She sleeps with a clenched fist, angrily set against her cheek on the blue pillowcase, her head close to the bedroom wall, the pillow more for her back, really. And then she turns over to my side, throws her arms around my head, all angry, frolicking motions, and presses her forehead against mine, clammy, hot and sweet, her breath falls in little rasps against my nose. Warm.

She now talks in the language of whys and whats and what-ifs. No writer should have to forego the existential crisis of NOT having to be asked why the moon follows you everywhere on a random Sunday evening. She will press on until there’s an answer. All my academic research and ardent hours of rigorous training at several academic institutions go down the drain when I promise her, “Mama does not know the answer to that question, mama will read and find out”. She forgives. She lets her acceptance of your apologies fold you in two and puts you away in the back pocket of her denim dress as she marches on to find why fishies sleep with their eyes open.

My house is a clockwork dollhouse of sorts. Wake up, read, breakfast and repeat. For months now we’ve got the rhythm intact. In a house stormed by chaos and an absentee father, only order will restore a sense of peace. So I have curated bits and pieces for the house in a calculated order. Brown edged paper pictures of my girl as a baby, swaddled in mottled picture sheet pasted across the walls. Dried flowers from the failed marriage painted in whites and dried. Lifeless. She sleeps in the crook of my elbow as I arrange one foot long string of lights over all dead objects of our house. Most of this house, I’ve done this way, with a sleeping baby over my shoulder or arm. Once I tried climbing over to the loft and lost footing when the chair slid over the marble floor and broke into two.

I sometimes bathe when she’s still asleep. On other days, I have to bathe only when she will bathe with me. Of late, she will cup a palmful of water and rub it over my body saying, “I wash, mama”. She exorcises a lots of demons from this body she did not cause to bring in, in the first place. She is a force of nature. I tremble at the altar of innocence when I think of ways in which I have wronged this baby by not walking out sooner from a marriage in which I was always tiptoeing over shards of broken glass and bleeding over a just assembled cradle.

She has begun to sing like a bird. She gets that from the prodigal father. She reads like there’s no tomorrow and weaves one story atop another like a precarious set of Jenga blocks: she gets that from me. If you ask someone, “where are you?”, she will walk to you on tip toes and announce, “I, here”, all the while pointing her pudgy index to her little chest and for a few divine moments, you will forget to breathe. I tell you, she is a force of nature.

If I wondered previously if there was a reason to all this pain I’d underwent, I’d have told you I’d have snapped without figuring it all out. I’ve always been that way: needing answers to feel safe. But right this moment, I know I do not have to have all the answers. Through all this storm, the tiny nose of a 12kg someone breathing into my face at nights did not suddenly give me that epiphany alone. There is a God above and he sees all things, I’m told. And maybe one day when he does the final role call, he will ask, “Child, where are you?” and I will say, “God, I, here” and he will laugh and laugh and laugh and that will be enough.

February.

I sighed as I typed that.

Is there a reason as to why we believe in the impossibles and raise an altar for an unknown God we wish and wish and wish we could fathom?

My friend sends me pictures of white mice with red eyes, squeezed between her purple gloves, like silly putty. Lab rats. She tells me she’s into Epigenetics and her PhD project involves finding a cure to mitigate later stage psychosis or disorders caused by early childhood trauma. A drug of sorts that people can take to prevent early childhood trauma from transitioning into a full blown disorder of sorts. So she puts mice under controlled distressed environments. My sister thinks this is inhumane and refuses to hear about how cute these mice are.

My sister is the golden child and I’m the scapegoat. My sister thrives to stay in my parents’ good books whereas I try and stay as far from their vicinities as possible. And even then, I am made the collateral and burnt at the altar of an unknown God. Infront of my sister, I am never enough. And still, the fact that I have carried on for 30 years itself should be a testament as to how strong circumstances have made me. Also, I have an impeccable relationship with my sister (99.9% of the times). She’s my best friend. The only triangulation that didn’t survive these walls of glass is the one that my parents sometimes set like a trap between my sister, myself and them.

So, my sister thinks the mice deserve better. I tell her, someday, someone would be lesser damaged, thanks to the sacrifices these mice make today. She flinches like she’s been punched. She tells me the mice don’t deserve that kind of life. I smile, lopsided like always, let the smile linger until she figures it out. An “oh”, loosely leaves her lips like a gasp. Involuntary. I laugh.

Two hundred and seventy kilometers away, a man has taken official leave from work to be with his dying grandmother. Her wheezing breathing keeps him up at nights. He confesses to his father that against all rational thinking, he’s fallen in love with a woman who’s already a mother to a two year old child. Twice married. Twice divorced. The father, they’ve talked about a hundred times as the easiest one to convince. But the father is upset because the son has raised an informational plaque and not a suggestion tag. The woman back home agrees, that his father would think so because she has learnt to expect nothing less than repeated negations from fathers of men who’ve confessed the same things in the same fashion.

The world is a fire pit of opinionated men and women who live because, because, because. His father was supposed to be the exception, a ground rule that breaks all other ground rules and sets a snare for naysayers along the way and now the ground rule lies stamped to the ground. “But he’s right”, she tells him over a phone she precariously perches between her cheek and shoulder, trying her best to not cry. She has loved his father, tried to think of him as a father figure over the chosen family she would make with this man, her daughter, the man’s father and as many people as they can accommodate. Her contrite heart has expanded over this man’s capacity to love and love and love. His name means love and that sits in her head, unfettered, all the time: she’s always chased metaphors but this metaphor, she likes the best. A man called love. This man has been so healthy for her that all arguments have been resolved like the lovers from O Henry’s Gift of the Magi . They have constantly reached a consensus over shared love. Thanks to him, her mind has been a plane of flat, blue sea, no waves, no wind. And for the first time a storm cloud has formed, the size of a fist, overhead. They rush to take shelter in each other’s arms at 1.05 am on a Friday morning.

They will now run against the wind. The world will sneer and snarl. There will be highs and lows, the storm winds will tear down their resolve and one of them will flail in the wind and unless all the love that has been sacrificed like scapegoats at the altars unite to revive this one person, they will both tear like game meat hand torn to be thrown into a hunter’s open fire.

My friend’s mice from the tormented bunch, still squeaks when she runs a finger over his scraggly head.

I send my mother a picture of myself, smiling at the camera with a flask lid, after an angry outburst that started over my not bringing home her kitchenware at the earliest.

The man who is two hundred and seventy kilometres away from the woman he loves, sits at the quietest corner of his house, his grandmother drawing her last wheezing breaths as he bends and bleeds over rough pages of an old worn green diary.

New books I bought at the bookfair make my tan brown hand bag bulge like a well ripened fig curve. Several new authors fresh from the covers of unopened books throw me one sexy glance after the other. Lust seethes through my weekend bookfair binge like the first sultry look Adam must've given Eve when the forbidden fruit was freshly bitten into-(“holy hell, she's hot!”) As I type this I remember Esau who sold his birthright for a steaming bowl of soup. For soup! I'm such a blasphemous fool.

I set up the room in a scandalous light, new books and bookish knickknacks I bought for him in corners he wouldn't find. A little Van gogh book mark, a tiny retro taperecorder that holds a favourite movie quote in my voice. Fridge magnets with our pictures on it and one with Silk Smitha's because why not. And then I lead him into the room, love hungry 1 week missed face of his, I guide him with kisses down the gift strewn path and like the impatient imp that I am, I guide him to each gift, excited to see the joy on his face and the first thing he does is pluck the Rilke book from the shelf, stretch the pages fully open and bury his face within the pages and inhale. I reaffirm the fact that I'm in love. Again.

The day before he comes home, I carry my baby and all her essentials that's packed in a duffel bag to the bookfair. Like the travel besoted *INDEPENDENT/SELD MADE (until my partner is home, then I'm a mush functioning on two brain cells) mama that I am, I decide I have to take her on a metro ride. My duffel bag is packed to the seams with everything she might need and everything she might wear and everything she might possibly suddenly want in the middle of the day. You name it, I have 12 of those in assorted colors already. And I forget that duffel bags are hard to carry and my baby is definitely not getting smaller by the day. So a stuffed baby in a kangaroo pouch and a bursting to the seams duffel bag on one shoulder and all the sights I wanted to show her on the metro ride, zooming past her sleeping cherubic eyes, I swear, I swear I used to be such an efficient planner, pre-baby. Long story short, I carried her like that, duffel bag and all for 6 hours straight. Granted, my friend came later on and carried her for almost an hour, or my carry time would've easily been 7 instead of 6 hours. By the end of the day, I swear, one side of my arm was permanently stooped from all the dead lifting. This week's excuse for not hitting the gym, ought to be the beautiful bloody body sores. And even then, nothing, absolutely nothing could've stopped me from scanning through every stall at the book fair. I waited all year long for this moment, I thought as I walked into a stall with curated vintagey finds, a typewriter at the cash counter looked at me with sexy bedroom eyes, I'd have given in, if not for the fact that I remembered just in time, that I had a baby to feed for the rest of the month. My friend's pillow large translated version of “The Elephant whisperers” makes my eyes well. I know she'd have put her blood and sweat into this one. I grab that and several copies of a notebook with different authors’ pictures and their iconic quotes on it, begging to be written on. I call my friend, hoping to get her book signed, but the crowded bookstall lets in very very little cellphone reception. The book coos softly as I deposit it in the safest corner of my duffel bag and I sigh.

