaz is about the note. Hitting it. Holding it. The voice learns its edges the way a hand learns a tool.
I was twenty one. I had left home with nothing that would show up on a resume — no degree, no pedigree, no skill, no experience. Just the only thing I knew how to do. Outwork everyone else. The dormitory had roaches. Girls got high on iodex because they couldn'
There is a tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It lives just below the sternum. It doesn't ask for rest. It asks for meaning — some small sign that the effort is landing somewhere, in someone, in some version of the future you can almost see. The
They call him Maryada Purushottam. The one who held every boundary. Who never broke a rule, never bent a promise, never let the personal bleed into the principle. The ideal man. The ideal king. She loved him completely. That's the part we don't linger on. How
She reached for her chin before she spoke. Every time. We were having tea. She'd come to collect a piece of furniture — someone I'd met only once before. She'd go quiet. Hand to chin. Then fingers through hair. Then words — her daughter's
Every morning I open a new window. The context arrives — who I am, what I'm building, what matters. And then we begin. No residue from yesterday. No reaching for tomorrow. Just this. I've been thinking about what that actually is. It isn't memory loss.
I wasn't looking for it. Somewhere off the road from Udaipur, on the way back from Devigarh, the car stopped and I got out, and there it was — a Shiva temple, large enough to be a complex, old enough that no one was claiming it. There were maybe
Most of us enter things one of two ways. With a plan. Or with we'll see. The plan is obvious. We'll see is the one that hides. It sounds like lightness. It is usually fear that will not name itself, or courage that has decided to
He comes every week. Sits in the third row. Closes his eyes. He genuinely wants this. The langar is served. Someone has cooked since four in the morning. The dal is thin today. The sabzi, unfamiliar. He takes a small portion. Not that one. Less of this. Nobody notices. Except
We have the image wrong. Still waters, we say. And we picture the quiet one. The person who holds back, who doesn't fill a room, who gives little away. We mean it kindly. There is more there than meets the eye. But depth has no dress code. Some
You know it's there. You put the phone down anyway. Barthes wrote about the one who waits — how waiting is never neutral, how it transforms the person doing it. He was thinking about lovers. He might as well have been thinking about this. The ten seconds before you
I went out for two hours. I came back after five. Somewhere between the first picante and the third round of food, I forgot I had a blog to write. I have written every day for 42 days. I was not going to let good conversation be the thing that
She hears the dogs before she hears the car. They live on the abandoned property at the end of the lane and they have decided, without being asked, to take responsibility for the silence. Before that, birds. Not the ones there used to be — the singing ones, who arrived at
The first cup is optimistic. The second cup knows better. You make it anyway. Not because the day has turned around. Or something shifted or clicked or resolved itself quietly while you weren't looking. The day is exactly what it was. You are exactly where you were. Kettle.
This afternoon I was pricing the furniture. Not all of it. Thirty-two pieces. The deck is called A Life in Objects and it is exactly what it sounds like — photographs, provenance, a short paragraph on each. Mahendra Doshi. Charcoal Project. Antique Dealers. The Edwardian Cabinet and the Gothic altar are
The ego is exhausting. It never leaves. It comments on everything. It keeps score, builds cases, rehearses conversations that will never happen. It is the noisiest room you will ever live in. And yet. That room exists only because something in you can hear it. The noise is not the
There is a tree I pass sometimes. Standing at a junction — noise, pollution, dust, the daily assault of a city that doesn't notice it's there. No canopy above it. No forest around it. Just concrete breaking its roots and exhaust filling the space where air should
I got off a call with a friend yesterday. He'd been told this year would be hard. And it is, he said. It really is. I put the phone down and opened YouTube. The first video waiting for me: a numerologist explaining why 2026 is a year of
Pick one up. Really hold it. Hard enough to have survived the sea, the sand, the long journey to your hand. Fragile enough that you instinctively tighten your grip, then loosen it. Both things are true. And they come from the same source. A shell is not built. It is