The Present Tense

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 not in it. Those are going to my new life, to a studio that does not yet exist, in a house that will be ready in December 2027.

In the middle of this, my hand went sideways.

There is a coffee table book on the shelf — Calcutta Then, Kolkata Now. Roli Books. Pramod Kapoor created it. He has built his life's work around exactly this instinct — Then & Now, Made for Maharajas, New Delhi: The Making of a Capital. A professional elegist. Not for what is lost, but for what remains visible in what is lost.

His book is bound so that one side is Then and the other side is Now. You flip it to read the second city. There is no front.

I sat with it for a while.

This is what I found.

I am not in the Then. I was not born into that Calcutta; I have no claim on it, no grandmother's house on Park Street, no trams in my childhood. I am also not in the Now I am moving toward. Alibaugh is a line in a cash flow. The Mumbai studio is a room I have furnished only in sentences. The two pieces I pulled from the sale are anchors for a life I have not begun.

So I am not in either city of the book.

And I am not in either house of my own life.

The present, this afternoon, is only one thing. It is letting go.

I think this is why my hand reached for the book. Not to mourn a city I do not know.

To find, on my shelf, an object whose physical form admits what I could not yet say out loud — that there is no front.

That you cannot read a life without choosing which way to hold it, and that whichever way you choose, the other side is still there, inverted.