I curated an entire open mic at my terrace the very next day, having nothing to say at my performer slot, except for the 6 hour baby deadlift story and the imaginary sacrificial motherly halo that it temporarily hit me with. I need to know once and for all that it is not unsexy to ask for help. I need to wrap my head around the fact that no amount of deadlifting will fetch me the best mom award, even if it does exist. I need to know I cannot curate stories out of my 6 hour labour when I sure as hell could've left her to sleep comfortably at my cousin's place, lovingly set up for her. But at the open mic, I knew none of that. I scraped from the endings of all the stories I'd half told before and built one anew, from scratch. About birds that perch on your windowsill, half visible through translucent window panes and their wings that can carry your lifetime of sadness on it, if only you let it. About how my life is a jumble of such birds and metaphors, metaphors, metaphors. For an unscripted story, I think I did okay when the loose ends mysteriously connect and the curtains fall.

And then it hit me. What is it about stories needing you, the writer, for only the start? How do stories suddenly write itselves inside out? I will forever be amazed by the ways in which I deadlift babies and stories like I am built for this and this only. Love, I incubate. I'm made for love. But stories, and motherhood, they make a home out of me. Inescapable. Not that I will ever try to escape it.

In one weekend, I feel like I've lived a whole life. I'm told I write like no one's reading and that's kind of true. I write like I am my only premium reader, unanswerable to all, I write like my words are a gift and thus, untaxed and unaudited. I write like I would let no governances prey upon words I curate like Art. Sometimes, I think, in this little life, I've lived too much, breathed too much, loved too much and laughed and drunk in excesses and I am, grateful everyday, for all the lives lived inside this one little life of mine. And like my baby, half asleep in her dead lifting mama's arms, sleeping for 6 hours straight through half the city's traffic and noise, I curl into the safe cocoon of words that swirl inside my head, and sleep on. This little life, is a lot. This little life, I tell you.

He slips through the door like an envelope of acceptance I’ve been waiting for. I fold him into my waiting arms and sigh into his knit grey pullover. He smells of chocolate and car. The weight of the week falls off our shoulders like a rolling stone. My fist bunches into the fabric of his shirt, and I do not let go. In this household, we follow the Disneyland rule of never breaking free from a hug that someone initiates, unless they let go first. The rule is passe, just an excuse to hold onto warmth longer, press tired faces into the fabric of each other’s clothes, and let the exhaustion pool under our feet as everything melts away like ice on a grill. God, I wish I could afford therapy, but in this economy, I pin all my hopes on the warmth of his embraces and the way he makes my skin colour when his eyes wash over my face in thick brushy strokes of desire, desire, desire. Being wanted and being loved could cure me of all my illnesses. Being his could be my absolution. I feed him from my hands. He eats, and it warms my heart at how easy love can be when it is shared from one plate every night. We make the bed together, we watch the stars together, we put our fussy child to bed together, we read her picture books together, we plan her night routine together and sing her songs until she drops asleep—and at night she insists she will only sleep in my arms or stay up until I carry her, and some days she will only sleep over my shoulders, and he stays up with me on those days. I wean her off milk, and it breaks my heart to pat her to sleep on nights I’d have overfed her to sleep in. He sings her to sleep on those days; she sleeps faster than she ever does when I put her to sleep. She curls like a bracket around his middle and he lets me sleep on the other arm, we as a family of two have claimed him as ours, especially the hands, I tell you, those hands are ours, to hold and to keep, to love and to be fed from, to hug and to kiss and to paint with (and on) and to go to sleep on. Those hands are mine to cherish and keep for all time. He lies on the bed, stretched out like Da Vinci’s anatomy outline, we claim an arm each underneath our heads, he talks of lenses and shots he would like to see this scene from, a perpetual third eye, always looming around us, unthreatening. It watches us lovingly from afar, a mother’s eye, an eagle’s eye, wings stretched out, unfettered, ready to defend, to protect, to fly. We sometimes set up the phone like a makeshift baby monitor, beside a pillow fort we build around her sleeping form as we disappear to the veranda for a quick smoke. We kiss between smoke rings and whispers, and still her unsettling tossing and turning will fall like a secret in the whorls of his ears alone, and he will drop everything to be by her side. We come back from smoke breaks to look at her angelic face. Sleeping, she is always cherubic, pristine, and a God-like halo circles around her in silvery tones of untouched innocence. He kisses her cheek and looks at her lovingly. Last night, he asked me if we could have a few more babies. My heart welled before my eyes did. He said, there is a certain straightness that babies bring out of you, despite the routines and difficult nights, and in many ways, he said, that togetherness brought him peace. Last night, I slept with the tears on my cheeks drying up still, I slept on the crook of his arm and woke up somewhere near his middle, our child entwined into his other arm, we’d shifted and turned and found each other in the middle of chaotic sleep and on his face, played a smile, so small, so innocent, so darling and so subtle, that you blink and it’d be lost to the world and so I left him at that, undisturbed. My kiss lands softly on his forehead, just so the ghost of a smile could linger. He slept on, eyes darting inside thin eyelids, a happy smile dying at the corner of his lips, a third eye welling up, a happy sigh at the drone shot of one little, happy family of three.

I love him like I love a well-worn ache.

He settles in the bottom of my heart like fat oil drops, viscous and globuley, settle in a jar of water.

He lingers. He stays.

I’ve written a hundred and two reasons in the backside of my notebook as to why it'll be best if he leaves. He is the kind of boy who will write underneath the list, a scrawny “no” and kiss it for you.

To be true to my own little tattered, shabby piece of a heart, I do not know what to do with love.

Good love and good men are like fine wine. But what do you do when you’ve never touched a drop of alcohol in your life?

He lingers still.

So the best line of defence I can give him is a surgically precise cross-sectional cutting open of my heart.

He does not even flinch.

Vulnerability feels heavy in a house of cards.

The wind does not blow my house away, he squats, observing my walls and proceeds to carefully flip one paper card, after the other and builds a home from scratch.

Painstakingly.

I flinch when I realise that his labour is all for me, and it makes me want to shrink to occupy less space so he will feel less burdened.

He doesn’t. He tells me that all the space in the world is mine. Any place I do not belong should not exist on the face of the earth, and I cry, big, fat, slugs of tears that crawl down my cheek in rivulets.

I always start to love like a soft, in-weather rain.

Soft puffs of wind over tiny drops of water.

And then my love progresses and falls like torrential monsoon rain.

Heavy, viscous, hailstorms, painful, real.

I leave before people can.

To stay is an act of courage.

I bite my lips from the inside to draw blood, to feel the first puncture of pain stab me, a few pinpricks of molten iron on my tongue, I inflict pain just to feel something, anything, anything at all.

He lingers still.

I parade him with questions that begin with stupid what-ifs.

What if I become a gargantuan snail?

What if I were a worm?

What if I sprouted one big unicorn horn squat in the middle of my forehead?

What if I had three hands and one leg?

What if I had three legs and one hand?

He says all situations are doable as long as I am with him.

I do not believe him.

If I were a worm, then he’d know.

He’d miss me in his shirt pocket and find me gnawing my way out through his knickers.

But he lingers still.

Calls my insecurities “quirky”.

Finds the rolls of fat underneath my tummy, “cute”.

Loves the “melody” of my laughter.

And for the love of God, will not get upset over the number of times he has to reassure me that he will not leave once he cleaves.

He cleaves.

He stays.

And then slowly my worm self sinks, viscous and drunk-dead to the very bottom of a jar full of tar.

I dispense love through the work of my hands. Last evening, with hardly six hours of sleep, I decided I’d make an entire Christmas feast, all from scratch. As the beef stew simmered in the instant pot, I stood churning freshly de-skinned boiled potatoes with milk and butter, thinking about the swimmingly thick state of my mind. In a haze, I realised I’d been feeling a tad nauseous, the way less sleep tends to do to people. My head, heavy, my hands, however, moved like clockwork, tilting and punching bread dough into neatly buttered bread tins and preheating ovens when the smell of browned onions for gravy caught me trying to hold back my turning stomach and making dinner on autopilot all at once.

