I

A pall of grey surrounds the aircraft as it dips towards Bandaranaike International. The ocean below looks foreboding, cleaved by frothing whitecaps. This feels different. On previous occasions, I have landed in a steaming Negombo, the air plump with sticky heat and the sky a high dry blue. Outside, now, a wind whips about. We are ignorant yet of the scale of the havoc caused by Cyclone Ditwah. As the four of us – boyhood friends – roll our suitcases along the highway, welcoming even the stinging droplets, we are pleased for this respite: from country, family, the erosions of daily life.

The first beers are had in a seedy bar in Katunayake. I imagine it as the kind of place Shehan Karunatilaka hung about to research Chinaman, his great novel about alcoholic uncles and cricket tragics. The patter landing on the eaves creates a thin tinny percussion. In the afterglow of the lager, this temporary freedom feels invigorating.

Night. The rain still lashes on the road to Bentota. We are on the gleaming Southern Expressway, not the narrow Galle Road that kisses the shore and on which colourful Transport Board buses tilt thrillingly and sometimes too dangerously. Sri Lanka has spruced up, and so have I. The first time I took one of those buses was in the October of 2011. That entire trip cost as much as I will soon pay for a single night in Weerawila. I don’t miss that scruffy, sentimental young man, but I do feel protective of him. I don’t miss that country either: just two years out of the brutal civil war, there was a gingerliness about it.

Nees and I have to take a leak, but we are on the unstoppable Expressway, completed and extended by the disgraced Rajapaksas, with funding from the Chinese. Sampath, the driver, gamely pulls up. Visibility is patchy but I can make out a looming bridge behind me. Shorn of colour and detail, it could be an aqueduct from antiquity. I water the wild grass by the side, unsettled by the force with which the whistling wind buffets the stream. Exposed like that to the elements, I experience the largeness of the world – and the insularity of my work-from-home life – as a minor shock.

At the hotel in Bentota, we are greeted by smiling faces tinged with worry. Browned palm fronds and thick green leaves swish about the modest swimming pool. Here on the South Coast, we hear, the damage is less severe than in the central and eastern regions. Ditwah has wrecked the Hill Country: power wiped out, phone lines shot, tourists stranded. Yala National Park, where we are meant to be in a week, has been closed for a few days. Despite everything, the beach boys lay out a rice-and-curry feast in the portico, where dumpy lizards hover around the warm yellow lights, and where we hear the roiling surf better than we see it. Dulled by tangy, coconutty prawn curry, aches soothed by arrack and Elephant House ginger beer, I go to bed in a mild fugue – half-worried about the fate of this vacation, half-happy that I am here at all.

II

The day dawns gloomy, ripe with rain. The ocean, only a sensation last night, presents itself in snarling glory, its spray landing like gobs of angry spit. For a hot second I consider wading in but settle instead for the swing in the lawn. Its matted coir ropes are coarse and bloated with moisture. But, dismissed by the sea, I want to feel something, anything. So I stand on the wooden plank and propel myself forward and back, wobbly knees buckling from the momentum. Swirling specks of sand get everywhere, but I have a semblance of the rush I was seeking this morning.

Despite the persistent drizzle, our guided tour of Lunuganga is on. Lunuganga was the garden estate of architect Geoffrey Bawa. A facsimile of Bawa’s aesthetic is found everywhere in tourist Sri Lanka. I like his clean curves, his burnished woods, his tendency to manicure the clutter. Descriptions of his work often wax eloquent about how he designed ‘around nature’. When you see the girthful tree growing out of the reception in Kandalama’s Heritance Hotel – or the bottom of one of its pools: smooth rock face, not tiles – you might take this view. But Bawa, like most great modernists, was obsessed with pruning. He was a photographer after the perfect frame. Anything that didn’t fit had to go, or at least, be cut to size. To say he was interested in nature only to tame it would be too much. To propose he wished for the natural to speak for itself would be too little.

In Lunuganga, on this overcast day, varying shades of green pop and sway, lulling the tourist into believing that they are all there is. They obscure the built environment – cottages, outhouses, water towers – so that everything constructed emerges as a surprise. In the northwest corner is a structure called the Hidden Pavilion. It shelters a cast-bronze bust of Bawa, Greek patrician-like and artfully placed on a plinth. There is something lonely about it; you wonder what the great man is doing here, skulking, torsoless, in this tucked-away spot of his grand garden.

I am mesmerised, too, by the stone leopard, perched where the ornamental paddies drop into Dedduwa Lake. The water is high today. The boundary between estate and lake has dissolved at eye level, and the impression is of a floating animal beckoning the visitor to the concealed edge separating land and water. ‘Not allowed that side today, risky,’ the guide says. He points to a planter designed by the Australian artist Donald Friend. It has a human face carved into it – smooth hard pebbles for eyes and stony flora for facial hair. ‘He was liking young boys,’ the guide tells us.

The gift shop is also out of bounds. The tempest has damaged a glass panel on one of its sides. In my Bawa-addled perception, the webbed cracks look like design elements. As we sip black tea in the cafe, tall trees lean in and billow. It has taken many pairs of invisible hands to cultivate this contentment: think of all the foliage clipped, branches lopped, thickets cleared.

III

Onwards to Hiriketiya, the gentrifying paradise contributing to the South Coast’s reputation as ‘the new Bali’, ‘a tropical Ibiza’. Hiri’s main bay is tucked away behind a gentle hill. In this sense, it is different from the more popular beaches in the South. The approach to, say, Ahangama or Weligama can be anticlimactic. Those stretches of sand are right beside the busy A2, the official route designation for Galle Road.

Again, we take the Southern Expressway (E01). Clouds part as we drive past glistening paddy fields. Bee-eaters emerge with the sun, skipping about the power lines, their blue beards offering a whiplash of colour in a world grey and green so far. When we reach Dikwella town, I banter with the driver about Niroshan Dickwella, the sort of cricketer I have a particular fascination for – talent that doesn’t deliver on early potential. Dickwella is a ‘character’ too, a term the timid often use to describe big personalities. Once, when Jonny Bairstow walked out to bat in a Test match, Dickwella quipped from behind the stumps, in the Sinhala lilt I am so fond of: ‘He gonna play the IPL, playing for cash only.’

The house we are renting in Hiri is on the incline of a meandering road leading down to the bay. Sitting by the pool, I study a coffee-table book titled Houses of Sri Lanka. It puts me in a reverie of tile, teak and trellis. What does one do with the guilt of being rich in a poor country? Immerse oneself in reminders of just how out of reach one’s own idea of beauty is.

And throw oneself into food and drink. We head to a bar that recently made one of those ‘Best 50’ lists that give our social class something to talk about. The smoked chicken pâté, smeared richly on sourdough, goes down like a dream. The char and crisp on the seafood doesn’t compromise its juices. The wambatu moju is a party in the mouth, the cold squish of brinjal kicked up by mustard and vinegar. The first two cocktails sharpen our senses; the last two blunt them. My drink of choice is named after Anula, an ancient queen from Anuradhapura who poisoned at least four consorts and husbands on her way to the top.

Back at the villa, under the night sky, I swim some laps in the small cool pool. Perhaps it’s the buzz, but I feel my strokes to be cleaner than ever, slicing and scything the water at the correct angles. When I come up for breath, I hear strains of the house music that Huss is curating. Baks is sprawled on the sofa, reading. Nees is on his phone, relaxed, quipping occasionally. A life aquatic, the easy camaraderie of friends you went to school with, some light-headedness from food and drink. What more is there to wish for?

The next day is for the sea, which is crowded with beginner surfers. I think back to that 2011 trip, when a friend and I took a surfing lesson from a trishaw driver at Pottuvil Point, in Arugam Bay on the East Coast. The sea was wild, the beach desolate. Surfing, what a sweet slog. Hauling the body, which feels like deadweight, towards the swell, going eye-to-eye with the watery wall, then the mighty heave up, the turn towards the beach, and, finally, the head rush if you manage to stay on the board. I have a graphic memory of being knocked over by an enormous wave, its roar first flooding and then blocking my ears. I felt the sickening tug of the ankle strap and the board crashing dully into my foot. A rich stream of blood gushed from the cut. I stayed out of the water after the trishaw man said the wound would attract sharks.

Now, standing on Hiri’s main beach, mentally charting a path to avoid rocks and surfers, I marvel at the cojones of my 20-year-old self. When had I become so fearful? How had I, lightest of travellers, accreted things I couldn’t afford to lose? I swim frog-style with my head above the water, to avoid the temptation of gauging the depths. I know I will see a blur of teal and brown, illuminated by a column of light from the surface. It is cold, dark and frightening down there. It makes me want to know what is beyond. Open sea swimming: the closest I’ve come to descriptions of spiritual experience.

Next morning, Huss and I make it to a yoga class led by Gabby, who is British and camps out in Hiri during the season. We watch the class fill up with Caucasians. We take in, with envy, their sinewy traps and glutes like little boulders. I am immediately conscious of my gangly frame, the stringy arms and the chicken legs. Gabby, seated in front of a basalt-grey idol of Ganesha, starts the class with an invocation to Hanuman. I flounder through the asanas, humbled by stiff body and racing mind. The woman next to me, in Lululemon from top to bottom, is a picture of poise. At the end of the class, when Gabby brings out a harmonium to accompany her incantation of Jai Siya Ram, I am moved by her conviction. I realise I may be tired of living ironically. I want to go up to her, the Hot Priestess in this scenario, and tell her, as Fleabag did the Priest: “I think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Mother, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”

In and around the main drag in Hiri, the cafes blend into one another, as they would in Bandra or Bali or any place where people with made-up jobs congregate to live the ‘slow life’. It’s where the fonts on the menu are as clean as the food, any uneven spacing buffed out by leading and kerning until the ‘look’ is achieved. For better or worse, this world is my comfort zone. The spell cast by the droning harmonium is wearing off. I put away a giant avocado toast and some eggs.

IV

The landscape is suddenly drier, hardier, as we travel eastwards to Tangalle. The road is lined with trees but these are stern and not enveloping. Rice fields on both sides, farmers ankle-deep in the slush. There is no sign of the sea, even though a simple right turn and a few minutes’ drive would take us to a most stunning and stark stretch of coast, on the smooth sands of which crabs tap dance with abandon and turtles waddle up to nest.

The storm has passed. Among people working in the tourist sector, the mood is cheerier. Still, for a country grappling with the ripple effects of the 2022 financial collapse, Ditwah has proved too costly. Business-owners, managers and drivers ask us to leave reviews, to mention the country is safe for travel. A healthy season is critical to many livelihoods, especially after a string of hard years starting with the Easter Bombings, the pandemic and then the economic upheaval.

That last crisis led to a political reckoning. The Rajapaksa brothers, under whom the civil war ended in 2009, were forced out following the aragalaya of 2022, a remarkable series of public protests against rising prices. In the 2024 presidential election, Sri Lanka opted for a third front for the first time. During our travels in the South, I spot posters with an unmistakable face: a man with a scholar’s thick-framed glasses and a Che-style beret. He is Rohana Wijeweera, who died in police custody in 1989. In the early 1970s and late 1980s, he led two failed insurrections in the South. Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, an organisation he founded, is today the leader of the NPP, the alliance of left-leaning parties in power.

The revolution may have claimed to be casteless and classless, but it was not raceless. The JVP’s Marxist politics has long carried a strain of Sinhala nationalism. In the late 1980s, it accused the state of selling out by inviting the Indian Peacekeeping Force. In 2005, it withdrew from the ruling coalition over a proposed joint mechanism with the LTTE to administer tsunami relief, arguing that it would legitimise a separatist movement. This divided island – to use the title of Samanth Subramanian’s fantastic book – is divided in more ways than the obvious one.

Around talking politics, there seems to be an openness I don’t recall from previous trips. If this sounds like a Western publication-style ‘the taxi driver said…’ analysis, I’m afraid it is. The language barrier doesn’t allow for texture. Contextualising takes reading and research. And, on a pleasure trip like ours, you see what you want to see or what you are shown; the real rhythms of a place, the inner lives of its people, remain out of reach.

In the hotel in Tangalle, we get chatting with a British couple. Back home, he does electrical work, and she helps out on the family farm. Encounters like this are charged with an undercurrent of class implications, though I suspect it’s felt more acutely by me than my interlocutors. As usual, I slip into a standard spiel explaining India – good, bad, ugly. I now recognise this need for representation as a cover for my insecurities. I don’t speak or read any of my country’s languages well enough. I can’t cook its food with any level of proficiency. I am prickly about its society’s emphasis on community over individuals. My connection to the nation feels abstract, loosely linked to romantic ideals that have nothing to do with its daily life.

V

The next day, we rise at dawn to go birdwatching in Kalametiya Lagoon. A boatman and guide wait for us on a flimsy catamaran. But as morning fills in the swamp’s colours, I realise how fit-for-purpose the contraption is. It allows us to spin around when a darter emerges to sun its glossy wings. It lets the boatman paddle closer to the mangrove roots on which a kabaragoya, the water monitor, is wrapped. We are close enough, and quiet enough, to notice the faint yellow striations on its ancient-looking coat, the precise way it wiggles its opposite limbs to inch its considerable belly forward.

The boatman navigates around islands of trees, creepers, weeds, the names of which I don’t know. It took until my early thirties to realise that the artists I admire often know the proper names of things. Detail separates the dilettante from the professional; the professional from the gifted. I fear it may be too late to start learning what things are called.

The spot of the morning is the stork-billed kingfisher. It happens when I am watching a pelican through the binoculars, transfixed by the size of the wrinkly pink pouch under its bill. There is something Jurassic about it, an adaptation that might have evolved long before the earth was peopled. When the guide asks if we hear a sound like laughter, I pick up a faint cackle. ‘Ah, it is there, stork-billed,’ he says, pointing to a tree in the distance. On the binocs, I only just glimpse its outsize red beak. How did he spot that with the naked eye?

As we return to the pier under the now harsh sun, a spindly fisherman, shirt hanging loose on sunken shoulders, hails our boat. He throws a paraw fish on board. It thrashes about until it lies still. The guide offers us kokis, coconut milk cookies shaped like flowers and smelling faintly of butter and grease. ‘Wife told to take for guests,’ he says softly. Overwhelmed by this simple kindness, I entertain radical thoughts of domestic bliss, alongside a worldly woman who will coax me to live outside my head. Not for the first time, I wonder if my co-travellers are sick of me, this guy who is so easily moved, who strains to extract meaning out of every routine exchange.

In the evening, and to humour my fascination with luxury hotels, we head to the Amanwella. The courtyard in front of the main entrance – a low modernist pavilion – is a study in minimalism: red earth, a single champa tree, lights in the style of shoji lanterns. I wonder if the design brief was ‘Japanese garden in the tropics’. Huss, who works for a hotel chain, does the talking at the reception, all charm without smarm. A staff member, polite without being servile, shows us around. By the pool overlooking the bay, guests – exclusively white – sip calmly from a mug of beer or a flute of champagne. Several of them are companionless, but, to me, it looks blissed out as opposed to lonely at the top.

In the driveway, we spot a handsome couple in white linen, probably in their fifties. The man’s look of rugged health marks him as the kind of wealthy southern European the camera repeatedly pans to during the clay-court season. I’m pleased to see him again that evening, on an adjacent table at a restaurant above a rocky beach. In this particular choice, at least, we are levelled.

VI

By moonlight, we trudge along the sands of Rekawa Beach, where we arrive late for a turtle-nesting session. The group is further down, and we scurry to catch up. In the rush, tumbling over a ledge of sand and feeling it cave under my sandals, I experience a frisson that takes me back to childhood, a rare moment of spontaneity in a rehearsed existence. A familiar twinge in my lower back brings me back into the present. The fantasy of childhood is the desire to return to a state of no pain, before the sins of body and mind compromise the ability to taste a moment without baggage.