Behind my shoulder, I see my baby daughter ask for the marrow swimming atop the beef broth. I tell her it might have beef bones in it, and I need to skim it for her. She sees the rest of the beef tenderloin, lying fat and bloody in a ziploc cover and tells me, "Mama, I want that”. I laugh. My daughter, who was fed beef broth and well-done steak and pork shoulders before she fully turned one. She knows all cuts of meat like a friend and does not flinch when the meat juices run bloody on my plate when I cut into a medium rare steak at a restaurant table. She has always laughed at the slain pig head at the pork shop I frequent, the shop that displays the head like a prized trophy. She sometimes tells me she wants to eat the bear in the picture book I point to her. I tell her she cannot have her meat raw, and she throws a tantrum beside the Christmas tree. She then asks me if she can have the marrow at least. I oblige. Babies and their manipulative skills kicking in before they fully turn two.

I serve a Christmas meal after having fully exhausted myself, having thrown up twice into the commode. The smell of fresh bread never fails to awaken a dead man from eternal slumber; my room wafts in clouds of thick bread smells. I’ve always wanted this, I’ve always dreamt of this: meals slaved over, served to a family of three. Love dished out in spoonfuls, love you dispense through the working of your hands. I know servitude, but this is willing labour that has seen thick cuts of bread and peanut butter sandwiches every other day; this is luxe labour, willingly chosen, labelled, owned, loved. My kitchen is a warzone. I will not try and ambush today.

I pack leftovers neatly in smaller takeout boxes for the weekend. Sunday smiles a sexy bedroom smile at me from the corner of the room. On Saturdays, I work. Nothing my leftover box of the cold Christmas meal won’t save. I think of Christmases spent alone during my divorce and the aftermath. I think of Christmases spent with my sick Yorkie in bed. I think of last Christmas when I was a newly deserted wife with a nearly one-year-old whose eyes lit up at the sight of the first Christmas tree. This year is different. I am different. She is, too. Her hands have not refused to want to tear at every branch of the Christmas tree, the ornaments have been removed, carefully examined, the faux holly branches have been harvested for the painted red styrofoam holly balls and put in the mouth, examined thoroughly with the tongue, chewed up and spit as a flat pink sheet.

This Christmas is mine and my carnivorous daughter’s.

We eat too much, watch extra loud sitcoms and laugh beyond the laughing tracks, make silly faces, draw and paint all across the paper roll I bought her, decorate the Christmas tree badly and tease the way my friend sneezes like a lamb. I drive her to my parents’ place for the day as I get ready to leave for work, she watches me in the rearview as I make a funny face for her. She catches on and makes a funnier one for me. Falalalala is the only song she’d let me play in the car; the song curls like an ouroboros and eats itself on repeat. I narrowly miss a cat that has decided to suddenly chase a mouse down the road, and we catch each other’s eyes in the mirror again; little slivers of mashed potatoes have stuck to her fringes. When she smiles, it is the smile of a well-fed bear; it reaches her large, liquid eyes so much that it scrunches shut for a moment. She is not afraid of closing her eyes like this when she smiles. In pitch darkness too, she knows, Mama is right in front, at the wheel, and will make faces for her when she opens her eyes again and again and again. She is allowed to think that maybe Mama will cook an entire bear for her if she dares to ask one more time. My vision thickly clouds her face in slow motion: her eyelashes flutter ever so slightly, eyes still closed, smile still crinkling her laugh lines at the corner of her lips, her head cocked to one side like a little bird, and slowly she lets out a squeaky giggle that flows drop by drop like an expensive jar of perfume cracked open on the linoleum floor. Her long eyelashes brush against her cheek and lift, ever so slowly, as she opens her eyes.

All is well with the world again.

I want to tell you I had a great week. I didn’t.

I was taking care of my baby, who was sick, and I got sick in turn, and the entire week was spent popping antibiotics like candy and getting a sore tongue from all the strong pills. I spent this morning eating ice cream because that's the only thing that will tame my flaring sore tongue, but my sore throat has to die a million deaths anyway. It’s like I cannot win anymore. It’s my body versus my body versus my body.

My mother tells me butter and ghee are the only remedies to a sore, flaring tongue, so I let the rasam my cook akka made me sleep in the fridge with other seemingly hot and holy lunches, and I had the spice-free chicken my mother cooked in butter with cracked pepper on top, just for the sake of it. It was the first real food I had had in weeks. It tasted like ambrosia steeped in butter, like an absolution to all the sins I’ve committed thus far and all the sins I will commit in future, a holy grail for hot and flaming tongues.

I am also on a constant diet of Marxism and Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina lies fat and well-loved on my workdesk as I try to wean away every child that wants to meet me in my cabin during coffee breaks, as I dumb charade the premise: “one sick teacher, cannot speak, so go away” in the most polite language of hand signs and smiles, I’ve ever known. Sometimes my kids are a handful (every teacher has thought this, but not every teacher has told this out loud).

Yesterday I dreamt of a pet marmoset I’d gift my daughter. My dreams are rough and vapid when I’m sick. When my daughter was 3 months old, I called her “my little marmoset” because she resembled the little wrinkly baby marmoset monkeys that curled over the zoo enclosure locks from the other side. Intelligent shiny wet eyes, tiny squeaks and very, very cute. It is my father’s birthday today; he is definitely sixty-something. I still haven’t forgiven him for the time he did not want to be my father, and for the times I have ended up being a father to my sister and my own self because my father refused to be anything but man, Superman, God.

My daughter’s father left when she was 4 months old. For similar reasons. He didn’t want to be father, he only wanted to be man, superman, God. Shortly after she’d been rechristened “marmoset”, he’d left. My daughter’s father refused a role he’d just been bestowed with like a war victory (war having been mine, and the victory: his.) All fathers leave. It is just a matter of time. When fathers leave, mothers and sisters become mothers and fathers all at once, rolled into one big ball of dough. Empty, faceless masses. My sister and I once saw a juggler’s act at The Great Indian Circus and practiced juggling seven household things in the air, breaking a few in the process, we never quite got the hang of it: especially when the juggling things became more and more complex over time: first a ball, then a brass cup, then a knife and finally a machete. I am 31 now, I must’ve been ten then. In twenty years, I know now that I can juggle as my life depends on it, because honestly, it does.

My marmoset now speaks. In words that feel like the rumbling ocean spitting pirate loot onto the shore, she says: “mama”, “hugs”, “I love you”, “look, mama”, “mama, naa naa!” (mama, no no!) And in no dictionary in the growing folds of her cerebrum exists the dangerous “d” word: dada. She skips past “Dada” like a rain puddle she would rather not jump in. Her white socks remain white even on rainy days. She sometimes poses fatherhood as a question, “Dadda?” Like the mother that I am, I tell her, “God will provide, if he wills”, like what Abraham told Isaac when the child asked him where the sheep for slaughter was. My sheep for slaughter is the man she will end up calling “dad” someday. I say sheep for slaughter because after 2 marriages, a woman can only hope she will be anything but collateral.

It’s not like I ache for a companion. On the contrary, I like my house eternally tidy with no man’s knickers pooled in concentric circles around the house, no litter constantly finding its way in a confetti thrown treasure hunt to the bedroom. I love the company of just one and a half women sharing the house with half a handful of pests and plants. But on days like my father’s birthdays, I imagine the many people he was: man, chartered accountant, husband, sperm donor, diocesan accountant, grandfather, occasional dish washer in mom’s absence and pram pusher. And I think of how my mother’s house eternally held room for all the men he was. And I think of how I have an empty room in my 2bhk flat too. Unoccupied still. To house all the men that he could’ve been. And I then imagine the man he still would never be:

A father.

And then I ache, and I ache, and I ache.

And in my dreams, I am the marmoset, tiny, in a zoo enclosure, curled right underneath the lock.

She texts me back on Children’s Day. Ironic. She was 11 when I met her. Sweet-faced, slightly waif-like, nimble on her feet, and fiery in her writing, she reminded me of Harry Potter trying to spurt magic out of his wand just as he discovered he was a wizard. Raw, untamed, dangerous writing. I was 22, and I carried memory like a curse on my face already. All the little lives I’d lived burst out of my seams like a felt cherub stitched till the seams, a Christmas ornament hanging on my tree. When I say she fed off of me, I mean it. My facilitator-knowledge of having written all my life since I was fourteen, she siphoned it out of me; she sat in the front row, open-mouthed in wonder, pointing, levelling, questioning. Such a joy to teach, I told her mother.

Her mother constantly called me home, told me her daughter loved me, my mentoring did her good and got angry when I called her aunty. Insisted I call her akka, and when I told her I was at the cusp, just having gotten married, fresh out of college and still not old enough to call a married woman with a child only ten years younger than me as akka, but my protests fell like bursting cotton pods over meadow laughter that stretched and stretched for miles. Green, warm, cushioned, soft.

And then her mother died.

Mothers die like fish blink. There one moment and then, they’re not.