The group is huddled at a respectful distance from a green turtle. Its flippers work like propellers, flicking sand to cover the hole. When the task is done, it turns, unhurried, towards the ocean. After its carapace disappears completely in the swell, as if a piece of flotsam, the volunteers stride towards the nest. They dig it up and transfer the eggs – 118 in all – into a gunny bag. We walk with them to a spot where they excavate a fresh hole and tip the bag over. This keeps the eggs safe from stray dogs and tides. I flinch, expecting them to crack, but they land in the cavity without so much as a plop. In two months or so, the hatchlings will stagger out to sea on a moonlit night like this one.

Back at the conservation centre, we chat with a middle-aged supervisor. He used to attend scientific conferences around the world, he tells us, but funding has dried up now. The animals, meanwhile, are struggling with the effects of climate change. On his phone, he pulls up an old photograph of himself posing alongside a gigantic leatherback turtle. He is fuller-faced and has that youthful light in his eyes. I can see why he thinks of the past as more abundant. I want to say to him: ‘It’s okay, Turtle Man, we are young and then we get old. You did well, you fought the good fight.’ But I catch myself. It is something I am working on: to avoid feeling wistful for a story, for a person, I only barely know.

VII

We drive through Hambantota district on the way to Yala. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s constituency, it was meant to be the showpiece of his regime. A port and airport were built with Chinese funds. South Korea paid for a convention centre. Reports suggest that these projects are white elephants.

Even while transiting, it’s possible to perceive the hollow scale. Water buffaloes graze on the grassy strip dividing the massive highway lanes. The convention centre, looming to the left, looks like a sterile behemoth. On that first trip in 2011, craning sweaty-faced through the steel grilles of Transport Board buses, I had seen forklifts around the port area. Now, from the confines of this air-conditioned private vehicle, it all looks ready and spanking new but missing the thrum of life.

It is a baking day. The sun stings the nape when we alight at the ‘bush camp’ I have booked close to the main gate of the national park. I sold it as an authentic experience but Huss isn’t having it, not with the flies and critters. The urge to defend my choice is neutralised after I spy a spiny-backed lizard luxuriating in the small gap between the thatched roof and mud wall of our bedroom. In the bathroom, a speckled spider squats serenely in its web.

Before checking out, though, we tuck into an epic lunch: juliennes of beetroot cooked in coconut milk; a chicken curry rounded with the woodiness of cinnamon; rings of fried bitter gourd for the crunch; airy coconut sambol for a coarse, salty texture. All this with clumps of dry, mild dhal and hillocks of hot, fluffy rice. The great pleasure of a Lankan rice-and-curry is in the mash-up. Let the rivulets of brown gravy run into the crimson beet; allow the chilli-flecked heap of sambol to sit on the dhal. Scoop it all up with your fingers; rouse your slumbering taste buds.

Nishantha, the property manager, is unbearably gracious even as we decamp for the creature comforts of the DoubleTree in Weerawila. Not only does he waive a chunk of what we owe him, he also presents us with a framed photograph of a Yala leopard. We learn that he is a snake whisperer, having grown up in the forests of the eastern region around descendants of the Vedda, the earliest inhabitants of Sri Lanka.

VIII

It is poya, the monthly holiday to mark the full moon in the Buddhist calendar. But Yala is finally open after the Ditwah disturbances. At 5am, bleary-eyed, we huddle in the hotel lobby to meet the driver-guide. We hear strains of chanting from the monastery across the property, carried over the waters of Weerawila reservoir. The inky blanket of night lifts as we race towards the park gate in a modified Toyota Hilux. In Tissamaharama, we drive past the market, already heaving with men in hitched-up sarongs and women in floral-printed dresses, buying vegetables and fruit – no meat and liquor on poya – for the auspicious day.

When we enter the park in a neat procession, I can’t shake off the feeling of participating in a regimented exercise. Jeeps will line up, tourists will gawk, some people will take photographs, and then, as in a drill, we will all leave. Tree trunks are strewn about as relics of Ditwah, but even this part of the scene appears man-made: the logs have been carefully placed beside the path, now pounded by jeeps that leave behind puffs of earth and whiffs of oil.

But as the landscape opens out into scrub and grass, I find myself committing to the bit. Beyond a tableau of motionless elephants, a sliver of blue-green sea glints tantalisingly. A black-necked stork hops around on one leg, the plumage on its head shimmering like an oil slick. Gnarly crocodiles bask mere feet away. When a flock of hornbills takes flight within earshot, the startling sound is of tarpaulin sheets flapping madly in the monsoon wind.

In the recess for lunch, the vehicles all park in a clearing outside a pavilion facing the beach. Toque macaques rustle the canopy above us. The driver-guides bring out identical tiffin boxes containing the same simple food: rice, dhal, long beans, fried chicken, fruit. Waking from a fitful nap on a deckchair, I see people crouching to take pictures of a thalagoya, the land monitor lizard.

Huss tells me he ran into the same individual in the loo. A couple of days ago, I’d reread the passages about thalagoyas and kabaragoyas in Michael Ondaatje’s incandescent Running in the Family. He’d written about children being fed the forked tongue of the thalagoya because of a myth that it would make them “brilliantly articulate”. His Uncle Noel almost died after eating half a tongue, traditionally served as sandwich filling between pieces of banana. But he also ended up a fine lawyer and great raconteur.

The money shot arrives shortly after lunch. We are stirred from post-prandial torpor when the driver revs up. He wants us to be in pole position to spot Jessica, the leopardess known for scientific purposes as YF52. We watch spellbound as she cuts across the path, haunches rippling in the sun, long tail curling as though a portent of yore, whiskers trembling from the activity around her.

The mood is buoyant now. The driver, relaxed after shedding the burden of a ‘sighting’, brings us around to a collection of large rocks. Pointing out a type of bunker, he says it is an army shelter from the days of the war, when LTTE cadres took cover in these forests. We scan the crevices and tops of the boulders – peak leopard habitat – but there is nothing there.

On the return drive, the sky is smeared with clouds, which muffle the final rays of day and render the fields in chiaroscuro. Men the age of our fathers ride home on bicycles, plastic bags dangling from handlebars. Obedient mongrels follow spirited children on bunds bordering the landholdings. In Tissa, the morning’s bustling market lies empty. From its loudspeakers, poya chanting carries across the town, deep and sonorous and soporific.

The arrack hits different after a swim in the hotel pool. Night falls as the colour of liquid goes from golden to amber to caramel. The air turns heavy with the chirr of cicadas and the perfume of flowers. We talk and talk, in the way one only can an ocean away from home. Limbs purr with sweet exertion, the mind whirs with ideas for new projects, and my heart feels homed, even if provisionally, on this long evening in the thick tropics.

IX

I dream on the road to Unawatuna. I am in London. Specifically, at the Nando’s on Commercial Street near Spitalfields Market. BM, a partner at the law firm I used to work at, is seated across from me. No man in the world wears a suit better. He looks at me over his tortoiseshell glasses and asks what I want to do with my life. When I come to, the car is gliding towards the Galle exit on the Expressway. In the wake of the dissociative feeling dreams evoke, I’m left wondering if BM ever asked me this question. I suddenly miss the insouciant way he inhabited that stuffy world. I miss those lunchtime runs to Nando’s.

It turns out we are not staying in Unawatuna, but nearby. The house, owned by a Swedish lady, is down a skinny lane bisecting a paddy field. Inside, a hyperactive dog called Micky runs rings on the spiky lawn grass. Dragonflies copter down to the plunge pool at the far end of the garden. In a niche in the whitewashed kitchen, I find a cookbook from Ottolenghi, yet another London restaurant where I had many happy lunches.

In the evening, we take trishaws to the padel courts at Araliya Beach Resort in Unawatuna. The main building is a tower, rising incongruously above the trinket stores and pizza restaurants on the main drag. It seems popular with the Russians. The court complex is managed by a young Portuguese man who lives here with his family. For dinner, we head to a restaurant called Hot Rock. In 2011, it was a shack with three tables. At high tide, the waves would crash into its unpainted wall. The aunty who owns it is much as I remember her, save for some grey around the temples: the same boy cut, the same warm smile.

We take a table on the beach, sinking toes in the sand. I am thirsting for a tipple and a dip, though the sudden drop in the sea here needs some caution. One moment, you’re splashing about in water up to the shin; the next, the ocean floor has fallen away beneath you. For swimmers, though, the conditions in Unawatuna are often ideal. There are few rocks, and the cove shuts out giant waves. In Karunatilaka’s Chinaman, a character spends a month editing a book here. He eats crab curry, watches the bay change colour, floats in the ocean after dinner. Perhaps I will do the same some day, when I have enough money, fewer obligations, and a book of my own to edit.

We spend most of the next day at Vijaya Beach, where we suspect the green turtles may be domesticated. Three men walk up and down the strip of sand, selling seaweed as turtle feed. The shallows are littered with floating pieces of green, either rejected by overfed turtles or dropped by tourists stumbling over rocks and the surf. Up close, the turtles look prehistoric and stately, appearing to deliver a permanent side-eye. When I swim around behind one and take in the dazzling tessellation on its hind flipper, I understand why the Russian children are approaching them with a kind of reverence.

The rain that has been threatening falls in spurts. The sky puts on a show of giddy colour. Sandy-haired, salty-bodied, still dripping from rain and sea, we gather around a wood-fired pizza as though in some elemental ritual, wolfing it down with a relish that fools us into thinking we worked for it.

X

Colombo for the final leg. Clang of kottu cutters in Bambalapitiya. Chatter in the hipster bars of Park Street Mews. Stillness inside the Seema Malaka temple on Beira Lake. These are the sounds and silences of the city now, but I’ve been told it was a different city during the war years. Even now, I perceive an afterhours quiet, quite unlike a thrumming capital. In January 2015, after gruelling bus rides back from Puttalam in the north, two of us walked the long, hushed length of Galle Road in search of a bite, finally coming across the shawarma spit of De Pilawoos. This time, after prowling the almost empty bars of the Galle Face Hotel, we land up at In On The Green, an Irish bar where we are the only customers for a while. If there is a party on in Colombo, I still don’t know where to find it.

But Colombo harbours many secrets. Its keepers are the bold and beautiful who work and play with each other. On a Sunday afternoon at Barefoot Cafe, there are so many good-looking people it takes an effort not to stare. Tanned muscly men, sunglasses hooked into their linen shirts, trade air-kisses with plump-skinned women in flowy dresses and flashing nosepins. There is an easy conviviality we feel left out of, by both geography and temperament.

We are bunking at a Bawa-designed residence in the city’s swishest postcode. Its owners are the De Sarams, one of the island’s old elite families, entangled in colonial and national history. The house – two gable-roofed buildings connected by a low pavilion – is a shrine to architectural symmetry. Chik blinds shade a seating area furnished with a Dutch-era almirah and box-frame chairs, their sides chiselled into perfect squares. The chairs in the dining-room are more sinuous, their curved arms resolving into crisp edges, another expression of the architect’s partiality for hard angles. In the wing of the house Bawa left untouched, by contrast, some of the furniture is still ornate, with curlicues and other baroque flourishes.

Flipping through the visitors’ book, I feel a stab of envy at the impromptu sketches left behind by devotees of design. With a few strokes of pen, they have conjured up likenesses of chairs, lamps, staircases. One Japanese visitor has etched – in casual ballpoint – a portrait of Bawa at work. What must it feel like to make something of artistic value at a moment’s notice?

And then, just like that, it’s over. It’s time to head back to Bandaranaike for the flight home. At the terminal, after checking in, I return to Ondaatje. In the pages of Running in the Family, I find the poem The Cinnamon Peeler.

When we swam once

I touched you in water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell

A few years ago, on a flight out of this airport, I’d read this poem with someone who felt it in their bones. That was after a trip where, in the rasping sea off Kalpitiya, I saw a hundred spinner dolphins leap. Where, on a deserted beach in Tangalle, Lasith of the bleached hair taught me to crest massive waves. Where, on a balcony in Kandy, I wept reading aloud a tribute to a guitarist who didn’t quite live up to his gifts.

Now, as we walk to the boarding gate, I am mentally labelling the images from this time around. Already, they are proving elusive, skittering like marbles to the edge of memory. Will I see again the lone bodhi tree, enclosed by a low wall, somewhere on the road to Kirinda? Will it happen as dusk steals over the yawning land, my companions lost in thought as a dead wind resurrects and hits their faces? I may not, it won’t, but I will return here still. To this country of the greenest forests and seas. The reddest earth and arrack. The blackest ants and pasts.

The title, subtitle and something of the style of this essay are a homage to David Shulman’s Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary.

Few things drag like travel writing. I don’t doubt travel’s restorative quality; my skepticism is around the traveller’s ability to unearth useful truths about places and people. Most of us travel to satiate self-curiosity. Under a thin wrapper of hackneyed description is barely concealed prescription—look, here’s how I view the world. It may explain why the average travel story is a crashing bore.

The genre only comes to life when a skilled narrator is genuinely interested in matters beyond themselves and their companions. Their obsession with noticing remains hidden. There is an urge to get to the bottom of things but the recounting shows no sign of strain.

You read Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake—a whole forty-two years after its publication—and you realise what the genre is supposed to do. I would have said that it remains, after all these years, “fresh as a bracing spring morning”. But you also read Vikram Seth to be warned against lazy metaphors.

In the early 1980s, Seth, who was in his late-20s and studying economics and demography in Nanjing, hitchhiked on a truck across remote, stunning landscapes in western China to reach Lhasa. The narrative pivots around the bureaucratic question of whether he will be permitted to exit Tibet and enter Nepal through the land border, or be forced to return east to Beijing, and fly back to India via Hong Kong.

Given everything you know now, you’d think this is a low-stakes narrative conflict. Just how much hardship could possibly befall Vikram Seth, son of a Delhi High Court judge and a hotshot corporate executive? Privileged man who would, in a few years, write a landmark novel, and then, in the coming decades, divide his time between the English countryside (as owner of a 17th-century Anglican poet’s rectory, no less), a loving family home in Noida and a pied-a-terre in charming Nizamuddin East?

But here’s the thing—a well-told story causes you to forget everything other than itself; it exists in its own dimension. Precedents, antecedents and portents melt away as you skip along. Reading Heaven Lake, my heart drops when chances of the land crossing look bleak, even as the news is conveyed to Seth by Nepal’s ambassador over a glass of scotch. When Seth belts out ‘Awara Hoon’ (what else!) in the courtyard of a guesthouse in Turfan, I vicariously experience the exhilaration as the Uighur musicians strike up the accompaniment. In Kathmandu, where he arrives haggard after long, cold days on the road, I am moved, as he is, by the flute player in the square.

Then, there is the language, the sheer musicality of it. Seth is many things but he is a poet before all else, my favourite one in the world. When I think of him at work, I don’t imagine furrowed brow and leaden heart; I see him whistling while he works, turning a word here, tweaking a phrase there until he earns his evening scotch & soda for landing the tetrameter to his temporary satisfaction.

Here, I take the liberty to show as poetry some sentences he renders in prose in Heaven Lake:

A light breeze begins to blow

It grows dark, then quickly cold

For dinner, we have lentils and noodles

I sleep on a large wooden double bed in the house

Sui’s muffled snores vibrate through the still night from across the courtyard.

Soon after Heaven Lake, inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onekin, Seth would write an entire novel composed of sonnets—The Golden Gate. I didn’t quite appreciate the scale of this achievement when I pretentiously annotated a bright yellow paperback in a university classroom. Of all the books I sold in the final year of college for beer money, this is the only one I regret parting with.