At 16, I don’t know what I would’ve done as a motherless child, so I ran towards her aching, heart on fire, lost in between two metaphysical words of the living and the dead, one trying to forget and the other hoping to remember, I tried to pin her down to the ground and write a letter of forgiveness on her forehead so I could save her and in saving her I hoped to be saved from myself. She was going to be my absolution. So one summer, when she had taken a sabbatical off writing, I took her around, brought her to my favourite cafes, drove her around my city to show her there was more to life than the sum-total of all our sadnesses combined and she bought it all with greedy eyes and a permanent smile that played on her lips, that sometimes defied her innocence when she let out phrases like, “all men have is the audacity and nothing else”, what men had she known at 16, what audacity did she speak of, and why was boiling resistence her second language?

She was already brewing revolutions underneath her skin, and when she felt hot to the touch at the last hug goodbye, I knew I had lost her already. 5 years that roiled by like a puking stomach, on and on and on. Perpetually lost in the hurling and unhurling of itself. I mute myself on social media and, as usual, I come back, 6 years later, with a new name, a new invented self. She is 21. Still waif-like, but she now sports a twinkling bead of a nosepin. When she turns, the pin catches light, and in an instant, all the suns are reflected on the left side of her face. I am blinded. Her writing flows, meanders still, unfettered but dams and damns at collective pauses. She was right. I want to tell her about the heartbreaking and the rivers of blood that drowned men out, and the poetry that came as a by-product of it all. But I don’t. She is a woman now, and I swallow my apologies away because I gave birth to this writer, one tumultuous summer. Is this what it feels like to watch a daughter grow? She lost a mother and gained another, and she doesn’t know she is my daughter of fire. I have anointed this union on forged fires, oceans of poetry, shared playlists, baptismal waters, and pentecostal fires that have taken and taken from us and never given us back our people. In comradeship, I have christened her a daughter. And she doesn’t even know. So I rain down apologies at her door. Bullet-like.

I wanted to tell her about all the men underneath my Grandmother’s Bimblikka tree. All the men who died trying to save me, unable to save their own selves in the end and how I have been a red-lipped revolution and my own knight in shining armour too and how I will never stop telling the voices in my head to go home and get some sleep and come back again, later. She would have laughed with me if I told her it was Lorde’s Liability that made me want to kill myself, but it was also the same song that made me want to live again, oh what a bunch of contradictions we are, as a human race, just a little human-bean, if you come to think of it and yet so complex, so full of ourselves and that too, for what? But I tell her nothing.

She texts me back on Children’s Day, and it is a 9.53-minute voice note. She hikes her pitch in places, rains down syllables like a plea and a pulse, she whispers and shouts and sings in places she cried in, a preening peacock in the rest of the voice note, and I am proud. Like her mother would’ve been. And is. And I am proud because I birthed this writer out of pain and shame and fire and waters and absolution. I am haughty, and I have inserted myself everywhere, and I have mushroomed in every nook of inconvenience in her house, and still she, like a wildflower that she is, has learnt to grow in wretched rooms that do not fit her in, and she will now grow everywhere, anywhere.

“We should meet” shines in my text box, still unfinished, I add: “again”.

She is at arm’s length now, a finger’s breadth, a whisper’s dance away, if I should stretch out my hands, there she would be-

And yet, I step back, I step away.

a sliver of her presence still shines in my fingers, untouched.

All men have is the audacity and nothing else. Rings and rings in my head.

Our mutual hatred for limp-noodled men who have collectively wronged us all shines on my skin like yellow sulfur pearls discarded on my hometown roads from careless national highway lorries that carry them to the country from a conveyor belt from the city port.

I’ve been told the roads to hell will be lined with sulfur pearls.

I hope every man who has ever wronged us finds his way safely to yellow-lined roads set for eternity.

She did not burn me, I did not burn her,

We were both not men.

I hit backspace until my screen is as white as it was before we’d even met.

There are two kinds of readers in this world:
those who read one book at a time, and those who, upon finding something mildly interesting, disappear into a literary cave for three months and emerge with eight biographies, three political treatises, and an unshakeable opinion on the Cuban revolution.

I fall, unapologetically, into the second category.

Which is probably why my Reading List for 2026 looks the way it does: unruly, ambitious, occasionally contradictory, and absolutely unwilling to stay within the polite boundaries of a school curriculum. Let me reintroduce myself: I am a Creative English Coordinator at a school that pays me to read. Pretty much that. I get paid to develop the reading culture at school, create curricula around reading and mentor writers and shape young minds with literary curiosity: that sort, you get the picture? Okay. So the 2026 list of books is more for me than for the kids. I always make sure that everything I do for myself is an extension of everything I do for my kids: Dual purposes. I really believe in “How we do anything is how we do everything”, from Sunflowers in Babylon by Joshua Luke Smith.

If the list feels like a syllabus for a small liberal arts college rather than a single academic year for students, that is because I have always believed that children ought to read like the world is theirs, not like the exams are forever fiends, chasing them. I do not censor books. I let the books breathe into their ears. If some should sing siren songs, luring them in, I let them. My kids are ravenous readers. (One read 96 books in 2025, overfilled her reading log and asked if I could hand her another!) My child is a month shy of turning two, and she is another rabid reading creature. No amount of books is enough. She gorges on books for a living. Her life is the life I most envy. Ridiculously simple life of being doted upon by her grandparents when mama is away at work, fed, bathed and given books to read and being read to all day until mama comes home to read more until bedtime.

The list begins innocently enough. Fantasy for the myth-hungry (Children of Blood and Bone), poetry for the contemplative (the Rubaiyat), classics for the soul who still believes in endurance (Dickens, Hawthorne, Hugo), and graphic novels for those who need narrative to arrive holding hands with illustration. Proust appears, as he always does, whispering that memory is less a vault and more of a perfume. Chekhov enters, shrugging, reminding us that people are capable of every contradiction except consistency.

The Syrian war slips in softly like a plea through Bana Alabed’s simple, devastating line: “I just want to live without fear.” Suddenly, literature is not past or metaphor—it is urgent, trembling, alive and very much the need of the hour, a beacon of hope and a catamaran of escape, all at once.

And then, almost deceptively, the list widens into politics. Not the manicured, textbook kind, but the inconvenient, messy, historical kind.
Mao walks in with his uncomfortable proportions. Obama strolls in with charm and weariness. Nathuram Godse barges in with a confession no child should read without guidance. Stephen Hawking, amused by all this earthly chaos, quietly talks about the cosmos while children try to understand what a singularity feels like.

But the most mischievous corner of the reading list is the one titled “Origins of Communism.”
Because this is where the story becomes personal.

It began, as many life-changing mistakes do, with one book. The Motorcycle Diaries. A young Che, scribbling about injustice in margins, asking the kinds of questions children should really be learning to ask in school:
Why are some people invisible?
Who benefits from silence?
What does a revolution look like without the romance?

I read the book, thought, Oh, interesting, and then—predictably—fell headfirst into the rabbit hole. Within weeks, I was reading Aleida Guevara’s remembrance of her husband, Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was tempered (still halfway through), Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess, analytical texts on Maoism, and Che’s own writings, where he shifts from idealism to action with alarming velocity. What began as curiosity morphed into a foray into political consciousness. And what a richly rewarding descent it turned out to be!

Perhaps this is why the reading list sprawls the way it does. Because I cannot, in good conscience, give children a narrow slice of the world. I want them to see what power looks like from above and below. I want them to hug a Dickensian orphan against their little bodies and digest a Tamil ethical dilemma without letting go of the Syrian girl’s hand in the same moral universe. Dickens and Alabed, and Jayamohan can exist in the same world and brush shoulders and smile at one another without a word being said. I want my children to look at Meena Kandasamy’s scorched sentences, the ones that crackle with fury, and understand that literature has never been polite. I want them to recognise Sally Rooney’s couples arguing as the world depends on it, and Rilke asking them to “live the questions,” and Tolkien quietly whispering that courage often looks like a Hobbit.

If the list feels impossible, that’s because good reading always is. It’s anything but possible.

Books do not arrive to make life simpler; they arrive to expand it.
Reading Proust will not improve your handwriting, but it may improve your sense of interiority. Reading Hawking will not make physics exams easier, but it might make the night sky feel less impersonal. Reading Godse will not make you comfortable, but comfort is a terribly overrated pedagogical goal.

And reading Che—well.
Let’s just say reading Che is how you end up with eight books, a crisis of ideology, and a thrilling sense that ideas, when held without fear, are combustible things.

My aim, ultimately, is not to produce children who can recite themes. It is to produce children who can survive the world because they have already travelled it through pages. Children who can recognise injustice because Hugo taught them compassion. Children who can sense political manipulation because they’ve read Mao next to Obama. Children who understand tenderness because they’ve read The Colour Purple. Children who understand the stakes of silence because they’ve sat with Anne Frank. Children who understand beauty because Rilke told them no feeling is final.