Here is an artist grounded in the fundamentals of his disciplines, but fleet-footed in their practice. In the many interviews he gave following the publication of his English translation of the Hanuman Chalisa in 2024, Seth spoke about the challenges of retaining the ‘rising’ rhyme of the original (say it with me: Jai Hanuman gyan gun sagar, jai kapis teehu lok ujagar) in the iambic nature of English (his example: To be or not to be, that is the question).

What struck me about these interviews (that’s another thing about great storytellers—we will happily sit through repeats) was his rhythmic intonation. The Chalisa has an incantatory effect—why it finds favour with children—but I experienced a similar pleasant, zoning out while reading Heaven Lake. On page, Seth keeps his thematic throughline taut, but always in aid of letting the reader’s imagination unspool in a montage of stark images. See this virtuoso bit on the colours of the Qaidam Basin:

“...The ridges are of pink and slate and purple rock, with cloud-shadows falling on some of them—and the earth to the right is beige and ochre and fawn….later, lakes of distant blue, with a band of sparse vegetation in front, and a red strip of soil nearest us, like the tricolour of an artists’ republic. A sole gold mountain glows in the late light; camels graze on a green plain; the combed raked clouds are yellowed with sunset; and finally, there is darkness, and a salt lake, and the distant lights of Germu.”

I think you can get more out of this passage while gently rocking back and forth as you read. Seth’s ear for rhythm and wordplay is on display in everything he does, including painting vodka bottles for Absolut. He inscribed one of his bottles with a line well-known in Urdu poetry circles: “Na main, na mai”, neither I remained nor the wine. If thoughts are butterflies, what a neat way to net the sensation of a liquor-induced stupor.

He is also a master of dialogue, which is conspicuous by its absence in lesser accounts of journeys. How can you get close to a place without talking to its people? Seth, as usual, does more with less, managing to convey something essential about national character in clipped exchanges in Mandarin, a language he learnt well enough to be able to translate eighth-century poets. Sample this conversation with a truck driver at the depot in Liuyan:

Old Wang appraises me as I light my cigarette. ‘You said you wanted to go to Lhasa?’

‘Yes’

‘There’s a place in my truck. Only problem is, it’s a Liberation truck, not diesel.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘There’s no heating in a Liberation truck, and it’s really cold on the way.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘It would be bad if you fell ill. I should get permission from my unit-leaders,” continues Wang in a friendly kind of way. “Your cigarette’s gone out.”

And so it goes over 220-odd pages, human portraits rendered with grace, while accommodating the traveller’s internal churn. Seth’s dynamic with Sui, the truck driver who eventually ferries him, plays out like a beautiful short film. Seth sees Sui for who he is—a man whose “hard-bitten side inspires as much confidence as his patent goodheartedness”—and Sui looks out for Seth but with a kind of reserve for the foreigner that is natural to a working-class Han man (remember that everyone in China was working class in those days).

And here’s another thing about a good story: it requires a callback, a closing of the loop. I had a lump in my throat reading a scene towards the end, when Sui and Seth bump into each other in Lhasa.

Seth etches these specific pictures of human connection while making piercing observations on the fate and nature of nations. On the frosty relations between India and China, he was realistic and prescient: “Neither strong economic interest nor the natural affinities of a common culture tie India and China together. The fact they are both part of the same landmass means next to nothing. There is no such thing as an Asian ethos or mode of thinking.”

I’ve always looked outward, been interested in the world. Yet, I’ve always glazed over when it comes to China. Perhaps it’s for the reason Antony Bourdain (who forever spoiled me for travel stories; I wish he hadn’t left) suggested in an episode set in Shanghai: “The one thing I know for sure about China is that I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time…”

Reading and listening to Seth reinforces that I shy from doing the hard thing, from putting in the toil required to taste and touch a kind of understanding. Typically self-effacing, Seth writes towards the end of Heaven Lake that he couldn’t live a “continuously wandering life” because his “drive to arrive is too strong”, that his “impatience displaces enjoyment.” But this assessment rings much less true of that Vikram—translator of Tang dynasty poets, disobeyer of deadlines—than the one writing this Substack post.

(Note: In September 2011, when I was 20 years old, I read a story by Sharanya Manivannan in the online magazine Out of Print. It was titled ‘The High Priestess Never Marries’. The cool cadence of its sentences and the complete kissability of its characters set off fireworks in my brain. This was an early encounter with an irresistible creative pull, the kind that makes me feel that a life not spent building miniature worlds, writing imaginative things, would be a life frittered away. ‘Butter Fingers’ is what I wrote then, in the thrall of Sharanya’s story. I have made some minor syntax edits, and allowed myself the indulgence of deleting one line from the version published on my then-blog in October 2011. I was reminded of Butter Fingers—and the High Priestess—this week after reading some unpublished short fiction by my friend . Amal’s writing came charged with the snap, crackle and pop I felt all those years ago. Thank you Sharanya, thank you Amal.)

One evening, I ring Butter Fingers and ask her to come with me to exchange the t-shirt she’d gifted me. Not to be particularly nitpicking, but she never picks the right size. Or colour. That’s what I like about her.

“You actually think I’m going to come with you to Linking Road right now? When Master is batting?” Who said rhetoric can’t be an art form.

“If I go on my own, then it won’t be your gift any longer.”

“I’d still have paid for it, fucker.”

“But if I pick up something else, which you know I will, I’ll have to pay for it. And then, you will have to give me the money if it costs more than what you bought me. Or, you will have to take some back if it costs less. Kills the gift feel, no?”

She’s a woman at heart, so she buys that. She talks non-stop as she drives me—Master is creaming the English bowling, Bandra has lost its charm, women don’t know how to drive. When we park in the gully adjoining Naganis, she’s rambling about how she’s not arty enough to be creative director.

In the shop, I extract the tee I want exchanged.

“No exchange allowed, sir.”

Guess who steps in. “I buy stuff from here regularly. I’ve exchanged clothes before. Why can’t you exchange it?”

“Company policy, ma’am. Exchange of clothes is not allowed.” He points to a sign which says exactly that.

The colour rushes into Butter Fingers’ cheeks. She lifts her aviators and scorches the poor bugger with her gaze. He says, “Ma’am, I cannot do anything. You can talk to the manager if you like.”

He disappears downstairs to call his boss, while Butter Fingers clicks her tongue as Raina leaves something pitching outside off.

“Che. Master would have punished that. Pull to square leg boundary.”

Shop Boy returns with a strapping, young man wearing a tee in the same design and colour I want exchanged.

“Look, what’s the problem with getting the shirt exchanged? He hasn’t even worn it.” I nod meekly, and watch those fingers move as she talks. If she was holding something in them, it would have fallen. Thank god I didn’t give her my heart. More precisely, thank god she didn’t take it.

“Ma’am, company policy. Exchange is not allowed.” Second time in the day someone points to the board. I look at her expectantly. She’s buying time. She stares at the life size blow up of Master in the corner of the shop.

A glorious turn of the head, swivelling with the upper half of her torso. Like Master when he pulls to square leg.

“I know Sachin Tendulkar personally.”

Boss hasn’t seen this coming. She has given him a legitimate reason to continue staring at her. He manages a garbled “Sorry, ma’am?”

“I worked with him on the Adidas ad. The one that is playing on screen right now. I can call him, and we can get this sorted out.” This is Bombay, and this is Butter Fingers. So it doesn’t sound silly. If I had said it, Boss would have given me a lollypop, and asked me to run along home.

“If he wasn’t playing now, I would have actually called him.” A Blackberry is thrust forward. I look around the store, trying to avoid Boss’s gaze. If she pulls this off, I swear to myself, I will never, ever entertain the possibility of being married to her.

Boss is incredulous. At this point, he still seems to think that the greatest batsman of the modern game won’t bother himself with a t-shirt exchange in a retail store, simply because he endorses the brand and has worked with the customer on a television advertisement.

But that point doesn’t last for long. Like so many men before him, he begins crumbling. I see him capitulate before my eyes, and hope that I don’t appear so pathetic. I have a sneaky feeling that I do.

“Ma’am, this is such a small thing. Why are you getting so worked up? Sir, please come and choose another one. Though I wouldn’t want to exchange. See, I’m wearing the same one. Haha.” I’m a man who keeps his word. I begin deleting images of wedded bliss.

Butter Fingers’ face breaks into a smile. The fault line of her lips swallows everything around her. Boss and I lose everything in the quake. Butter Fingers plonks herself on the seating, and tut-tuts at the game while Boss continues to look at her from the corner of his eye.

I pick up a green tee that is not two sizes bigger than my normal size, try it on, and present myself to her. She tears away from the screen, tilting her big, gorgeous head.

“It’s nice, men. But it’s not too much different from the one I picked up. So much drama you do.” After all this, I’m the drama queen. I stand there like an idiot, wondering at the ease with which she slips in and out of the cloak of femininity.

There are two overs to go before the Indian innings comes to an end. Butter Fingers does not have to insist that we wait, and watch. Waiting and watching. I’ve become a master at that game at least. Bhajji is swinging, and connecting. Butter Fingers hoots like a hooligan. There are no gentlemen left in this heartbreak of a sport. Boss’ minions are slapping each other’s backs. But Butter Fingers makes them look like a bunch of Englishmen sitting in the members’ enclosure at a Headingley test.

Bhajji thwacks the last ball over mid-on for six. 317 for them to get. Butter Fingers looks like she’s the one who’s played a whirlwind knock. Come to think of it, she has. I pick up the bag with the new tee, and we walk out of the store. Shadows never fall on Linking Road.

“I’m in the mood for Pizzeria? Let’s go?” To her credit, she considers it for a brief moment. Then, she disposes.

“Nahi yaar. Not town. I need to get home and work on a brief. Client meeting first thing tomorrow morning. Bastard Sahni tells me at three in the afternoon.”

The compromise is McDonald’s next door. Compromises are always predictable. The colours of disappointment and solace from them are always red and yellow. Seating is available only in the open-air area on the first floor. We begin to devour our Maharaja Macs.

It is dark outside, but this is McDonald’s. The cheap neon lighting makes its way outside where we are sitting, and I can make out kohl-lined eyes that are tired. They are looking down on the appropriately named Linking Road, bridge between the island city and the suburbs. If only there was one such road connecting our hearts and heads. Butter Fingers goes from Fire Princess to Ice Maiden. Just like that.

“Eh, you know some new place has opened up on that turning, coming from Shiv Sagar side. Right next to Mocha. New place there every six months, no? Sabi says the place is jinxed because it is haunted.”

“Cha, this Sabi says all sorts of things, men. Just because he’s running a restaurant in JVPD, he thinks he’s one Juhu Boy.”

“Eh, you’re always after Sabi’s case. Listen to the whole story first. Back in the old days, when Juhu was still a place where only people with old money had their beach houses, there was a double murder there. Old uncle and aunty used to own that property. It was on the beach then. Juhu Tara and all came later. They say it was a hotelier who had arranged. Same story. He wanted to build there, they refused to sell. Sabi was interested in the place when he wanted to start up. That fellow who ran the Italian place had put it up for sale. Sabi and him go back sometime. He only told Sabi not to consider. He had seen white shapes of Uncle and Aunty throwing pasta at his chefs with his own eyes.”

I roll my eyes, making a mental note to check with Dad about the real story behind the restaurants on the corner. Dad has known Juhu from the time when that fellow who runs the paan-shop outside the now-defunct Haveli would have to turn back on high-tide days.

Butter Fingers starts counting on her fingers the number of restaurants that have come and gone. We argue over some names, and the duration for which they occupied that place.

“Hey, Alisha! Didn’t expect to see you here!”

“Hi Sabi! Wow, what are you doing here?” Mr. Hotshot restaurateur in the house.

“We all need a break from fine dining once in a while, yes? Especially when you run the damn place.” Flash of white above the chiseled jawline with just the right amount of stubble. Uneven goatees don’t stand a chance in hell.

Now it’s Butter Fingers’ turn to flash. Her world-famous dimples. My gaze hovers over her face like moths around a flame. “Who are you here with?” she gushes, as I burn my wings.

“Mamma wanted to pick something up from Metro. And my partner Arjun is supervising the restaurant today. So, driver at her service.” He makes an expansive gesture with his hands, and I see the reflection of Christ the Redeemer in her eyes. So this is what passes for charm these days. No one gives a shit if you know the capital of Colombia.

I force a smile, as I’m introduced to Hotshot. I tell him that I’ve heard so much about him. I’m not lying. As Butter Fingers and Hotshot make plans to meet for coffee sometime, I stare at my half-eaten burger, trying to remember the capital of Burkina Faso. It’s a funny-sounding name, but I can’t remember.

Butter Fingers is still beaming as she watches him return to the air-conditioned area. Then, she blushes. I raise my eyebrows. “I know he likes me, and I think I’m falling for him.” This the most unkindest cut of all.

On our way out, we stop to look at the score. The English chase has begun. Strauss top-edges one from Sreesanth. Munaf at third man fumbles, juggles, but finally manages to hold on to it, even as he falls to his knees.

A roar fills McDonald’s as we watch Munaf, cradling the ball like a baby, prancing towards his joyous teammates.

Alisha turns to look at me. She means only one thing when she says what she says before she hugs me, “Guess who’s not butter fingers anymore! Did you see how he held on to that?”

***

(The deleted line: I sit quoting Shakespeare in my head, while stubbled entrepreneurs in white shirts walk away with the affections of women I pine for. Story of my life.)

Amshula is a curator. She’s the kind of human who dazzles every room she enters, and even the ones she doesn’t. I have been both nourished and blinded by her light. In June, she wrote to me about a project she was thinking about. Bored of banal interviews, she was inviting some artists to ask questions of themselves—ones they want to be asked, ones only they can answer—for an archive she is putting together.

The people with whom I’ve shared pieces of my creative life, like some dirty little secret, know how touchy I am about the word ‘artist’. I’m not sheepish because it means nothing. It is the opposite. I’ve seen the work of some of the people Amshula has collaborated with, as curator and confidante. They are artists in the true sense of the word: their work summons its power from somewhere natural; it also makes serious money. This question of authenticity may be so yesterday but I’m afraid it continues to cast a giant shadow over my creative ambition.

So I was excited to be one of the ‘Artist Friends’ who received this email from Amshula; to be considered a practising artist by someone committed to the pursuit of beauty not as diversion but vocation. The idea also dovetailed with a personal essay I’d been trying to write. Scraps of it existed as notes on my phone but the more substantial work had been done in the shower, and on long walks and short flights. In these hours of pure pleasure, I had conjured up many paragraphs of imaginary prose.

But when it came to the actual writing, there was no entry point. The material felt very personal. It involved parts of myself that needed protection by remaining unnamed. The world is always seeking explanation. And I—pleaser of people, keeper of expectations—I can’t help but stumble through the explanations, resenting the expector, weighing up lost time, measuring the gap between who I am and who I wish to be.

But then came Amshula’s email and a shape into which these thoughts could be moulded. The scribbled shanties, the wordless cathedrals, were responses to questions I was desperate to be asked—and asked in a context that privileges understanding over judgement.

This is my explanation for the self-interview. Let’s get into it.

Vikram Shah calls himself an ‘independent writer and editor’, which sounds like one of those titles invented by privileged people to sidestep real work. When I pressed for details, the gigs he listed included a consulting editor assignment with a legal reporting outlet; communications work for a recruitment company; short-term editorial projects with authors of non-fiction books. He was previously associate editor at an online magazine for narrative writing, and, before that, a fact-checker for the weekend edition of a mainstream business newspaper. While at the paper, he reported a story on a Gandhi ashram in Nagaland, which the historian Ramachandra Guha—a personal hero of Shah’s—called “charming” in a tweet.

I met Shah in his bedroom, where he spends most of the day clanking away at his laptop, and, in his own words, “fretting about how I can make real money, life-changing money.” As we spoke, Shah kept glancing at a mirror, which was fixed to the side of a cupboard made of engineered wood. The cupboard’s fauxness was cast into sharper relief by an adjacent writing table, which he was at pains to point out was built from “old teak”. The gap between the mirror and the room’s door was too narrow for Shah—six foot two, gangly limbs—to get a proper look at himself. To do that, he had to step out into the corridor connecting the living area and his parents’ bedroom. He remarked on this spatial inconvenience as if it said something grander about his life.

Shah looks skinnier every time I see him. In the mirror, as we spoke, his collarbones appeared more prominent, the cheeks more sunken. But the years hadn’t dimmed his smile, which eclipsed any gauntness when I asked him about Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel Chinaman, which was lying on his bedside table. Next to it was a copy of Gideon Haigh’s Stroke of Genius, which, he told me animatedly, was gifted to him by the author after an interview on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2020.

Unlike that conversation, this interview has not been condensed for length or clarity.

How does one come to writing, Vikram? Or does the writing come to one? What I mean to ask is if one can learn to be a writer.

First of all, Vikram, thank you for inviting me to be interviewed though I find the idea of the elusive writer very romantic. In my mind, the aura of a creative person comes from the fact that they dance tantalisingly on the precipice of meaning. I believe that the reader, the viewer, the patron, must be overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to sit inside the artist’s brain and know what they are smoking, in a manner of speaking. I know I have a long way to go because I am constantly seeking out opportunities to explain my work, explain myself, even as I feel repelled by the act. An interview is also an opportunity to hedge against the risk of readers conflating you—as a person—with the work you put out. One defence against this risk is to insist, as Karl Ove Knausgaard has, that it’s not me, but it’s the “text doing something, the text thinking something….it is not me saying it from who I am, but from inside the novel or the essay.”

All this sounds like a diversion but it ties up to your question. To me, a writer is someone who instinctively understands what Knausgaard is trying to say here. It isn’t a question about fidelity to facts as it is about creating something that is true in the world of the text. Can you learn to feel this in your bones? I’m not so sure. There’s a kind of thinking—and therefore a kind of writing—that approaches the emotional core of an issue at a certain angle. It’s a sensibility, and I think one either has it or doesn’t. Of course, one can improve on technique and craft but I think the sensibility needs to exist to begin with.

Right. You speak of sensibility as something specific, but it may be much broader than that? In the universe of fiction, for instance, a mass market author’s sensibility may have nothing in common with the aesthetic view of a literary novelist.

No, the sensibility I am referring to is more basic than that: it’s the instinct to shape a narrative that is in conversation with human conflicts and contradictions. Durjoy Datta writes mass market fiction, simplistic in its framing and with neat little resolutions. And if you turn off the sound on his Instagram Reels, you’d think he’s just another content creator selling Indian millennials a certain yuppie dream—hot wife, cute kids, credit cards, clean eating, festivals, vacations. But if you listen to his voiceovers, which I’m assuming he scripts himself, you can see glimpses of the writer’s sensibility. His narration may be delivered in a saccharine, conciliatory tone but they are often about clashes: traditional and modern, Indian and global, freedom and belonging, families and friendships. He’s no iconoclast, of course, but you can see he is at least mulling over these questions in written form, as a writer would.

Recognising the fundamentally textured nature of human emotion and observation, and not flattening them in expression: that’s the sensibility I’m referring to. Geoff Dyer uses this wonderful phrase in the context of what a novelist has to do: “discern the psychological freight of the smallest gesture and the tangle of motives that constitute an individual’s moral relation to the world.”

When it comes to the resolution of these conflicts, Durjoy and I won’t land on the same side. And I’d pick a Naipaul title over a Durjoy novel any day of the week. But I do think there is an overlap in their concerns. The literary writers are going to take me to the back of the building and shoot me for this comparison.

I think both Naipaul and Durjoy would want to shoot you for this. I spoke to some of your friends as prep for this interview, and a couple of them did say you can be contrarian for the sake of it, haha. Okay, let’s move on. Was there an exact moment when you knew you wanted to become a writer?

When I was in the sixth standard, I got back a copy in which I’d written a composition on the topic ‘The Most Memorable Day of My Life.’ My essay was about the day I scored two goals in an inter-school football match. I’d tried to capture the pure and compressed elation of the moment the ball hits the back of the net. The teacher hadn’t graded it. Instead, she’d left a note: “Is this your own work? Please meet me.” Her incredulity seemed to leap up from the lined page of my notebook. The walk to the staff room was the most confident I’ve ever felt, because it was indeed my “own work”. Something had been conjured out of nothing, and a figure of authority, an arbiter of worthiness, had been left wondering how I had made it happen.

Of course, the writing may have been influenced by the sports journalism I was reading at the time. But I know now that to write anything you have to, as Julian Barnes said once, “deny influence” and “pretend that it’s not only separate from anything you’ve written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written.” Barnes calls this attitude “a grotesque delusion” and “a crass vanity” but he also recognises it as a “creative necessity.” So yes, it was this sense of having my originality noticed and acknowledged that is my earliest memory of wanting to be a writer.

You must have noticed how tied up this anecdote is to external validation. Even now, the moments of being published, read, and complimented tend to carry a sweetness that the moments of writing don’t. Most days, writing feels like tuning a recalcitrant instrument until you can take the harsh notes no more. But this is changing. Irrespective of the output, writing is coming to be associated with solitude. There’s a zone where the world gets drowned out, and it’s only me and the tak-tak-tak of the keyboard. It’s a lot of frantic backspacing, but it’s starting to sound like the soundtrack for cognition. There’s a quote attributed to the composer John Cage: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.” I’ve been unable to get over myself to the extent that I leave, but I do love the feeling of being completely alone and working on a thing I care about.

I think you might be underestimating how easily solitude tips over into loneliness. Don’t you worry about loneliness?

I worry about loneliness but I’m not afraid of it. Loneliness is inevitable if you’re serious about any kind of artistic pursuit. When the writing is going badly, which it often is, solitude takes on the flavour of loneliness. Also, when you’ve developed an aesthetic view but lack the talent to express it, or an audience that gets it, it can feel very isolating. The life of an artist is about bridging that gap, about finding the tone and the textual or visual vocabulary to express how they view the world. But the gap must not be completely closed, because loneliness can be nourishing for the work.

Kiran Desai uses the word “exquisite” to describe “artistic loneliness”. Elsewhere, she says that a writer has to be lonely. And I love what she says after that: “I know loneliness in all its different forms, the difficult bits, but also the sustenance of it, the quiet of it, sometimes it does also feel so glorious.” This might sound like woo-woo to most practical people, including you, but I get Desai’s glorification of loneliness at a deep level. An artist must stew in their own juices. You must be prepared for the world to call it self-sabotage. And it will be self-sabotage if you genuinely don’t believe it to be self-preservation. In Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, the aspiring artist’s mentor tells him: ‘Toote hue dil se hi sangeet nikalta hai.’ I would adapt that to ‘Choote hue dil se hi sangeet nikalta hai.” Choona, as in ‘to touch’. If you want to create art, you have to be touched by things, and you have to want your work to touch people. A creative person must be prepared to be touched by loneliness but must guard against being torched by it.

You’ve quoted Knausgaard, Barnes, Desai. Let’s talk about artist interviews. After everything you’ve said about letting the work speak for itself, you clearly spend a lot of time trying to lift the veil of creation.

I’m always consuming interviews of writers and film directors. The good ones are studded with clues about how the work happens. If they’re being authentic, artists often come across as self-indulgent and chronically dissatisfied in these conversations. The most candid interviews offer a glimpse of some kind of internal churn. But the great ones are never all doom and gloom: any bleakness is cut by charm, like light caught on the blade of a Japanese knife. At its best, an artist interview is like a cortado—the irresistible bitterness of coffee cut by a dash of milk…

You do have a lot of metaphors, I’ll give you that. Sorry for interrupting, please go on.

Yes, so I was saying that meeting the artist in interviews often confirms the suspicions I’ve had while engaging with the work. An interview can sometimes feel like watching an artist think in real time. In a television interview in 1977, Jorge Luis Borges talked about why he found English more interesting than Spanish; he said English has two registers, Latin and Saxon, which is why, for any idea, English has words with similar but not the same meanings (his examples: ‘dark’ and ‘obscure’; ‘regal’ and ‘kingly’). It makes sense instinctively. There is a lightbulb moment, and you’re open to receiving it because it’s coming from someone who has a deep love for language, someone that you just know relishes weighing words inside their mouth and saying them aloud when sitting by themselves. That’s the beauty of the interview format. For a beginner, reading or watching something like this can make them feel less weird for enjoying the things they do.

In my twenties, I’d inhale the ‘Art of Fiction’ interviews in The Paris Review. I’ve grown up in the kind of ritualistic and mercantile Indian environment where writing is, at best, a hobby. It’s not seen as serious work. It’s something one does for a lark. And the bar is so low, everyone fancies themselves to be a bit of a writer. You only need to use big words and bombastic language in a LinkedIn post or in a WhatsApp message to be considered ‘creative’. Such a person is referred to as a ‘wordsmith’ in my social class. So descriptors like ‘wordsmith’, and phrases like ‘more power to your pen’ have come for me to represent a kind of mediocrity and obscurity.

That’s why reading The Paris Review interviews, where writers like Marquez and Mahfouz and Lessing hold forth about writing almost as a matter of life and death, was important. And of course, the greats know that literary work is decidedly not a matter of life and death in the way medicine or law or technology can be. But it’s still the difference between life and death at the individual level. You get the sense that these people will die, metaphorically at least, if they didn’t write. I’m not quite there yet but that’s where I want to be. For that, I must get over the guilt I carry for wanting to spend all day trying to impose order on feelings through the written word, when I should have been reporting on tumours or running deals that move millions of dollars.

These days, as much as the craft talk, the thing that draws me to interviews is the chat about the circumstances in which the work was done. Was there a sick parent to look after? Was there a cabin in the woods, paid for by a benefactor they were sleeping with? Was there a pram in the hall, to use the Cyril Connolly phrase? Was a construction site next door creating a mighty racket? Rahul Bhattacharya, for instance, said that he wrote The Sly Company of People Who Care in “very noisy circumstances”.

As you can imagine, on this aspect, there is much more to gain from reading about how women work, with all the demands on their time and brains and bodies. It’s why, as I grow older, I hang on to every word in a Deborah Levy interview or in a podcast featuring Ayşegül Savaş. There’s a remarkable Mahasweta Devi interview from the early 2000s that I consider as coming closest to painting the truest portrait of the writer. There’s a point where she says, in Bangla, “Shomosto shomoy lekhi gechi”—I’ve written through it all —and that moves me in an inexplicable way.

But between all this reading and watching, when does your own writing happen? You seem to spend way more time reading about writers than actually writing. This was forgivable in your 20s. For the longest time, didn’t you dream of having your first novel published by 33, a decade after you finished college? Well, 34 and ticking now.

Wow, that was direct. But I guess I needed to hear it. The thing is: I still fear the blank page, the half-written page. I’m scared of confronting the limits of my talent, and even that is more bearable than confronting the limits of my discipline or my stamina for doing hard things. By now I’ve developed enough of a taste to know whether something is half-decent. Creating the world of a literary novel is painstaking work. You have to do it brick-by-brick, over weeks and months and years. I’m nowhere close to being a natural. I saw a tweet the other day: ‘There’s nothing more humbling than encountering someone who is casually better than you at the thing you’ve made an identity out of.’ This happens to me all the time. I come across a beautifully written Substack post, a pithy YouTube comment that packs in pages worth of emotional articulation, tight novels that have been written along with day jobs and I think ‘Pack it up mate, why are you even trying?’

Sorry, what was I saying? Yes, so building that world takes work. And it is delicate work. One poor sentence, one patchy transition, and the spell breaks. A modest novel is about 60,000 words. Imagine how much you have to get right, how many times you have to get it right. There are a lot of poor novels out there. But, with the novelistic form, I’d rather not write than write something unreadable. I don’t have this compunction with non-fiction. With non-fiction, I think writing something is always better than writing nothing. There’s another block I face….

So that’s the endgame, then? Writing a novel? With the life and career choices you’ve made, I don’t quite understand where you’re going. Where does all this lead to?

I’m trying to get to it but you’re interrupting my train of thought.

Okay, go on then.

Thank you. The other block I face is an embarrassment around feeling. In my milieu, melodrama is acceptable but a lower emotional register is not. We are naturally dramatic people, having grown up in the kind of homes where a parent or grandparent could say something like “I know you’re waiting for me to die” and then go on the next day like nothing happened. We have a lot of words and gestures but so much of it is performative. In daily family life, emotion plays out at such a chintzy, flaky register that it ceases to mean anything. In this environment, if you say what you mean, it’s viewed with suspicion.

This gets in the way of the creative journey. Most of the art I admire and want to make operates at a lower emotional register, which demands authenticity to get closer to the truth. And that’s the challenge, to feel and express without hitting that high note of sentimentality that feels superficial. This is especially troublesome when you can’t get over the need to be taken seriously by a society that rewards only two things: conformity or stratospheric success, which usually translates to money and fame. Despite what we’d like to believe, material success is an objective metric. In this society, the most pitiable thing is to be an unsuccessful non-conformist.

The novel remains the holy grail. I’ve been published several times since I quit a job in corporate law in 2017. I’ve written journalistic stories, a handful of book reviews, pieces short and long about travel and cricket and so on. On the fiction side, I’ve written a few short stories over the years, some of which had been published on websites that no longer exist. Happily, a couple of stories have been published in print this year—one in a mainstream newspaper and another in an anthology with limited distribution.

But I’m still embarrassed to call myself a writer because there is no novel yet, that thing with your name in large font on the cover, available in bookstores in every major city in India and preferably at the airports, too, defiant amidst the sea of self-help titles and mythological trilogies.

My career in writing seems cobbled together by standalone pieces of non-fiction and fiction. The novel could be the clean line. In his Art of Fiction interview, László Krasznahorkai said that the novel “contains a huge construction, like a bridge, an arch, from the beginning through to the end.” According to him, a story—as opposed to a novel—is a “black box in which no one knows what happened.” One of the conceptual problems with my stories is that they span long periods; they accommodate too many time jumps. My stories borrow unconsciously from the novel’s treatment of time but my characters remain impressionistic. These discordant notes are why the stories sometimes feel insubstantial to me, lacking a core. So yes, there’s an urge to write a novel to impose a kind of order on my writing career. A novel will make it feel like something real has been achieved, that all the wrestling with oneself was worth it.

Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question about when the writing happens. Let me ask directly: do you write everyday?

Well, what I’ve said partly answers that question. The writing doesn’t happen, not as a discipline in any case. I’m still very much a hobby writer. It’s not my day job. It should be my night job or my early morning one, but it isn’t. This whole thing feels a bit like something Geoff Dyer would say. He wrote an entire book about failing to write a D.H. Lawrence biography (Out of Sheer Rage). But there’s a difference. He’s doing a bit. He’s playing with form to say what he really wants to. There’s a lesson there—you have to be mad to want to be a writer, but you have to have a method to be a practising writer.

When I’m working on something actively, though, it feels frantic. I can’t think of anything else. It’s as Hemingway said in his Art of Fiction interview: “Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.” He also has this sex analogy in the same response, about how, at the end of a morning’s writing, he feels “as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love.” Weird, but then Modiji ne bola hoga…sorry Hemingway ne bola hoga toh kuch soch-samajhkar hi bola hoga.