In other words, readers who are harder to fool and easier to move.

The 2026 Reading List is not a curriculum; it is a provocation. A suggestion that the world is infinitely bigger, stranger, sadder, funnier, and more astonishing than one childhood can contain. A reminder that reading is not a hobby but a method of becoming.

If the list overwhelms you, good.
If it excites you, even better.
If it changes you, well, that was the point.

After all, every revolution, literary or political, begins the same way:
with a reader who stumbled upon something interesting and decided not to look away.

My children will not look away.

Because their teacher didn’t.

My chia seed pudding cup rests on my table like a relic, looks at me with wanting eyes, sexy bedroom eyes. I am an eternal optimist. The more storm clouds you show me, the more silver linings I’ll spot for you. Rejection is redirection, and think of all the new possibilities now, oooh!-kind of person. Not for the positivity aesthetic, I genuinely would be a Golden retriever if I were a dog. So my chia seed pudding makes up for my pre-diabetic breakfast. Fits squat right in the sweet spot (no pun intended) of things I can actually eat that are slightly on the sweeter side and still will not spike my blood sugar alarmingly-kind. My blood sugars have been staggeringly high the last couple of months when I was battling too many things all at once and being a wet noodle of a person to my chosen family, unable to be anything but a serial overthinker. Now that I’ve finally moved in closer to people I cherish, in a nice apartment that overlooks acres of greenery, my sugars have decided to NOT declare a war on my body.

So here I sit at my desk, typing (as I promised myself I’d do every day and not wait until January to make a resolution, if it is serious, it starts now, and it has) a week’s worth of words that have been fat tadpoles swimming in a murky sea in my head. I am the chaperone of these fat tadpoles I have been bestowed with to raise until they turn 18. After which, they will rent a corner of my body and work until they die. A capitalist body and a communist mind. I am a deadly pre-diabetic cocktail of stuff, I cannot even fully begin to explain.

There’s a room I still haven’t fully set up yet in this new apartment. 12 fat cardboard boxes of books lay silently, breathing life into an empty room. Think of all the lives contained in a single box, no fighting to overlap, just simple quiet tones of “I am, I am, I am” as they lie like sardines in a can, tightly stacked against each other, little worlds upon worlds upon worlds. I come home beat. Baby stays over at her grandparents until I set the house up and invite her home. It seems to take forever. My brain which is so used to getting things done in a heartbeat, is exhausted trying to convince the million ways in which I can fully unpack my things and set up a house in two days with a 9 to 5, a baby, a social life, and no Saturdays off. It’s been almost a week. My stuff lies unpacked, sad, and I still live from suitcases and cardboard boxes of stuff. My empty drawers and cupboards look at me, pleading to stuff them with clothes I have beautifully folded and brought from the old house. Not yet, I tell them as I pass them by. My mama heart aches with a pang as I sleep alone every night. In the absence of my baby, my mama hands make a home out of everyone I touch. I have learnt enough to not house another acre of guilt in my heart already tattered by grief and longing. It will be fine, I tell myself every day as I trip over a carton filled with toothpaste and laundry detergent. One day, I will set this house up so nicely that all the other houses I’ve ever been in will hang their heads in shame.

I will start, however, with the reading room. There’s a big shelf in the room that would at least house a hundred or more books, and my friend tells me we will put the other books in the loft. But I want to believe that there’s room for all 12 carton-fulls. So let’s stack them against the walls, I tell him. Let’s. Please? I want to hoist the little white tuille canopy underneath the window where the sunlight pierces through freely, and set a little cushion on the floor for a reading nook. Books all around the room, and a little deep green cushion bed on a corner to sit in, a little canopy on the other side for my baby to read in. A floor bookcase for her to read from: all her picture books in order. I read her Andy Pandy and Beatrix Potter yesterday. She really loves her HD picture book of vividly pictured birds and animals; she can count up to twenty already and name all the animals in the picture books and even say the name of their little ones. “Dhhjooeyy” is her most favourite. I have a little Red Riding Hood book and a Prowl Puss book that she cannot get enough of. I already have a huge hardbound Harry Potter collection to read to her from; she’s still too young for Harry Potter, but I cannot wait for the day I will read the first few lines of The Sorcerer’s Stone to her.

So I dream while I set the house up, room by room, in my head.

The house lies cold in the mornings from all the fresh air that gushes in through windows I leave open all day (and night). The air in the house is glorious. I could die from the amount of good air that enters this house in abundance.

One day, this beautifully and tastefully done house will put all the other houses I’ve lived in to shame.

And that day is not today.

There’s a lot going on in my instagram feed, people forever getting married, daughters taking their parents on trips, sons cosplaying as their mothers, a lot of laughter tracked sit-com edits and a good dash of puppies doing puppy things: breathing little raspy breaths and moving about slowly, in uncalculated staggers, existing purely unaware of the effect they have on human beings like me to get by another work day. My work pays me decently and makes sure I sit through several Saturdays even, at the work desk, typing away paperwork nonsense among other stuff. The weekdays, I mostly mentor young writers and shape the reading/writing culture of the school, which is fuuuuun. I don’t know if I love the job or hate my guts for always applying for work and then always betting on my quitting streak. The shortest being two weeks, and the longest being the current job. I must really love my job to have stayed for a whole year here. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a non-commitmental ass (As I type this, I realise, wait-maybe I am, but okay that’s a story for another day) but I really hate having to do a 9-5 that sucks your soul and leaves you waiting for Sundays, just so you can rewind and prepare for another draining cycle again. What a beautiful thought to have on a Monday morning. The week stretches in front of me like a mirage. Every answer is a no already. My eyelids droop, and sometimes I catch myself drifting off, and then I remember who the fuck I am: I am the girl who did not quit for one whole year, and immediately, I huff my chest up like an Amazonian warrior and power through the day. This is how I get through most days. This and the money keep me motivated to work. Genuinely, nothing else can convince me to lift a finger, I swear. Also, cute things to buy for my already cute daughter. And diapers. This economy, I tell you.

The number of books I read this year easily outnumbers the number of people I’ve met this year, and maybe I need to start looking into these statistics, for example, instead of the thousand and one podcasts I listen to about brain health and the genius of a bilingual child. But we both know that I won’t. I barnacle onto my only friend as smoke envelopes both our bodies, outlining us in a womb of comfort. Sometimes our friends from downstairs join us. They bring their tiny but mighty shish-tzu. He always wants his space, but also gets annoyed when he’s left alone for too long. In many ways, he’s me. Also, did I tell you this one time I fed my goldfish too much that they got really sick? Chia seeds, idiyappam floating around the water like white worms, these golden orbs loved to catch! Until their little bodies puffed up and they floated like fat gold foil paper in the tank. I fear the day love will be the death of me. Can you love a person so much that you kill them? In my mind, I know, if anything, I am really good at creative excesses. Hyperboles, purple prose and superlatives are my forte and if left unchecked, my writing always overcrowds with metaphors of excesses, and if anyone should be worried about loving in excesses (see what I did there? Do you see it, do you see it??), it’s me.

Last night, I wondered if loving someone could give you a heart attack. I also do not want to sit at 2 am in empty bedrooms and eat boxed takeouts alone in my bathrobe. I am built for one pair of hands always made to hold my sides, take my face, cup my chin and caress my cheeks, tousle my hair. I need Thing. (Wednesday reference, sooo not what you thought it was, shut up) Hands are beautiful. Hands. Veins, blue-green. Palms, lifelines that run from everywhere to everywhere, moles squat at the centre of palms, hands so strong, solidly secure. Hands are lovely. I could build a monument for hands. So pretty. I read somewhere that AI cannot really replicate the beauty of hands, and that made me feel so blessed for a minute. As a writer, I spend every waking hour in dread of how my line of work would be the first to go when AI takes over. But I also know that AI cannot get hands right. All writers get hands right. From Shakespeare’s “heavy hand of fate” to Angelou’s “Hands have their own language”, writers are pretty brilliant when they write about hands.

“To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” - William Blake (from Auguries of Innocence).

Given a choice to be anything, I think I will be somebody’s hands. And somebody will write about me and how AI can never replace me. I will cup someone’s face and do no talking, I will hold somebody else’s hand and go to sleep in the warmth of collective everyday exhaustion. I will fold under somebody’s head as they rest for the night, I will caress heavy foreheads and feed big morsels of food into somebody’s mouth. I will pinch a cigarette and sometimes flick the dead butts into wilderness, hoping the emptiness never builds a home in this body I belong to, and many times, I will grow cold and dead and limp underneath somebody’s head when they forget a pillow and use me instead all night, and that, I think, is the best way to go limp and die.