Anyway—when I am in these bursts of writing, I don’t want to see or talk to anyone, I don’t want to do anything else until I finish the first draft, at least. This is actually a problem that needs fixing. This approach elevates writing to some kind of rarefied air, as if it must happen outside of life. But the only way to be a practising writer is for the work to happen inside of your life. If you’re writing outside of your daily life, ‘writer’ is not your primary identity. People say things like ‘Oh, I’m a writer at heart’, ‘I don’t need to write every day to be a writer.’ They—I should say ‘we’—write a couple of blogs and then, with cultivated bashfulness, say that we are writers. Would you go around saying you’re a historian if you don’t write history or teach it? You’re a history buff at best, an enthusiast.

That’s why I find it hard to call myself a writer. I don’t write every day. There simply isn’t the time, mindspace or stamina to write amidst the work, the family life, the paying of the bills. Caregiving for elders, getting the door, keeping the kitchen clean: there’s an assortment of little things that add up in a way to erode you and your foolish dreams. Let me give you an example of the doorbells. On a weekday morning, I have to answer six doorbells. What a first world problem, you think. But it’s a very real problem for me. I am snapped out of the world of the thing I’m working on, and then I must lock back into it. I’m not a dreamy person, I take real life seriously, so it’s difficult for me to drown out the world. And the distractions accrete, you know, especially when you lack the courage to take your writing practice seriously. Let’s leave it here though. I don’t like the look on your face. People often have this look when I’m talking about the things that bother me.

Your troubles do sound somewhat self-inflicted. You’re not the first person to have to move back home to care for a sick parent, you know. And what are these bills you keep whining about? Your parents don’t need your money. I know your father tells you to stop doing your day jobs and spend your working hours on literary projects.

Okay, so we’re getting personal. Then I should also place on record that you have a simplistic way of viewing the world. You may justify your one-dimensional view, saying you’re happier and less worked up than I am. But I’d rather live without happiness, whatever that is, than live an unexamined life…

Hang on, where is this coming from?

Anyway, the bills are metaphorical. Financial dependence seems to me a kind of defeat, whatever spin I put on it, so I need to have enough money to be able to strike out for myself at short notice. It’s reached a point where I consider financial independence more important than the writing. It’s a dangerous place to be from the point of view of my creative ambition, because a life could go by with only the standalone, mismatched pieces of work to show for it. The danger is compounded by the fact that financial freedom is a mirage at this point, because I feel incapable of doing an office job that promises progress up the financial ladder. Nor do I know how to make money in something like the stock market. All this is hard to explain to people in conventional careers, but it’s harder to explain to people who live an artistic life. The result is that I feel caught in the middle—too normie for the creative cosmopolitans; too wishy-washy for the householders.

So much talk, Vikram, so much theorising.

Because talk is cheap, innit? And you know what, I’m not a monster. On his episode on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Colm Tóibín was asked whether it was true that he once told a creative writing class that ‘you have to be a monster to write.’ And here’s how he explained himself: “I meant, stop worrying about your grandmother’s feelings, your mother’s feelings, your girlfriend’s feelings; your job is to get the thing down and if you have to use something that belongs to you or somebody else, write it down. Just don’t be saying that ‘when Auntie Marie dies, I’ll be able to write the most wonderful story’; write it NOW…”

So, you see, I’m always worrying about everyone’s feelings—also because the ideas and stories that come to me are of the things I know closely. I’m incapable of conceptualising wildly imaginative material. I will become a serious writer the day I become a monster. For now, I’m a regular, well-adjusted man who tries to give society no reasons to fault his existence. Well, except for believing that it might be possible to live a fulfilling life without romantic and sexual companionship. That might be the most deviant belief I hold.

Oh, that reminds me of something that your readers—okay, friends—want to know. What do you do for sex?

I’ve gone without it long enough to not need….Hang on, where the hell is that coming from? How dare you. Can we stick to the work please? But you know there’s a thing that Tóibín said about sex in that same episode…

Stop. Just stop. Can you say one thing without quoting a novelist you haven’t even read? God, you’re so full of references. You’re an overthinker, Vikram. You tip-toe around the thing you really want to say. And it reflects in your short stories, if I’m being honest. You teeter towards the brink and then pull back from taking the leap.

But why do you say ‘overthinker’ like a slur? In that, you reveal yourself to be a foot soldier of the dominant modes of cultural production, where thinking for oneself is anathema. ‘Overthinker’—the word itself is a refuge for the unimaginative. I accept that the world has been shaped by men and women of action. But take a moment to look around you. The world contains wonderful things—it always will—but, on balance, do you think it’s turned out to be a place where most people retain their humanity? Don’t mistake this indictment for hopelessness. Because, like Mahasweta Devi said, “I am determined to live, I have that.” And engaging with the humanities is one way to live. The fact is that our ‘overthinking’ intimidates you, it makes you feel lesser. You worry that we may have tapped into something that’s outside your grasp. That threatens your technocratic fantasies of control; it reveals how mechanical your own existence is. I want to reassure you that my intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency isn’t a criticism of your life choices.

But I will admit your charge about my writing. It’s not airy enough, right? It feels like the material hasn’t been hung out to dry. There’s a sentence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, where she writes about a character called Obinze wearing a relationship “so boldly, like a brightly coloured shirt.” It made me aware that I’m nothing like this. And it made me wish I was more like Obinze. In my inter-personal relations, I can be a good ‘whoever you want me to be’. Agreeability may be the defining element of my personality. But the flipside is that I can’t be a good ‘what I want to be.’

This dissonance leaks into the writing. I think that’s where the work gets this quality you’re referring to—of stepping back when it’s time to pull the trigger. I’m not ready yet to pay the price for freedom. I won’t be ready until I have the courage to unsubscribe from this moral code based on reciprocity. That’s what lends the stuffiness to the work, the feeling of being trapped in a web of obligation and expectation. I stay in it, because the web is also a net. And a net means safety. My mind is open; my heart is closed. To write something real, the mind and the heart have to be on the same page.

Some of the things you say are mildly interesting, Vikram, but you don’t have the courage to convert them into something that doesn’t sound like an entitled whine. You like a good pity party more than having words on page. Because it’s the easier way out.

You know what, Vikram, you will never understand because you’re no different from the rest. You live like a clone. Creative work has its own logic. Rearing children and writing code and acquiring real estate aren’t the only useful things that can be done with a life. And you think all this ‘do more, talk less’ stuff makes you interesting. It doesn’t: you’re a fucking bore. You have no understanding of an inner life, of what it means to have your work move strangers, to be stirred by a sentence that sounds like music, to….

Vikram, dude, I’m trying to help you, man. You’re too far into your own head. “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” That’s a line from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky? Really Vikram, you’re quoting Dostoevsky to me? You saw this on Twitter, didn’t you? With zero idea of what comes before and after. You’re a mindless consumer of ephemeral, snackable content. You have created nothing of your own. And you have only loved when you’ve been certain of being loved in return. You have….you know what, fuck you.

No, fuck YOU, Vikram. Snap out of this batshit dialogue. Get a real job, settle down, have a couple of kids. Time is running out, buddy. And, for god’s sake, stop talking to the fucking mirror.

From 2012 to 2017, on and off, I wrote retirement tributes for a website called Sportskeeda. The first one was published in September 2012. Titled ‘The Last of the Gentlemen—a personal history’, it was an overwrought eulogy to Dravid and Laxman, mild-mannered, hardworking batsmen who, while not being impassive, didn’t always wear fervour on their loose sleeves.

I was 21. Chintzy nostalgia was my currency then, as a writer and as a person. It was many years before I came across a column where Nisha Susan quoted an unnamed writer saying “Sentimentality is emotion written by someone who doesn’t know how to write it.”

Matters of style aside, the central idea of that tribute still stands. The retirement of these South Indian batters signalled the end of an era. Tendulkar would retire from ODIs a few weeks on, prompting an outpouring that would earn me the then princely sum of Rs 10,000 and a dream of working with words for a living, still the most fulfilling and stupidest thing I’ve done.

Virat Kohli, who announced his retirement from Test cricket earlier this week, was a year into his red-ball career then. He was decidedly not a gentleman. He was a foul-mouthed, bratty dude who had the talent but perhaps not the temperament. Alyssa Healy tells a funny story from around the time. It’s about how Kohli rocked up to her and Ellyse Perry and described himself as the “next big thing in Indian cricket.”

It was exactly the kind of thing that cheesed me off, in line with my upbringing in a ‘good home’, where we put our head down and prized modesty. Genius for us was something whispered, not proclaimed with a guttural cry. And here was this punk with a fuckboy stubble, the kind of parvenu who’d rock up at IPL afterparties with spiky hair and a figure-hugging Ed Hardy t-shirt.

It was fitting that his first century came in what would turn out to be Dravid and Laxman’s final Test. When you watch footage of Adelaide 2012 now, you see the traits that would recur over a career: a wristy whip off Nathan Lyon through cover; a lofted shot picked from outside off and deposited over wide mid-on; even the dreaded poking on the fifth-stump line.

Then, you also see the things that wouldn’t repeat as much—chubby cheeks, the Nike sticker on the bat, a century celebration while there was still a single for the taking. “He’s a flashy player, and he’s a player for the future,” goes Mark Taylor on commentary. At the time, I found none of this endearing; not in the Test format, no, where it was important to be of dignified bearing and respect the history of this game.

In the summer of 2014, when he was struggling with swinging conditions on his first England tour, I was freshly done with college; not yet in the real world, and still turning my nose up at displays of pageantry. The thing is: I was able to overlook arrogance if it came with a high degree of flair and insouciance, and though Kohli was “flashy” compared to the general staid-ness that marked Indian cricket in the 1990s and early 2000s, he neither had Lara’s ballistic backlift nor Sangakkara’s silky sophistication. Kohli was not cool, he cared a little too much.

In his technique, he was compact and conventional; a busy cricketer, and busy cricketers are rarely a feast for the eyes. In the way he seemed to need an audience and an edgy encounter to sprout wings, Kohli was a more natural successor to Pietersen than Tendulkar.

As for me—by the end of the year, I’d had a humbling experience during a long internship at a private equity fund. Chastised by the insults to my intelligence, dazzled by the brilliance of my bosses, I was itching to prove myself at my first big boy job at a law firm in London. I was also receptive to a certain kind of tenacity that I imagined would be required to stay afloat in cut-throat workplaces.

By the time the coronation came in the 2014-2015 Border Gavaskar Trophy in Australia, I was in a slightly different mindset, less tangled up in transmitted ideas of right and wrong and more chomping at the bit to have a go at life in general. I was primed to finally warm up to Kohli, who, as it turns out, was also on his way to becoming his own man.

He was in imperious touch that winter. Four hundreds, including two in Adelaide, the second in an audacious but failed final day chase of 364. Finally, the shades of Tendulkar: he kept his head when all about him were losing theirs. But there was nothing of the Tendulkar Era in the way he got under the skin of the Aussies. The flab was cut, in body and mind. This was the beginning of the chiselled monster of the next six years, the 75 kg specimen of clean eating and cleaner stroke-play. The madness had a method.

His provocations, both from bat and tongue, took on a sharper edge. The prickled bloke who flipped a bird to the SCG crowd on the 2012 tour now sat combatively in front of the Aussie media, telling them “You guys hate me and I like that.” Single-handedly, he added a spicy dimension to what was still a one-sided rivalry. Kohli had left India as its most promising batsman; he returned as its 26-year-old Test captain.

From my personal Kohli-Cam, the next couple of years are a blur. I was away and he was home, in the sense that I was living abroad and had a demanding day job (and money to spend in the evenings) and India had home seasons, where, on dust bowls around the country, our man was cutting, nudging, driving, sweeping, whacking his way to big scores and burnishing his reputation as the most interesting cricketer in the world.

These were also his prime courting years with Anushka. India didn’t tour in the two summers I lived in London, but I did get to watch Pakistan and Sri Lanka at Lord’s, where I had to grudgingly admit that Virat Kohli was not the only thing saving Test cricket.

The home Tests are also a blur because when I look back now, it’s the SENA tours that loom large in the mind. In this melange of random images, he’s always in the foreground with his upturned collar, twirling his bat or chirping in the slip cordon, wearing a jumper or sunglasses, his whites unsullied by parched earth. And in the background: billowing backs of white shirts at an overcast, windy Oval; lager-swilling on the grassbanks in Durban; a hulking MCG made benign by the crisp quality of Australian sunlight.

In the prompt machine in my head, at least, Kohli is truly carrying the brown cricketer’s burden. These corners of a foreign field are where he earned his stripes, and by taking the fight to the game’s traditional conscience-keepers, gum-chewers and fire-breathers, he played a starring role in reminding them of where the sport’s power balance now lies. On the greenest grass, under the bluest skies, our bearded king was on the prowl, breathing life into every ball, spoiling for a scrap, roiling a civilisation used to having its way.

That’s why 2018 comes to me in vivid colour. The year of the holy trifecta of away hundreds: Centurion (January), Edgbaston (August), Perth (December). All three getting India close to the opposition’s first innings total; all three in ultimately losing causes.

Centurion is my favourite of the three, a masterclass in control and balance. He’s batting outside the crease but has enough time to get his head above the ball and smother the scented poison of the South African pace quartet. And you see what has changed from Adelaide 2012 when he gets his century—now, he’s watching the ball even as he reaches his milestone, scampering back for a second because there’s still a job to be done. There’s an anguished comment under a YouTube video of the ball-by-ball of this innings: “So outside the off stump is not a problem.” More than many others, this knock brings alive the phrase that Atherton used in his tribute: “a touch player in a muscular era.”

That was the summer I took a leap of faith and moved to Delhi for my first newsroom job. Outwardly, it formalised my career switch. Inwardly, it gave an utterance to my craving for freedom. Tie and suit jacket were only sartorial manifestations of a deeper disconnect. But well-wishers wondered how I would cope in the city—thought to be loud, abrasive, showy. But I’d like to believe I threw myself into it, all of it: crafty landlords and riotous amaltas; the internet wires chewed up by squirrels (or monkeys?) and the grey hornbills of Sunder Nursery.

Feeling alive in his city, I was hyped enough for Kohli’s UK redemption tour to write a kind of preview for the English summer. One of its lines: “The sound of leather meeting willow on a mild-weathered day at Lord’s is a special kind of music.” Old habits die hard.

From a Kohli point of view, it was a series for the ages. Arguably the series for the ages. The 4-1 scoreline looks more unflattering than it was: the first Test we lost by 31 runs and the fourth by 60. It was the Kohli show throughout. Two hundreds and three fifties laid the ghosts of 2014 to rest. Many of the images and clips you’ve seen in the edits through this week are from that tour—the kisses blown to Root after running him out from an improbable angle; the “common” that all of Edgbaston heard when he got his hundred.

And then there was Australia, where he led the team to a first-ever series win. In Perth, on a pitch that was only two shades of green lighter than the outfield, he swallowed the sting and followed the swing to compile 123 memorable runs. When he reached his milestone by helping an inswinging Starc delivery down the ground, he took his helmet off, pointed at his bat, and made the talking gesture with his gloves. Uff. This was Kohli at the peak of his powers—carrying a team, a broadcast, a format by force of personality.

It was the completion of my conversion to his cult, and so to the idea that life needn’t be observed quietly from a corner, that it’s almost necessary to make a song and dance about your skill if you live off it. I had grown up hearing ‘There’s a time and place for everything.’ But no, there was another world where every time and place must adapt to your thing.

I won’t go so far as to say that, in my first winter in Delhi, I transcended my own personality or background. In fact, I was gasping for breath in the noxious air, but even a prescription for an inhaler didn’t cripple me from greedily gulping the city’s seasons, its monuments, its sprawl. In short, I’d reached a point where I found it amusing and not appalling that the word ‘kaleshi’ (‘pugnacious’, in my inadequate translation) was often used as endearment in that city. Kohli was kaleshi, and he had the skills to back up the motormouth.

Test career-wise, things slid pretty consistently after that. That Perth hundred in December 2018 was his 25th. He finished his career in May 2025 with 30. Of course, there was a pandemic in the middle. And much else besides—two children, for the birth of whom he sat out away Tests against Australia in Winter 2020/21 and home ones against England in Feb/March 2024.

Meanwhile, the T20 juggernaut continued: three World Cups and six IPLs in this period, only one of which yielded him a trophy but most of which suggested that a lack of motivation has always been a surmountable problem for him. In these years, many millions joined our parasocial legion of Kohli fanatics—some satisfied with his electric presence on the field, some pining for lost youth, others filling their empty days by facelessly abusing Rohit fans.

When the Test career is seen from the point of view of numbers and his own lofty standards, there’s no escaping the precipitous decline of this period. The highlights buttress the story one number—9230—will tell. The slight tentativeness, the frequent scratchiness, the perceptive dimming of the fire that burns within: these will explain those 770 runs that never came.

Yet, even during this time of paltry pickings in his favourite format, his legend grew. Through Punjabi tweets that barely contained his gratefulness for his wife and child; through clips that suggested that a guy who once asked a journalist “Do I look the pooja-paath types” found solace in chanting the lord’s name; through shoulder shimmies with a freestyle dance group on Stereo Nation’s song ‘Ishq’. And perhaps this is the real legacy of Kohli—he could have remained in the gilded prison we built for him; but he evolved constantly, making choices that reflected a hunger for excellence in flannel but also life beyond it.

Six years is a long time, and life was happening to me, too. At various points during these years: I wrote a few things I’m proud of; I worked a dream job with an inspiring boss and a wonderful team; I learnt to express love and receive it; I saw birds I’d never seen in places I’d never been; I moved back home for the health of my parents; I met all kinds of people—kind, interesting, unhinged; I did things for the money; I did things for the thrill.

Even here, the numbers may tell a different story. I didn’t win any fancy awards, my bank balance looks pedestrian, the number of novels and screenplays I have written is still zero. I lost some love and drifted apart from a few friends. I tore one meniscus and the number of white strands in my beard crossed 10. But it’s not the whole story; it’s not the only story. Yes, there were lulls in the middle, mini-downfalls and mini-comebacks, but looking at the big picture, it was a happy, enriching time.

How can we end this? This story of the King and I. Maybe in the Wankhede stands in November last year, where the faithful sweated heavily as hawks circled above and New Zealand completed their whitewash. His batting returns were 1 and 4, but our eyes still sought him every moment India was in the field, where his involvement took the usual roles of elder statesman, team jester, rabble-rouser.

Or perhaps we can end at the Boxing Day Test at the MCG last year, where I was supposed to be but wasn’t because my application for a visa was twice turned down. Here was the pound of flesh extracted by my personal and professional freedom: apparently, it’s not enough for an unmarried, unsalaried brown man in his 30s to suggest in a cover letter that he wants to watch Kohli on his final tour to the country that ennobled him.

But, really, the best place to close this chapter would be to return to a Boxing Day past, to a cold, smoggy December day in Kalkaji, to an MCG bathed in sunshine. I’m in my little room, with its steel-frame single bed and flowery green bedcover. Kohli is walking out to a commentator saying “Every eyeball in the arena and around the world is on this man.”

On the broadcast, Melbourne comes to Delhi, in Rahul Bhattacharya’s words, “like a secret, crystalline”. I’m sipping my coffee, eating a cheesy egg toast, content with every life choice that has led to a moment when I can leisurely watch Test cricket at 11am on a weekday. Pujara is taking body blows at the other end. Kohli is seeing the ball beautifully, punching it down mid-on. He is in his kingdom, I am in mine.

Farewell, King. We’ll always have 2018.

I’ve been trying to find a way to write about Rejection, a book of linked short stories by Tony Tulathimutte. Since a majority of its protagonists are extremely online, depraved and touch-starved, it’s taken some bitter pill to admit that certain passages felt like an excavation of the shadowy parts of my inner life.

One way to do it would be to take the objective route, to cast the critic’s glassy eye and produce a polished article that puts a professional distance between the reading and the writing. I have some background in this. In 2018-19, I used to review books for a newspaper. Since then, I’ve been through a spectrum of views about book reviewing—derivative; anodyne; not an art; Parul Sehgal elevates it to art; my own talent too limited.

But I had a sudden urge to return to the formal way of doing things because I was stung by a comment (by user “mjc2023”) under a review of Rejection in Vulture magazine:

“....Sure, there are plenty of 40 year olds who can make a good point or two on Substack or in nonfiction, or via a meticulously curated shitposting account, but convincingly smuggling ‘the discourse’ into fiction seems to be a lost art.”

“Who can make a good point or two on a Substack”—this the turn of the knife; it mirrored my nagging thought that Actual Writing (as opposed to Ramblings, Musings, Some Thoughts) is always happening elsewhere.

Rejection is a good instance of this elsewhere. Its pages feel like a shrine to detail, to the thickness and intricacy that separates those who write as a practice and those who write to express themselves. Its virtuoso passages on themes like woke politics, Twitter troll farms and anime-inspired smut (a dizzying 4000-word email to an Only Fans-style creator) induce a trance with a trill as background score—hypnotic in the way the insides of a rotten pomegranate are. The delicacy is in Tulathimutte’s craft, not in his thought, and, from my aspirant’s perch on a lower branch, it feels like such a fulfilling way to go about the work.

The unrelenting and unflinching prose reminded me of a person whose style, at least at first glance, couldn’t be more different: J.M. Coetzee. Where Coetzee deploys spare, uncluttered sentences to plumb the dilemmas and depravities of the human mind, Tulathimutte, a self-confessed veteran of the “Irony v Sincerity Wars of the early aughts” packs his lines with lurid metaphors, succulent adjectives and attention-seeking italics. Different routes to the same destination: self-flagellation and doubt transformed to prose that leaves little to the imagination. Coetzee’s deliverance is in holding back; Tulathimutte atones with excess.

I’ll show (and not just tell) what I mean by excess. Rejection’s world is one where a character’s morning dump is “like a multistage rocket launch, so loud and fervid and aerosol”; where an incel is “not able to get much firmer than an overripe tomato.” This kind of full-bodied writing is interspersed with bangers like “Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure” and “Discourse is loneliness disguised as war.”

There’s also “Love is mutual, which means Alison has never been in love”, which made me sick in the stomach. This is the opening line of ‘Pics’, my favourite story in the collection. Move over, “Call Me Ishmael”. ‘Pics’ traces the gradual unravelling of “fat white bitch” Alison after a friend she sleeps with once displays no interest in encores. The unforgiving ending is a total suckerpunch, and by the time we get there, she has lost much more than the casual cruelty of a group chat and, in a plot device for the fucken ages, a pet raven with “a knife for a face.”

It’s an unhinged story and I would have written it off as far-fetched a few years ago. But I’m 34 now, and more aware of the batshit thoughts loneliness and a lack of self-worth can drive one to. I’m also more familiar with the denouement when millennials realise they are as mediocre and uninteresting as the people they privately shit-talk.

The single story that didn’t work for me is ‘Our Dope Future’, about a slimy Tech Bro whose life is a giant optimisation scheme. If the Tech Bro, who uses words like “algorizzm” and “deadass” without a hint of irony, is meant to be a caricature, it doesn’t quite come through, even accounting for the 30% more selfishness Tulathimutte has mentioned characters need to have for comic purposes.

Perhaps Rejection won’t hit as hard if precious years of your life haven’t been spent online or unpartnered. It really is a book of its time, in the sense that you can get more juice out of its literary investigation of brain rot if you have followed at least one Twitter spat (or e-lafda, as we call it in these parts) from beginning to end. If you’re someone who touches a lot of grass and doesn’t feel like you’ve “never taken the shrink wrap off” your life, I’ll understand if you don’t get my gush. Happy for you, bro. Genuinely.

But me? This kind of made me want to go back to the drawing board and rip up a lot of my published and ongoing work. Some of my stuff feels so cowardly, so tame in a post-Rejection world—dignified characters dancing around homilies, accepting their lot with stoic forbearance, muttering under their breath about the joy of little things.

There’s an interview that Karl Ove Knausgaard gave to The Paris Review in 2013. The final line is him saying “That is writing for me—a cold hand on a warm forehead.” My own writing, I feel, has tried to be the warm hand on a cold forehead, seeking solace, silver linings and slice-of-life authenticity. But there is another way of working, as Tulathimutte shows, where you grab the words and feeling by the scruff instead of caressing them into place.

Apart from the matter of style, Rejection has helped me confirm one thing. It’s only the work that offers a way out of the doubt. I know I want to write to give shape to sensations and feelings, especially the ones between the lines. Talking doesn’t do the shaping in the way writing does. Talk as a way to make sense has its own place, but it is too subject to vagaries of mood, moment and motive.

My inadequacies and doubts are redeemed when I convert them into content, into material, into art, call it what you want as long as I’m satisfied with the output. To strive to delay the demise of life on the sterile page—it is a worthy and hopefully lifelong pursuit.

Growing up, the clutter didn’t bother him as much. He hadn’t really formed his view of the world then. He had existed, as most children do, in the ongoing moment, oblivious to the past and the future.

But the clutter was always there. The house had been stuffed with ugly things. When not in use, the TV in the living room, or ‘hall’ as it was called in Bombay, was covered with an embroidered cloth, frayed at the edges. The cloth had little holes, too, made by insects almost invisible to the naked eye. His mother would fold down the fabric to obscure the holes from the front view.

The TV remote had its own covering, a plastic case with purple lining. Despite the care, the lettering on the remote had faded over the years. When it started losing its responsiveness, his father would extract the remote from the case and hit it repeatedly against his open palm. This was an act of resilience and not frustration.

The sunmica-topped dining table had two foldable portions on either flank. The fixed central plank was always loaded with items: a glass vase with plastic rose petals, waxy and dusty; a pen stand whose lacquer had chipped easily; floppy table mats with a low-resolution print of an assortment of fruits. The side flaps would only go up during meal times.

A jumble of steel utensils and plastic containers took up space on the kitchen platform. The adjacent sink was a stone bowl not large enough to accommodate a pressure cooker. Next to it was a pista green fridge, its insides heaving with more stainless steel and smelling of ghee and curdled milk.

After meals, the sink would get clogged with bits of stray tomato and coriander. Sometimes, he would transfer the slimy bits to the brimming rubbish bin, which was lined with a black plastic bag speckled with cucumber peels and the dregs of brewed tea leaves. Two calendars hung from hooks on the wall opposite the sink—one an annual offering from the local optician, the other displaying squiggles of Tamil script and garish images of Hindu gods.

The steel bar in the bathroom was occupied by at least two damp towels: thin and pale white and with a double-lined border in red or green or blue. When he had to dry his hair after a shower, the towels were useless. For that, he would have to sit under the fan in the hall.

So he had grown up amidst this aesthetic of accumulation where things were hoarded not because they were useful but because there was a time when they hadn’t been there at all. In this culture of possession, beauty could only be an afterthought.

He hadn’t given conscious thought to spaces and dimensions before he went to university. In Class Ten, the orthographic and isometric projections in Technical Drawing class had come to him quite naturally. After the Board Exams, his mother took him to a career counselling workshop. He did well on the spatial reasoning test. Father Jeevan, the counsellor whose athletic build couldn’t be disguised by a cassock, told his mother: “He should do architecture. Aptitude is there.”

On his first day in Ahmedabad, a professor showed the class images of her favourite buildings: Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Ando’s Church of Light, Bawa’s hotel in the forest of Kandalama. He spent the rest of the semester reading about Japanese design and Tropical Modernism. By the end of that semester, he had started thinking of space not as something to be filled, but created. Light became a breathing thing. When he came home for the holidays, he had nothing to say to his parents. He had made the break from their view of the world and things would never be the same again.

He now lives by himself in Goregaon. He is a partner in a boutique architectural practice. He thinks of all this, as he is driven towards Taj Lands End, where his client Zubair Khan is hosting a success party for his new film.

The cars are bumper to bumper on Link Road. As they wait, he spots a patch of mottled light on the footpath, the patterns made by a tall tree inside a building compound. The moment belies the busyness of this road, this city. He rolls down the window and immediately, the muggy air is on his tongue, the sharp stench of Bombay in his nose. It’s a wonder, he thinks, that artists create anything remotely tasteful in this clusterfuck of a city.

Now, in his mid-thirties, he knows that less is attractive only when more is within easy reach. But he hasn’t escaped his origins completely. He is wired to seek balance. It does not sit well with what he considers to be his artistic vision, this idea of balance. Balance is really a middle-class euphemism for limitation.

He remembers the time when he couldn’t stand the sight of that dining table any more. He was home for the holidays on a break between semesters. He had stuffed the fake rose petals in the chipped pen stand and dumped the whole thing in a plastic bin outside the society gate. His insides had glowed with a sense of closure.

When his parents asked, he feigned ignorance. In time-honoured tradition, they put the disappearance down to the maid. I will make her account for it, his mother had said. His mother does not prefer direct confrontation. She has an accusatory tone reserved for such occasions. She would have asked the maid in her special tone, “Manisha, have you seen the pen box on the dining table?”

It is the same tone in which she has been saying things like “I don’t think there is a daughter-in-law in my fate.” He has met a few women at her insistence, but nothing has ‘clicked’, to use her word. Too much water has flowed under the bridges of all these separate lives already. How do you build something new and fresh, especially as the years pass and you become more fixed in your ways?

More traffic on SV Road. The driver turns on the radio. Arijit Singh is singing about an impossible love. Mehfil mein teri, hum na rahe jo, gham toh nahi hai, gham toh nahi hai. His thoughts wander to Maria and what could have been. There is a power in this kind of sentimental music. It makes every driver and passenger a hero in their own tragic film. An image forms in his mind—of Maria kissing his forehead as he lies collapsed in her lap after a trying day. Thank god he has been loved, he thinks. It would be unbearable to go through life without knowing what it feels like.

Kitni daafa subah ko meri tere aangan mein baithe maine shaam kiya. He was both contemptuous and jealous of artists who created things for mass consumption. There was an essential difference between his clients and fans of Arijit Singh. His clients are concerned with art, Arijit’s listeners were thinking about life. There was a whole wide world between that difference.

The car is on Bandstand now. This time he brings the window down to take in a breath of the salty sea air. On his right, he catches a glimpse of ‘Jannat’, his minimalist masterpiece for Zubair Khan. Poetry in stone and brick, Architectural Digest had called it.

His mother calls. “Did you meet her? Her mother just sent me a message. Radhika has been at the venue since 6 o’clock.”

“I haven’t reached, Amma,” he says, not disguising his exasperation, “You need to relax. Why don’t you go for a walk downstairs?”

“Please have an open mind, okay? I am sure you will get along with her. Profession is also the same.”

“Amma, I’m an architect. She is a fashion designer. They are not the same. Listen, does she even know she’s being set up like this?”

Their mothers were part of a WhatsApp group of Tamil ladies in their sixties. They met virtually to sing devotional hymns. Radhika’s mother had posted her daughter’s matrimonial profile on the group, in the chance that someone had an eligible son, or could play matchmaker. She had noted that her daughter was ‘independent-minded’ and worked in a ‘creative field’. It had caught his mother’s attention.

“Of course. She said she knows you by face. When I told Lalitha you’re a good friend of Zubair Khan’s, she said that Radhika has done costume design for his new film. Some things are meant to be.”

“I’m not a good friend of Zubair Khan, Amma.”

“Lalitha told me to tell you she’s wearing a blue dress. You’ve seen her photo. I’m sure you will recognise her. I have shared your mobile number anyway.”

“At least ask before sharing my number with people I don’t know! Okay, I’ve reached. Just entering. Bye.”