And in the squat mole that lies right in the middle, all infinities of my world will lie unfettered and still.

I look for vestiges of me in every line you write,

I scourge through your verses, combing through words,

For lies.

Lice. Louse?

One eats away at the soul until you are properly famished for more life,

The other is a blood sucker, I’m told.

His name was a palindrome.

I say was like he ceased being, but if you come to think of it,

he did cease being, so his name was a palindrome is the rightest way to grammatically put anything.

That was the first sentence I ever spoke to him.

A full sentence, a nerd with myopic eyes, and a larger by two sizes chudidhar and Mickey Mouse sneakers.

He kissed me against a large sycamore tree that grew haphazardly, unorderly around the Heber courtyard.

Our little secret forever buried between the branches. A sin-stained hand still cupping my cheek.

Run. The forest screams at me.

They say the human skin sheds every seven years, and to think, one day I will have a skin untouched, unmapped, unspoken into existence by your ruah breath.

Nolite le bastardes carborandum: is not even real Latin, but I scratch it all over the hidden beams in my house anyway, because I cannot ward off Palindrome names and unshedding skin and pickled love that has sat on house lofts with anything other than Atwoodian dissent.

I love the fact that you could not read to save your life.

I love the fact that I hid my ammunition in plain display, between rusty crinkly pages of a well-loved, worn book.

I read 1Q81, Dance dance dance, Leo Tolstoy and Meena Kandasamy right under your Puritan nose that sniffed sin from a mile away, my reading was protest, my words were ammo, my lips were a rebel country you were trying to traverse, my fingers all guerilla warriors caught in a forest of deceit, enemy country, tricky palindrome riddles, God-powered bullets raining down my spine as my soldiers hide, detest, hide, attack, until we are but one army, one country, lost cause and still unbent to your noose.

We’re the unbroken reed, the one you bent and bent and still couldn’t break.

Our backs carry the promises of a God-country we do not want to traverse into.

Honey flowing, milk dripping, country of the good God.

Our skin, marred.

Our faces pockmarked with lies you spit in our faces like a war preamble.

I dissent. We dissent.

Our skin peels.

Like magma thick oranges,

We come undone.

Layer by layer.

Until we are,

Shed,

raw.

There’s a crystal goblet precariously balanced on a glass cabinet beside our table at the mallu joint we frequent. I tell my partner I covet it so bad, and he promises if it ever disappears, the owner will have to know it was us, the owner then walks over at the conjecture and offers us the goblet like it is a sachet of aftermints. It is not the flakey, ridiculously layered parotta that brings us back, over and over again, it is the twinkle in his eye as he speaks, a kind of quiet devotion to the work he does, almost ceremonial, the way he asks, “nalla irukka?” and really waits for an answer, not a template “yes”, he narrates how he always makes the Malabar biryani by himself. He explains how it is a ritual almost every day, 5 kilos of stocky short kaima rice, fried with a handful of aromatics and golden slivered half-moons of onion rings that meld with the red oozing gravy that has declared the oil an enemy country and yet when they harmonize and come in little saucerfuls to be piled on your plate, I swear, Tujh men rabh dikhta hain, pyara mein kya kahoon? I am human after all. This is the food mortals go to war for, and he knows, exquisiteness lies in the art of simplicity. Simple food. Parotta and beef, Malabar biryani. Nothing fancy, nothing extravagant. Siyadh sir lurks around you as you eat, a quiet presence, eyes twinkling, wordlessly, a smile playing on his lips as he seems to tread lightly on his feet, almost gliding around the room, speaking through the eyes in the language of gods and goddesses who have mastered the ambrosia of the mortals.

I have come here for the first time after work, raging, fresh out of a war zone, my heart hungry for companionship and in the dingy room, full of sweating sweltering breaths mingling as one, college kids fit inside like a tin of sardines, I have seated myself in a corner, a fan pointed at the nape of my neck as I would have my usual, half a plate of biryani and one goli soda. Malabar biryani is an ode to the preservation of my heart. Beyond Siyadh sir’s shop, Malabar biryani holds a special sweet spot in my heart because it is what I made when I was fresh out of a heartache, when the world was locked down in a standstill. I did it in big batches and then one-person servable clay pots over and over and over with fish, mutton, beef, prawns and even pork until I realized, this would be the purpose of my life. To try to perfect the art of Malabar biryani for the rest of my life and still never once getting it exactly the way I had it at 2.30 am on a cold December morning at Kannur. A dinghy oil lamp-lit shop that hung from the top of a hill, risking a fall of biryani pot and all, but the clarion call of the biryani ladle hitting the metal anda was a siren call. Never have I had a biryani that tasted exactly that way, mildly but perfectly spiced and just enough fat and meat to balance out the meat juices-drunk-fluffed up kaima rice, until Siyadh sir’s restaurant beckoned me with no clarion call, only presence, quiet presence, like the twinkle in his eye, always there but never loud, a kind of welcome that folded you into the dough kneaded in batches for the evening’s parottas. You belonged there. No Malayalam was needed, the replies came in thick, accented Malayali-Tamil, not ethhara parotta but ethhana, corrected, folded- folded-over-itself-Tamil. Borrowed Tamil, lent Tamil, owned Tamil. I used to open Tiktok while it was still unbanned, tune into a Srilankan tamil girl’s channel I loved, for the Tiktok -lives she would post: no faces, just people in the background cooking and cleaning and doing their businesses as they conversed in unadulterated Jaffna Tamil. Music to the ears, unalloyed Tamil still baits me in every room I enter. Like the humpback whale lullabies, they make sense to nobody but me, and that is okay. That is how I sit in silence as I eat my biryani at Siyadh sir’s hotel. In a cocoon of silence, heart freshly broken, as a swarm of college goers fills the air with vigour and youthful promises that have since left the block for me, but still taunt me, loom over my head, unable to break my Mossad army dome-cocoon. I hurt and heal in this shop. He has no idea. Then slowly, as I let happiness trickle into my life, a chink in my armour through which love enters unannounced, it is at Siyadh sir’s shop that he comes to, re-introducing my relationship with this space as I slowly reclaim the seats with a flutter in my heart. Love waits for me in the seats at Siyadh sir’s hotel, one time it waits even though it has no idea I am going to come in. Love comes soft, unannounced and waits for you in a corner of a hotel you have come to belong in. One day, Siyadh sir tells you in a tone of so much love, how much he likes the boy you come to eat with. You gush back at him, the feeling is mutual, you think. You do not have to tell it out, he knows it already. And in that moment, Siyadh sir steps right into the converging circles of the Venn diagram that fits love and you.

There is a special seat you feel most at home in at the shop, there is a cleaning akka who is mostly grumpy but whose face splits into a grin when she catches sight of you and then there’s Siyadh sir, who makes biryanis all from scratch, everyday and waits until your plate is fully clean to ask, “beef kondu varatta?”, knowing full well that there is never a day when the answer would EVER be no to that question. Baiter!

One day, love sits right across you at the table, and in shy glances and coveted smiles, Siyadh sir looms over, he blushes for you, he blushes for me, and suddenly, there’s no cocoon around me. In that little shop, all of us belong-Biryanis, parottas, beef and love and the twinkle in Siyadh sir’s eyes.

And then one day, love decides to stay. Love holds your hand across the table, no cocoons have evidence of ever having existed, hands clutch harder, smiles spilling from faces, to tables, overflowing on the paved tiles of Siyadh Sir’s shop. Love resonates until it fills the entire empty shop in Schubert’s Sonata in D Major, your heart flutters, unfettered, unaware of the world around you, a feather softly floats in the music in the air as he grabs a chair, inches it closer to both of you and says, “oru vishyam solanum”. Love holds your hands a bit tighter, panic softens the edges of your vision. He has never spoken in tones of quietude, secrets, before. Now he does when he slips the news of his going away to Dubai. A little feather that has been flying, floating, swirling always in the entrance of the shop, now settles, softly, cottons on the floor, with a gentle sigh. Love’s hands feel limp in yours; you touch them, trying to bring a warmth that the room has suddenly lost. Love’s hands feel ashen cold in yours. You panic. In the quietness of never coming back, Siyadh sir’s eyes mist till the brim, yours do too, and Love sits right across the seat, cold and suddenly very still. It doesn’t spill. Tears are the enemy country’s last weapon of deceit, never to be used until the very last possible moment. And then you ask, in the naïve stupidity of happy endings and forevers, “You will come back, right?” “Right”, he says. And you almost believe him. When you part, Siyadh sir’s eyes still twinkle, albeit a little sadly. For the first time, he shakes your hand at the entrance, hands dough-soft, full of parting sadness, a little goodbye at the door. The feather flutters but does not fly again. In the car, love would tell you that coming back was a lie meant to soften the blow. He is split from the seams with so much swirling emotions that you decide, you will not cry in his arms today, your safe country needs you. So you want to become several things all at once: Love’s arms, the night, the feather, the biryanis, the twinkle in Siyadh sir’s eye and the warmth of the shop that concocted love, tangible, every day.