The lobby with the giant atrium is milling with people, many of them famous. All of them are heading towards the banquet hall, where Zubair is expected to show up any time. Knowing him, it will be a grand and gimmicky entry.

She is wearing a blue dress, his mother said. Ultramarine blue? Navy blue? The world is full of shades and nuance, but his parents only dealt with monoliths. Maybe it is simpler to live that way. For all his veneration of clean and sharp lines, his mind feels like a ball of wool that will never be unspooled. He can hear the clinking of glasses and snatches of the airy chatter of the rich.

Zubair descends in what looks like a makeshift crane. Was he hiding in the chandelier? The beautiful young women gasp. There is something about this man, a magnetism about his presence. But time has caught up with him too, even the mighty Zubair is no longer frozen in youth.

He spots Radhika near the bar. She has a hooked nose, very aquiline. It adds character to her face. Her hair is pulled back. Her shoulders give off a sheen. An unfamiliar tingle runs down his spine, and causes him to think that anything is possible tonight. He heads up to her, and explains who he is.

“Oh my god, here you are! I promise I wasn’t trying to avoid you. I was just going to call.” She has a husky voice. She seems so sure of herself.

Suddenly, he feels awkward and shifty, like he’s in a place he doesn’t belong. He feels like he’s wearing a mask that is slowly peeling off his face.

“That bhajan group, haan? Quite something. But at least it’s given her something to do.”

“Well, she’s dealing with a Tamil Brahmin girl gone rogue. Maybe desperate measures are warranted.” He’s surprised by how that came out. He’s not had a drink yet.

She guffaws into her cocktail.

“So, architect of Jannat? Zubair couldn’t stop talking about it on set. And you know how it is. When he talks, everyone has to listen. So how come you’re into this whole arranged marriage scene? Broken heart?”

“Well, whose isn’t? I fought the idea when I was younger. Now, there are days when I think it can’t be too bad.”

A glint in her eye, a laugh that takes over her face. “Or—you’re just a good Tamil boy who wants to give his parents a return gift for their long years of sacrifice.”

It is his turn to laugh. He likes her directness. He’s tired of living this oblique life. He can already tell that her rebellion is more resolute than his.

Someone calls out to her from the other side of the bar.

He feels inadequate as he watches the shiny shoulder disappear in a small crowd. Yet, he thinks of a shed by the sea in Ashwem. He will have an upper storey added and make it a home. French windows, a bookshelf that covers the west wall, a red oxide floor for his studio and chessboard tiling for her atelier. Two tasteful Japanese woodblock prints framing the four-poster in the bedroom. They will wear loose cottons and walk around barefoot. They will drink coffee and smoke cigarettes on the little balcony. This is how they will escape the plastic water bottles and clogged kitchen sinks of the generation before theirs.

She is making her way back to him, leading a filmmaker by the hand. He has been in the news recently. He’s adapting a sprawling cop-and-gangster novel for a streaming platform. His jacket sits perfectly on his biceps, his tanned face is crowned by a mop of thick curls. He’s wearing those clear-frame glasses that are so trendy with the creative crowd.

“Meet Abhishek, my boyfriend. I was just telling him what our mothers have been up to.”

They all laugh. Abhishek introduces himself in a cursory way, as if he expects the stranger to know who he is. Someone else joins, allowing herself to be hugged by Radhika even as her hands are occupied by two martini glasses.

The lights shine brilliant in the banquet hall. Her dress is powder blue. Freedom is only temporary. Mothers may not know their children. Their children do not know each other.

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You close your eyes when you feel its corrosive presence in your gullet, the sides of which you imagine chipping away, when all you want to do is retain some of it in your throat, feel the liquid accumulating around your Adam’s apple so that to anyone on the outside, it looks like a clear, transparent patch that will stand out on your neck, making you the Shiva of Saligao, the Destroyer who remained unpoisoned, the neelkanth, the fenikanth.

Feni and cunt. You open your eyes, and find yourself chuckling, like a drunk in a taverna, which you are. Destroyer who remained unpoisoned is far from the truth. Someone puts on a switch somewhere, and a bulb half-heartedly illumines the figure in front of you: a dense haired, wet-lipped apparition, but you notice only the freckles, which you have called (will now call for the last time) stains on the face of the moon. The Englishwoman is shaking gently, not yet undone by the liquid conductor of the opera this evening, this First World Parvati of yours. The professional drunks of Saligao don’t even look up as they go about their job with practiced ease.

In this life at least, you’re a bellboy at the Taj property at Candolim. Too young to strut about like a fucking comprador, too old to think that you’re never going to get out of Goa. You’re attractive in a wolfish sort of way, the sort of way fellows like you are attractive to women like her.

In one swift motion, she has locked the door of her room and pulled you towards her, attacking your lips with her own pink ones, even your teeth and an unprepared tongue. There is no time for you to wonder whether she had caught you staring at her heavy, dotted breasts, sticking out from under her summer dress, when she was in the lobby. This was audacious even by the standards of a washed-up Englishwoman who gets on a flight to this country within a country to get over a messy divorce.

You’ve never had an older woman before, and are still reeling from the sex when she begins talking about herself. You see her hurtle towards what you know she considers her redemption and you say nothing even as you know that this deliverance might turn out to be her biggest folly yet. Hypnotised by the sight of her breasts straining against her t-shirts, and spoilt by the opportunity to free her of that yoke, at the very least, you begin to listen. Pressing your wiry frame against a rear that eats up, bit by bit, your capability for rational thought, you become her dumb assistant as she decodes her sins, unhampered by red curtains and latticed windows. All the very well. Padre Lucius would not be pleased.

It is monsoon. The only time of the year when Goa is for the Goans. When it doesn’t matter whether anyone has left for Lisbon yet. Quem viu Goa excusa de ver Lisboa, they will say now. The awnings in Fontainhas drip throughout the day, and the sullen Mandovi looks like she has finally had enough of her reddish-brown burden. On the floor of the barge to Betim, you can make out the brown imprints of the soles of the cheap, black sandals that the middle-aged women of this state wear. Their black umbrellas tucked under their pudgy arms, they gossip about other people’s sons or, if they are not in the mood for chatter, try not to think about the day when their own boys will leave. While the Englishwoman buys her smokes, you try to avoid the gazes of the gaunt old men that still carry the last dregs of a dream. In them, you see moth-eaten visions of the Bombay docks and the bottle-green jerseys of football clubs.

You pick up Sabby’s bike from his little dugout on what has come to be known as the River Princess Street in Candolim, after the ghost ship that lies forgotten in the sea a few metres away, daring scrawny, enthusiastic youths and pot-bellied men trying to spice up their marriages with a bit of holiday machismo swim up to its wreck, despite the warnings of the occasional life-guards in garish red-and-yellow.

You, in your local pride, hardly consider the wreckage to be an ennui dispeller, until that night when the Englishwoman drags you to the edge of the water at the witch hour, and you hear the waves breaking against its ominous, ghastly silhouette. In the silence that follows, you feel the manic frothy foam accumulate around your ankles, tightening and loosening its grip around them, fists of the vast, vast ocean clenching and unclenching, undecided whether to take the fight to you or wait for you to forsake the shallows and wade farther.

For the first time, you notice that the Englishwoman, in the four months she has been here, has gradually slayed the River Princesses of her own past—the vacuity of an unhappy marriage, a job as a low-level functionary at a hedge funds even as the creeping tendrils of the recession were growing into unruly, self-strangling vines, her spectacular failure as a writer in a previous avatar—not decapitating them with one smooth stroke of her Exacalibur called Goa, instead chipping away at them with it, eroding and discarding the past as only a change of air can.

On the edge of the water that night, you understand how one can fall in love with a place through a person. Along with freshly-fried calamari, snatches of Konkani drifting in from next door at the rented accommodation in Anjuna and the gentle whistling of ancient, swaying palms in a ruined paradise, you have been totemised. Love is nothing if not a totem for a new lease of life.

And so you ride with her on Sabby’s bike to Morjim, as the monsoon peters out and an assertive sun calls out to the denizens of countries that colonised and liberated and re-colonised this place. This is it, you think. The endgame. Let the season begin, let the hordes in oversized yellow swimming shorts take over North Goa, and cause her to end her long vacation from real life. You’re not too worried about the people talking. Countless young men before you have tread down the same path, fooling around with white women until it is time for them to get on their flights to Riga or Birmingham or wherever it is they have to go. Everyone knows how these things end.

But one evening in the Greek’s shack in Morjim, as you watch her rolling another joint, you get the sign that going back home is not very high on her list of things to do. She sits back crossed-legged, unperturbed by the attention she gets from city-dwelling young men, and imperiously inhales from the joint. Her eyelids droop for a brief moment, like they do when you rub your day-old stubble in her nether regions, before they open suddenly and she looks out on the sea again.

You begin to feed off your own fear, revealing yourself to be colonised by flesh. Not once do you indicate that you are uninterested in emotional involvement, fearing that a rejection of her heart will cause an automatic relinquishment of flesh. As she absent-mindedly circles your bare chest while you smoke a cigarette, she whispers that she loves you. She does not demand reciprocal declarations.

And so you find yourself in this taverna in Saligao, when you finally announce that you’re getting engaged to Flavia next week, and boarding a train to Bombay next month, where you’ll begin a journey to Africa that’ll end with you posted as a cadet on an oil tanker off the Angolan coast. This is your fate, you tell her. There is no question of wanting to leave. Like generations of men before you, you have to. She has had a lot to drink, but she has nothing to worry about. You ask her what she will do when you are engaged, and then gone. She smiles, and as if to confirm your suspicion, she says that she will wait for monsoon to come again.

(Author’s note: A version of ‘Kukri’ was published here on 23 October 2024. In a fortunate turn of events, it fit into the ‘War and Peace’ theme of the 2025 Short Fiction Special of Mint Lounge. Shalini Umachandran, the editor, got in touch to ask if they could run the story as part of the special. Thrillingly, ‘Kukri’ appeared as a centre-spread in the print edition of Mint Lounge on 4 January 2025. There are few feelings that match seeing the work in a newspaper, the touch of paper and offset ink a reminder of why you wanted to do this kind of thing in the first place. As part of the arrangement with Mint, I’d taken down the piece from Substack until today—18 January 2025. Here is a paywalled link to ‘Kukri’ on the Mint website. Grateful to Shalini for letting me republish the text here. Grateful also to Somak Ghoshal, for having brought the story to Shalini’s attention.)

In the absence of the predictable rhythm of domesticity, he is washed-up in a way men his age aren’t. It cost him his thirties to realise that a spouse and child don’t wear you down. They ennoble you instead. When you lose the luxury of time and thought, you have no choice but to keep moving. Alone, you’re trapped between thinking and doing, lacking the courage to juice the freedom for its worth.

The lonely ruminative spy. Such a cliche, he thinks as he checks into a hotel the Wing has booked him into. He doesn’t need a fake name. This is only an identification job, a one-off for old times’ sake. They have flown him in from Delhi with a strict instruction: No engagement with Kukri.

The hotel is on Residency Road. Its ashtrays and cheap soaps remind him of the city this once was, before it was choked by musty Ubers and coffee shops that blend into each other. In the restaurant below, he watches men in polyester track pants wipe their bushy moustaches after wolfing down a masala dosa. As he sips a second filter coffee, he thinks back to 2002, when he was tapped by the Wing.

It was his final week in law school, in a leafy campus at the other end of this city. A visiting American professor, an authority on Indian constitutional law, summoned him to an office overlooking the main quadrangle. Skipping pleasantries, Melville asked if he would work with the Wing. I’m CIA, the professor said flatly. Those were early days in the global war on terror. Melville was recruiting for a joint intelligence gathering project.

He had a feeling that the offer may not be a practical joke. The CIA had a history of collaborating with academics working on foreign countries. It was a Cold War thing and Melville was a Cold War man, a learned American in the old-fashioned sense.

Still, he said: You’re messing with me.

Melville swivelled in his chair: If you’re not interested, forget I ever asked.

Why me, he asked.

I think I can trust you, that’s why.

He’d written a paper on espionage law for Melville’s seminar. Following the oral defence, they had a long conversation about spy fiction. He was obsessed with realism back then. He complained to Melville about the genre requiring a suspension of disbelief. But you can’t test everything against logic, can you, Melville said. Was the professor teasing him? Was what was transpiring in the room a scene from one of those implausible novels?

He remembers looking through the grill, at a spot of dead grass in the quad. It was a typical day in this city. The sky was low and grey, and the faint smell of earth and rain hung over everything.

But I’m already signed to work for a law firm in London.

And who do you think got you that job, Melville asked. You’re going to need a cover. A Rajan from Delhi will call you about the formalities.

/

He had the perfect cover in London. During the week, he wore sharp suits and went to work in a glass tower. Nobody suspected anything at the day job. He was seen as a industrious immigrant, not brilliant or singled out for great things, but a reliable chap who could be counted on to respect deadlines. It helped that there was a line that his British colleagues could not be bothered to cross. At drinks on Friday evenings, their polite questions were restricted to the best places to get Indian nosh. On Mondays, when they asked about his weekend, he made up something about cycling and laundry.

The work would happen on the weekend, when he’d collect information from assets, to use the agency parlance. In nondescript cafes in Southall and Kilburn and Edgware Road, he met disgruntled Balochis and delicate Iranians and recovering Khalistanis whose eyes glinted when talking about the arms trade. Most of his interlocutors were men. They wore puffer jackets and joggers.

Spying is waiting, he heard it said often. But spying is really talking, it’s smoking shisha with family men who tell you to ‘find a wife quickly, my brother’. A lot of information that came his way was simply filed away, never to be called up again. Even so, it helped to fill the gaps, to add colour to the shifting picture whose contours had to be made out when it was time to act.

London was a good place to blood people into the business. All kinds of people lived in and passed through the city. It really did feel like the centre of the world, heaving with lives that were desperate and disparate, grand and grimy. He was constantly trying to work out what tied it all together. Was it the gusts of air that whipped around the Tube tunnels? The cold crunch of cress in a supermarket sandwich? Perhaps it was the golden lettering on pub signage, glistening with the lamplit droplets of an overnight drizzle.

On some Sunday nights, he’d take the Tube to Holborn and walk to the Embassy. He’d enter through the backdoor to deposit a sheaf of documents and pick up envelopes he would later slide across a greasy table. He reported to Harpreet, a cultural attaché on paper but really an undercover officer who answered to headquarters.

Later, in his apartment in Russell Square, he would shave, iron his shirt for the next day and write email dispatches for the desks in Delhi and DC. At work, he was embarrassed to tell his colleagues that he had an apartment to himself in Zone 1. So he sometimes told people he lived out in Wembley. These evasions used to amuse Harpreet.

Be cool, Harpreet would say, good spies don’t lie about the small things.

/

On days like today, he feels like the little lies are all he’s ever had. It was as Pushkin had written: a deception that elevates is dearer than a host of low truths. He has many low truths. There’s nothing remarkable about his appearance: average height, thinning hair, skinny fat that makes him conscious about wearing t-shirts. Unlike many of his former colleagues, he isn’t patriotic. This had made life difficult in his last years at the Wing. After the Party’s tentacles reached there, a basic view of the world was valourised as moral clarity. Think less and do more, the new chief had said. It was the prevailing mood in the nation. But ‘do’ to what end? Do so that you don’t have to think. Do to fill up the hours and turn your face away from everyday horrors.

He’s now walking on Brigade Road, which seems to him tacky and tired. Wherever he looks, there are franchise outlets of apparel brands and discount shops hawking phone covers. He turns onto Church Street, newly pavemented and filled with young people tapping into their devices. The street hasn’t changed beyond recognition but many of the old landmarks are gone. Of the ones that remain, bars that seemed to him edgy then look seedy now.