Grief is a chewed bubblegum wad in my jeans pocket. I watched “500 Days of Summer” today.

I took a day off from work, the day you left. I spoke to my therapist, who told me in unsugared language that I needed help. I feel anything but helpless. The world is still spinning, I’m in it, I’m winning, just lost footing for a little bit, but yeah, we good, I tell myself. Death slips an envelope under my door. And then my world is a pepper shaker, stuck at the opening, so someone is slapping the other end in jaggedy, jaggedy, jaggedy bursts-until the shaker cracks in the middle, parts in two. Peppered air. Peppered everywhere. A-tish-shoo. My world’s in two. No rescue. Please, please, please, this is not what I ordered, I say, but the envelope has no return to sender on the flap, all mine, my entire world floats at the corner of your blinked phosphenes. Would my “yes” have changed your world? Would my silences account for mourning? I couldn’t bring myself to see your face, cold, lifeless is not the way I’d like to remember you. I want to remember you fighting for the console as we played video game after video game after video game, pressing a napkin between my palm and the console when my sweaty palms came in the way, telling me to eat more, to take more space, to belong more, to look at the world with renewed tastes, and putting it into my head that Meghalaya is the most beautiful place on earth and if only you went there, you’d kiss your life away because that would be a life full lived in itself and now to see your cold face, this is not how I want to remember you. Grief is a chewed wad of bubblegum stuck in my jeans pocket, I try everything to get it out, now my fingers are tainted with the semblance of trying to peel grief out of everything it shadowed it’s existence on. You take a quarter of my life away, my shadows are remarkably lighter, my feet nimble on the pavement, I remember to eat more, take up space, belong more, go to Meghalaya, and think of you. Everywhere wears the cloak of your absences. You’re here, you’re there, and then all at once, everywhere. So like the phosphenes that float in sight each time I shut my eyes, you float away.

Today, many years ago,

A little boy yearned for his father,

Who murdered himself.

He called his mother an “all American Bitch”

Who could make a pack mule shoot himself,

Let alone his poor bloody father.

Today, many years ago,

A little boy was stolen his right,

To a father, a mother,

A world in which love couldn’t coexist with,

Indifference and apathy.

And so, a writer was born,

In the altar of vengeance,

To steal back everything that was rightfully his,

Everything he could’ve been,

Fallen figs from a Sylvian tree,

He stole them all,

With a steel tipped nib,

An ache in the centre of his chest,

Hemingway was once a little boy,

Denied of grace,

Drunken stupor, drenching every relationship he ever had in the ashes of his mother,

The all American Bitch,

Funny how every misfit traces lovelessness,

To an absentee mother,

A mother who played hopscotch in her backyard with her demons when her children cried for milk in the kitchen,

Her swollen breasts reeking with the smell of overkill.

I want to kiss Hemingway back to life,

The mother inside me,

Still aches to mother all the orphaned kids left

On the roadside,

Run over by a million trucks of deceit--deceit, deceit.

So I ache too much,

I love too much,

I feel too much,

And call myself incapable of love,

You laugh into my mouth,

Your cigarette smoke circles above my head,

My memory erases and writes back itself as the poetry of your name,

The mole in your palm,

Becomes the dot to the i,

In “imagine”,

I cry for the capacity of love in my lungs,

Calling myself sterile of love all the while,

I’m incapable,

I say,

Of love,

As I pour you,

Myself,

Onto,

Your open palms.

You are love,

Poet.

You are,

Love.

Septembers have always been a blur, a non-existence. An ode to herald the coming of the Christmas pre-months, but never the star. September thrives in the nonchalance of unwelcomeness. September sits with a cold cup of tea, scalding skin forming at its surface, a little threadbare coat against the world, looking out of the balcony from her little wickerwork chair. September is me.

I could’ve been all these silences fused together as a person, in all these silences I’d have lived an eon and more and come back, a recluse, still. September speaks to me in a way no month ever has. September’s voice is a whisper, a frail, frail whisper. September never screams, even if September has a lot to say, September always whispers, or better still, sings a soft lullaby. September is never lost, always found, never trailing behind mountains of work. September is a safe place, nestled between just enough books and steaming cups of tea. I speak of tea like I am a tea drinker myself, but I am not. I am neither a tea person nor a coffee person, I am just a little person who loves to play with the idea of a warm cup of some comforting beverage pressing against my palms, terracotta walls making friends with my cold-tipped lonely fingers—I am September.

I want to tell you I read a mountain of books this September, wrote like a rabid dog running amiss in a cotton field, but no—I stood and stared a lot, this September. Leftover rain in the mornings from a stormy night, weighing heavily on leaves and railings, made me feel like I was a joyous afterthought in this whole beautiful conglomerate of things. I want to believe, leftover rain from the edge of ferns will heal me of all my sadness, September believes with me. Maybe in October I will laugh at my naivety, but in September, there is room for all make-believe madness. Like Kafka, in September, if I am turned into an insect overnight, I will first think— “Oh no, I think I will be more than five minutes late to work today”, instead of: “Why the hell am I a giant bug?”

September is an afterthought. September does not let the leftover rain weigh down on her transparent headgear. September forebears. Like I do, too. And then graciously, almost like clockwork, September lets go. The leftover rain falls off in sheets from rooftops, the droplets atop leaves make their way to the grass, and dogs sneeze the dew settled atop their warm muzzles. I delete a 9-year-long friendship from social media, without looking back once. I tear the front cover of a book that still holds: “With love, your husband” because no love seeps through the pages now, the ink stains still smudgy from the first page have not steeped into the second—I wash a lone croc he left behind and plant a betel leaf sapling inside, my house owner aunty tells me Betel saplings are holy and I should not plant them inside chappals, but I let it be, my betel plant belongs in his croc. I cry into letters I find under the boards of almirahs, I take in a whiff of everything that once was, and then, I shut the door, goodbye.

September carries on, weightlessly, like a nymph.

And I let September be.

He calls me by my name.

In his mouth, my name blossoms.

The three syllabled word of my name blooms like yeast,

Balloons like a marshmallow in orange fire,

Fits squat under his tongue,

And goes to sleep there,

Curled.

Unprotected but safe.

My name. He says it like he means it,

A tinge of familiarity,

Safe, safe, safe.

My eyes have seen his smiles curve,

His eyes have dipped coyly as mine met his,

At eighteen, he was a little secret flame,

I never really extinguished.

I’m not eighteen anymore and he still thinks,

I’m beautiful and I choke everytime,

He tells me I’m the first woman,

He ever laid eyes on,

He paints me with words like gorgeous and beautiful,

he peppers it in conversations like he means it—

like he sees me exist in between these words but those are thoughts he’d never say,

lest it spills unconsciously—

He remembers the sandals I wore, the tops I paired with my dainty skirts,

He tells me I gave him a chocolate once,

And he did not expect such a pretty woman to,

as much as acknowledge his presence that way,

And he tells me he likes me but—

There’s a but.

I stumble.

I freeze.

There’s a but.

I want to cup his face inbetween my palms.

I want to kiss his eyelids shut.

I want to hold him like that until his heart stops racing,

Accustomed to my nimble fingertips on his face,

Tracing a soft apology, my fingers tracing a thankyou note across his jawline,

I want to press my index to his lips gently,

Building a dam across every word that “but” stretches like rubber, to hold back—

Call me by my name, I whisper into his ears,

Softly, gently into the whorls of his ears for safekeeping,

Only his,

Only,

His.

Call me by my name,

My three syllables safely tucked underneath your tongue,

Like second skin, like chrysalis,

Like it is yours to keep and

to hold,

Powerful but gentle, gentle, gentle—

Call me by my name,

In that intimate way you do,

Like you know me,

Like you’ve known me,

for a long time now,

Like my eighteen year old self could curl inside the vetricles of your heart and stay,

If only you said nothing else, no buts—

Just please,

I want to live in the imagined possibilities and worlds I would make in an instant,

A fortress in the stone hard slab of your chest,

A shield in your arms and a seal in the exact touch of your lips against mine—

I mean, I don’t even want to hold your hand, you know?

I do not want you to claim me for your own,

But call me, by my name,

Take me back,

even if it is just for an instant,

to a place that was,

to a place that existed,

even if only in our collective memories,

a place before the breaking,

a place that I could call my home.

So darling, if only,

If only you called me by my name,

I’d crumble,

and be whole,

again.

Your head radiated like gold when you read that. You had to put the book down and let that eon worth of sigh collecting in the underside of your diaphragm, escape. You looked at everything around you, fazed. The words knocked you out, senseless. You had done that too, a wave of nostalgia washed over you. The black soil that you now stood in, burnt to the ashes, once was a beautiful forest. And inside the lush foliage, J was still there, breathing and alive. His liquid black eyes held so much warmth for the world, a gentle acknowledgment washing his features as his eyes would find yours. When your face coloured beet red, his would too. You found that endearing about him. It was long before the clasps of masculinity had fully taken over him. Boys blushed too until they knew they were expected not to. When J blushed, his smiles lopsided slightly across the right and joy split across the room as the smile widened. Do you remember the one time you had gone with your parents to invite him home for your new house ceremony? You must’ve been in ninth grade. He was, too. Your pale orange chudidhar, the colour of dimming crimson horizons, was cut and stitched perfectly and for the first time you thought you looked more like a woman and less like the tomboy that ran around in your father’s loose Tee and Bermuda shorts, hair undone, boyish curls not even reaching your shoulders, playing gully cricket with the boys. Your parents sat in the hall, across from his and there was no sight of J. Your eyes frantically looked for him across the sparsely decorated room that looked minimalist and comfortable. You then heard cork ball being thrown on a rough wall, the sound ricocheting down an empty corridor. You imagined J, shy, head bent down, unwilling to meet your eyes, throwing a ball around, practising catch in a lone corridor. And then his sister came out to take you to show her room. You had to cross the corridor he was practising in. His head was bent exactly the way you had imagined and his lips, curved in a shy smile, joy dripping across the empty veranda, overflowing until it reached the tip of your toes in warm waves. You shivered. He hadn’t even looked up to meet your eyes, but his presence engulfed you. That day, you took a spray of baby breath from his garden when nobody was looking. That little bunch still lives between the pages of your poetry books. In the years to follow, you’d take several other fallen flowers from his garden that spilt on the road outside the walls of his house. They would live pressed and adorn several volumes of your poetry books and journals. But none of those you held dearly as the lone spray of baby breath, now yellowed between pages of your oldest copy of Wuthering Heights.

After one failed marriage, with the divorce at its looming horizon, it’s J you ran to. J, whose kind eyes you’d sunk in, J, whose shy smiles spilt joy in warm waves that reached the tips of your toes and caused you to shiver. J, whose mere presence could flip your heart over, the same J talked to you for a week, balming all over your aches, wishing it was him that took your hand and put the wedding band on your finger in the first place, hinting at how his friends wished they were in his position, first girlfriend coming running back to them at the clarion call of a broken marriage and how much of a man it’d make them feel like. J, who told you a week later that he could do anything but get married to you because you were from the same church. Still the same J, sensitive and sweet and too thoughtful to actually tell you the truth: in small towns like yours, remarriages were still looked down upon. If he married you, his family would be ostracised from the church, community and family. J let you down as gently as he had loved you. But you fought, made it harder for yourself because the J in your head was larger than life, a real looming Demi-god that the actual person in question was far from becoming. J was just J. Human. Bound by how much he cared for his parents to not lose their respectable position in the society. Bound by duty to his parents that far exceeded any ties with you. And when J broke your heart for the second time, you were staying at your athai’s house. Your father’s sister. The loud one who reclaimed her position in the family through a loud voice, dominance and unwavering control over her husband: a true matriarch in the making. From the very beginning, you did not get along with her. She liked girls who were demure and non-demanding. You liked your dosas a certain way and it offended her that you had choices and preferences, big privileges, she didn’t get to enjoy as a child. So when your father wanted to build you and your sister a bedroom to share when he had walked in on you changing because of the single room you share with your parents, she was the first to protest: “did our parents get us separate rooms? Why would you squander your wealth on girl children like this?” And your father stopped all plans of building the room. But your rage that ran as an undercurrent between your relationship with her ran deeper than that.

You were seven years old, your sister, two, left to be baby sat by your grandparents at your house, after school. Your parents checking up on you every one hour, and your grandparents out on a stroll, leaving you both at your athai’s house that was just opposite to yours. Except that your athai would be back from work only after six. And for the next two hours, a TV would be blaring in the backdrop, his hands roving between the fabric of your loose school blouse and your naked skin, roving under the fabric, searching, scorching your skin in trails of heat. Her husband was the first face you’d learnt to detest. His face, you learnt by heart, exactly dark and scornful as a lemur monkey’s, your sister and you would later call him lemur in public when you’d tear him down and dissect him apart verbally. Every year until your sister turned seven herself, you’d safeguard your sister with all your life. If the TV show got too interesting, you could still not pay attention, what if his hands found the space between her blouse and skin when she wasn’t looking? So your eyes peeled, you kept watch. Once you’d bitten him until your mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. Twice you’d slapped him so hard that the bones of your fingers hurt and still it never stopped until you turned fourteen and never had to be babysat again.

So when you were twenty four and had your heart broken for the second time by your first love, to have cried in the same rooms you were molested in as a child, felt like a betrayal. The TV would have recoiled if only it had eyes. The same TV that stood on the same distasteful wall cupboard, stocky brown wooden table. You would lock yourself in the room until evening and cry your fill of tears. When you came out of the room, you no longer felt like you had to run back to the Fiona that was, before the breaking. Those parts were now, thoroughly broken, too.

Gratitude used to be a practiced sport when I was still single and selfish. I had to nit pick things to be grateful for and throw it onto an altar for an unknown god and burn it like incense to only watch the smoke not even grow as tall as the roof of my house. But you should see me now! Our baby’s hands have just learnt to fold at the mention of “prayer” and the way her large doe-like eyes flutter close and then open again to peak at our faces with a ghost of a smile playing on her lips as she watches us mouth the words to a prayer and close her eyes tightly shut again and finally flutter open so dramatically at the amen part is probably one of the reasons why I remember to pray every night, no matter what, no matter how and no matter when. The joys of motherhood far outweigh the cons (I’m not saying there are any to be weary of, in the first place). My aching arms at the end of the day, heavy with having held a growing baby, rings of night around my eyes tattooed like a memory, the cherubic quality to my face that threatens a permanent state of being or the Saturn ring of adipose tissue around my middle that refuses to ward off now that I’ve had my prized possession, how can someone not be grateful, I wonder?

But then again, I know gratitude is deeply beyond thank yous. Gratitude is a state of being. It is a conscious reflection of who I am and who I used to be and who is the reason why I even claim to have a place to go to when my role here on earth is done and dusted and typing this brings pinpricks of tears to my eyes. That’s the kind of gratitude I have. My husband used to tell me, to think we are unworthy or everything we have right now, to sometimes call everything we have as “things we built” instead of actually giving credit to the Giver of all things good, that alone is proof that we ought to be condemned, right? The way, we steal God’s breath without a thankless acknowledgement, he’d say. That stealing alone is enough to condemn us, right? But God in all his mercies, chose not only to redeem our souls but our lives too! What a God we serve! This is an added bonus, right? Something he could have overlooked and it would’ve been just for all we’ve done against him, he could have given us the big picture alone but the way he cared enough to give us the smaller joys: food on our tables, a little garden, a house of our own, a TV set, a marriage, a baby, a career, fulfillment, music, love and joy and peace and family!

I have a tiny patch of kitchen garden (that is still a work in progress) that I’m working on. I’m incredibly proud of my little green shoots that burst into exponential heights every morning (especially my green onion shoots, seriously what are they on?) Green patches of onions and strawberry vines, greet me every morning. Hello, they say, I’m happy to see you. I am too, I think, I am too. These are the exact same words I’d tell my daughter in the first couple of months of nursing when she would be gently lifted out of her bassinet and given to me, a soft milk-drunk scent of slumber still atop her sleepy brows, her lips already taking the shape of an O, ready to be full again, so ready for the world. I’m so happy to see you, I’d say, and she would give me that beautiful lazy sleepy smiles of hers as she’d latch, maybe thinking, I am too, mama, I am, too.

Gardening for me, is God’s way of saying, there’s a tomorrow you can water for. When I was at my lowest, a few years ago, I gardened with such vigor. I wanted to tangibly see a tomorrow I could not envision. Sowing seeds meant I expected them to grow roots and sprout into shoots. It meant I believed. Incidentally, running did the same thing for me. Setting out tomorrow’s running gear on the chair meant I believed there would be a tomorrow. And in that tomorrow, I believed I would run. And I ran, several tomorrows away. Now, that is what it has made me into: a firm believer of tomorrows. No matter today’s heart ache, tomorrow will push through the dirt and rise, and rise and rise. Tomorrow is an overripe tomato that will burst open little sticky sweet seeds of tomorrows. Tomorrow is a strong firm light green onion shoot that springs from the earth like nobody’s business. Tomorrow is a slice of carrot, orangey outside and magma thick yellow on the inside. Tomorrow is the soft peach sun that spills juicy yellow liquid all over the earth.

I believe in tomorrows. I believe in the God of all tomorrows. My tomorrows are safe with him.