He used to like the job on some days. It gave him a thrill to hold secrets and connect dots. His participation was premised on the fantasy of the eventual reveal. What a man, they would say after he was gone. Such an exciting life, and no song and dance about it. He often writes his obituary in his head. If it doesn’t surprise the people who know him, what would be the point of this life?

He is wearing a navy blue cap and sunglasses. He has grown his hair out. He looks somewhat gaunt now, but he feels fitter than before, as if the vagaries of life have eliminated the body’s trappings.

He reaches a cafe, which has been done up in the usual dark greens and burnished browns. In this cafe, in an hour from now, an engineer from the country’s combat aircraft manufacturing division will meet a person. For weeks now, the two have been exchanging cryptic messages. The Wing knows this because they have tapped the engineer’s phone. They suspect he is leaking information about surveillance instruments that the division is developing for use in recon balloons. If details about the project land with an enemy country or a non-state actor, there could be consequences.

On the engineer’s phone, the person’s number is saved as Kukri.

/

One of Harpreet’s first tips to him had been to reach places well before the appointed hour. Survey the layout, take stock of the exits, know where the washrooms are. He sits outdoors, taking a chair so that his back faces the road. He runs his fingers along the underside of the terrazzo table. The faint smell of earth and rain again. He orders a lemonade, takes out his black diary and resumes his outlining of a short story.

Why are your stories so sad, Harpreet had once asked him as they lingered in bed. His parents had just left London after a visit. His father had been diagnosed by then. He was startled by the pace at which the Parkinson’s blunted his father. Already, when the effect of the morning drugs wore off by early afternoon, the hand tremor and mouth tic would come creeping back. It wouldn’t be long before this man who spanned the world like a giant would be left to shuffle from living room to kitchen.

Harpreet had a way with people. Even his mother, famously hard to please, took well to him. The line they took was that they were flatmates. There’s a photograph of Harpreet with his parents. They are sitting on the grass, each with a can of ginger beer. Harpreet is carrying the frame, with his big broad shoulders, his high aristocratic cheekbones, that smile verging on madness.

You love life too much to work in intelligence, he used to tell Harpreet.

After a couple of years, the Wing asked him to quit the law firm and work for it full-time. Melville was living a retired life in Vermont by then. The threats to national security had become more shadowy. There were more mercenaries on the scene, shorn of ideology. In just two years, his old networks had become irrelevant. It was a quick-churn business, intelligence. Both the demand and supply sides had to keep changing face.

He spent less and less time out in the field, moving into the role of handler. Now that they worked in the same building, Harpreet and him had to be more discreet. Tongues wagged. In their own country, which in a way the Embassy building in London was, they could be considered criminals.

In those days, he was labouring through a novel he never completed, about the rivalry between two disciples of a Hindustani musician. His practice was sincere but his words were not. The sentences were overwrought, the touch too heavy. Back then, he mistook the limits of his talent for the limits of realism as a novelistic form. But he had come around to Melville’s view by now: the rush of blood lay beyond the boundary of logic.

In the cafe, he tries to guess which of the young men and women are courting but it’s hard to tell. He thinks about his own love life. It is a brief history. Romance has never come easy to him. He has had a couple of deep connections, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to exist lightly with a lover. His quiet and desperate need to be liked, to be thought of as a good person in concrete terms, means that he goes through life feeling like there is a gun to his head.

The shame comes from a similar place. He recalls summer nights in London. When Harpreet would return home with beer on his breath and fire in his loins, he’d often find himself negotiating his own desire. He tip-toed around desire, as if it would return in the cold light of day to take its pound of flesh. Yet, he’d receive Harpreet every time, anticipating the face he made after he finished, the face flush with sweat and release. Was that good, did I make you feel good, he would ask Harpreet.

/

You have to stop this, Bakshi had told him. Bakshi was deputy chief of the Wing then. With Harpreet, Bakshi had gone a step further, threatening termination. A prominent member of the Indian community in London had brought it up with the High Commissioner. This interest in their personal lives did not surprise him. It was one way for the diaspora to deal with its deracination. The trade was in their favour: they could have the dollars and drinkable tap water without losing the conservatism.

Harpreet was a proud man. Let’s quit, he insisted, fuck the Wing. Let’s move to Greece or something, you write your books, I’ll cut logs and drive trucks if I have to. Harpreet meant it sincerely. He was out to his parents and friends. He had an older brother who worked for a bank and was a father of two. But for him, an only child with an ailing parent, it was nothing more than an erotic fantasy. He couldn’t just uproot his life and move to a new country with a lover.

I have responsibilities too, Harpreet said, but I don’t make them my personality. There was one thing they had in common: they felt intensely. For Harpreet, that feeling dissipated in living. He immersed himself in sensory pleasure, in running and sex and food. Intelligence for Harpreet was a job, not something he thought he was ordained for. But his own feeling petered out in plotless pages, in tepid words about the tiresome inner lives of his characters.

And so Harpreet left, showing no sign of self-pity. He made good on his plans, too, moving to Athens, where it didn’t take long for him to embed into the queer scene. Occasionally, over email, he sent photographs of high blue skies and clear blue waters. When those stopped, he used to check Harpreet’s Facebook page for updates. He often wondered if he was blocked. His profile picture—light stubble, those veiny biceps, Ray-Bans hiding his shining eyes—was as if frozen in time. Sometimes, he touched himself while looking at it.

The year that followed Harpreet’s flight was solitary and fulfilling. He started writing a new novel, about a secret agent who foils a terror plot in Morocco. When the night’s writing went well, the mundane became imbued with meaning. A morning ritual of a fry-up, a cup of black coffee and a single cigarette felt like it held all the contentment in the universe. He was alone but he had never felt more alive. It was like being left unsupervised to eat a juicy mango with bare hands, or getting drenched in the rain, unburdened by wallet and phone.

It was gauche to advertise the pleasure his aloneness gave him. He realised this after being met with sympathy where he expected acknowledgement and judgement where he went for counsel. This feeling would have to be a private pleasure. His life would always look limited from the outside.

He had to return to India after that year. His father was dying. He wished that his parents were different people, the kind who’d accept the indignities of illness and continue the round with the bad cards they’d been dealt. But they were not, most people were not. Still, it was one of his favourite agonies to wallow in, what if his parents had entirely different personalities?

To its credit, the Wing was supportive of his move back to Delhi. He had a sense that he had outlived his usefulness in London, but still, they could have asked him to leave. They accommodated him on the Middle East & Africa desk, hoping that he would keep the old networks warm. In his turn as dutiful son, he felt, he had been somewhat forgiven for his deviance.

Everything changed after his father died. The passing only widened the distance between him and his mother, who struggled to make peace with losing the thread of her life. Her sixties was supposed to be the decade she travelled the world and experienced the joys of grandparenting. A full house, that’s what she called it. She blamed herself for how he had turned out, how the bright, obedient child had become the balding, unmarried man around whom hung a vague sense of failure.

Two days before he died, his father told him: You have to take care of your mother.

But I am not patient like you, Pa.

You have to learn to be. People will always need you more than you need them.

He had looked up from his phone at his old man, skin white and dry around the mouth, shoulders drooping from the slow ravage of disease.

I know your secret, his father suddenly said with mischief in his eyes.

Which secret?

Both of them.

/

Back on Church Street, the engineer arrives first. His name is Kumaresh. He is small and wiry. He walks purposefully towards the glass door and enters the cafe. His backpack has the branding of a technology company. When he comes out again, he takes a seat at the table closest to the door. He must be in his late twenties. His eyes are dark and his facial hair is patchy, as in the photograph the Wing has shared.

He continues to scribble in his diary. He sees a waiter bring two beverages to the table. Kumaresh asks the waiter to place the hot one, the one in a ceramic cup, in front of the empty chair. Kumaresh is facing him. He sips on an iced drink served in a disposable glass.

Minutes pass.

He senses a tall, turbaned man walk past him and take the chair opposite Kumaresh. The two shake hands. The turbaned man takes a sip from the ceramic cup. This does not look like their first meeting. As Kumaresh busies himself with his backpack, the man turns around in a smooth motion and looks at him. It is a look of recognition but it betrays no sign of surprise.

Harpreet has filled out in the way people do when they don’t have to worry about love and money. He is carrying the weight well. He can make out the shape of it under the checked shirt and fitted jeans. He wears a beard generously flecked with white. The turban and beard are new, unlike the cut in his left eyebrow, the mark of a playful mauling by a pet.

Kumaresh has produced a spiral-bound booklet from his backpack. Harpreet is flipping through it. They exchange a few words. Harpreet hands Kumaresh a small box of traditional sweets. Kumaresh lifts the lid from one corner and looks inside. He places the box in his backpack, shakes hands with Harpreet again and leaves the premises.

He turns his chair towards the entrance to watch Kumaresh until he disappears from his line of sight. He walks over to the table near the glass door and sits in front of Harpreet.

/

Take off those shades for god’s sake. You’ve always looked silly in them.

He removes his sunglasses. He has already flouted the Wing’s instruction—he has engaged with Kukri. He glances at the cover page of the booklet on the table between them. It carries the title ‘Assembling Manual for PC4801’. Feeling bold, he picks up the booklet and leafs through it. The pages are full of line diagrams.

But you look great. As usual. Especially with the turban and beard. A bit like your dad. Is this a disguise of some sort?

I’m a believer now, you know.

Betrayers have to become believers. And Kukri, really? Just say you miss me.

Kukri was the name of a Nepali restaurant they used to frequent in London. He remembers how Harpreet would eat, with a focus bordering on prayer. He ate with body and mind, wordlessly scooping up the aloo sadeko and mutton curry with vigorous movements of his thick fingers. Sometimes, after he took a first bite, he closed his eyes in a theatrical manner.

Betrayer. That’s a big word, haven’t heard you use that one. Read the book, by the way. I take my words back. You should stick to sad stories. The happy ending wasn’t convincing.

He ignores Harpreet’s critique of the novel. Who are you doing this for?

I have a wife and child back in Canada. And I’m useful to the people who want to avenge Surjeet’s killing. Haven’t you guys worked this out yet?

Sunny Singh Surjeet. Activist if he was your friend, separatist if he was an enemy. Surjeet had been murdered by an unidentified gunman in the parking lot of a gurdwara in Ottawa. The Canadians are claiming that the Wing is responsible.

Surjeet had many enemies, he says. The Wing didn’t even need to get involved.

Look at you being all defensive. Has Raghav Sinha turned into a stooge for the state?

You know what is more surprising? Harpreet Bains is now a family man who trades information for the Khalistanis.

Hey hey, don’t taint me like that. I’m a gun for hire. I work for whoever pays me.

I’ll tell you what I think. You’re still not over Bakshi kicking you out of the Wing. Let it go.

Have you let it go though, Harpreet asks, taking his hand. Their fingers intertwine. He wants to look away but can’t. There’s a dull ache below his rib cage. He has an urge to run his fingers in the furrows of Harpreet’s face. To counter it, he tries to play back the moments of his perfect solitude, of belonging to no one.

Tell me, Harpreet says, breaking his reverie, How did you know it’s me?

Ghouri, he says. A knowing smile crosses Harpreet’s face. Ghouri was an old informer from London, a cherubic Afghan whose networks spanned the oceans. They said to never befriend your sources but they didn’t say anything about not fucking them. When a man brings you melons from Kabul and sobs over his wife’s miscarriage in your lap, a kind of friendship is inevitable.

Maybe you should join the Wing again. Stay long enough to get a pension. Make your mother happy, Raghav. Settle down, have a couple of kids. How many more evenings will you walk around by yourself? He pauses for a moment. In Lodhi Garden, he adds.

He rearranges his face so that Harpreet doesn’t register his surprise. He realises he doesn’t want to give this man any more satisfaction.

Ghouri, Harpreet says. They both laugh.

Okay, enough playing. Let’s talk shop. What are you going to do with me? He points at the manual in front of him. You can keep this, actually. I already have what I need. I just needed to give this chap his Canadian passport.

It’s a pity he’ll never leave this hell-hole. Why did he do it?

He’s in love with a Muslim woman. They want to get out of here.

This time, he reaches out to take Harpreet’s hand. He is thinking clearly now, no longer trying to separate Harpreet and Kukri. It is Harpreet for the moments, Kukri over the longer arc. This is how it ends up. Happiness, innocence, abandon, it is all too much to sustain over a life.

They place their elbows on the table. An onlooker might think that they are about to arm-wrestle. His scrawny wrist is no match for Harpreet’s gigantic one. Harpreet’s shirtsleeves are rolled up to the elbows. A ripple from his hairy, muscled forearm goes through his own body like a current.

Tell me, Harpreet insists, what are you going to do with me?

I’m going to ask you to become a double agent.

Harpreet, old and weathered and somehow more beautiful, looks at him defiantly. A lot of years have passed between London and Bangalore.

Harpreet, Harpreet, he sighs. What happened to you? Didn’t you want a happy ending?

I wrote this short story almost 13 years ago. It was turned down by a couple of magazines, won a short fiction contest at a college fest in 2012 and was even published in an online lit mag in 2014. The mag doesn’t seem to exist any more. Nor does the author, who so earnestly used to write these little short stories under the white light of his hostel cubicle, hoping that it was the path to fame, riches and a literary life. Sometimes he rode the current, and sometimes he fought it. Today, when he looks back at those diligent emails to literary magazines, he feels paternal towards his younger self. This is odd and somewhat new. Just the other day, he was convinced he didn’t have a paternal bone in his body. Anyway, here’s Technicolour Life (very lightly edited, despite himself).

I was in my second year of college at Xavier’s when my brother Rolfred was diagnosed with cancer. Mamma had handed me a bunch of reports when I came home from college one damp July evening. I leafed through them fearing the worst. Finally, I asked Mamma what the doctors had said, and she told me that Rolfy had the disease. 

When Rolfy came home from work that evening, he told me over dinner that things were a little fucked up but there was not much to worry about. He'd start treatment soon, and there was a good chance that they'd be able to get rid of the damn thing. Mamma didn’t say anything. She just sat at the table, mixing her rice and curry, casting glances at the two of us every once in a while. 

Over the next few weeks, both Mamma and Rolfy took turns at pretending everything was okay. Some days when Rolfy was really weak after the chemo, he talked about the practical consequences of his not being around. Like how his bike was to go to his pal Gavin because he was the only fucker in all of Bandra who would ride the damn thing like it was supposed to be ridden. When Rolfy started saying these things, Mamma would bring in the little stool from the kitchen, and sit by the bed that Rolfy and I shared and ask him to quit being so dramatic, the doctors (“cancer specialists, men”) had told her his treatment was progressing well.

Other times, Mamma would break down all of a sudden. Like when she'd be chopping tomatoes and more frequently, in the middle of mass at St. Andrews. Rolfy never came to church, but he heard about these episodes from Gavin, who in those days was making eyes at some choir chick. When Mamma and I would get home from church, Rolfy would give her a tighter hug than usual.

I had developed some sort of a passion for photography. And also for this girl from Pali Village. Her name was Marisca and she was studying English at Xavier’s. She had a soft, rounded mouth, almost like a fish, and she smiled with her eyes. A little silver stud in her nose made the slightly hooked thing look even more distinct. We would take the train from Bandra station to VT. She was the intellectual type, always reading something or the other, hardly noticing when I made eyes at her as Bombay sped past us on the Harbour Line. 

Sometime in October, I saw a poster advertising a photography contest on the college notice board. There was an expensive camera to be won, something that the professionals used and which I obviously couldn’t afford. The theme was “Technicolour Life” and they wanted a description of less than a hundred words to accompany the photograph. 

I remember I spent the next couple of weeks with my second-hand Kodak slung around my neck, taking shots, mostly outdoors. I told Rolfy about the contest, in an attempt to make conversation, but he only grunted and continued puffing on his smoke. It was during this period that Marisca and I really got talking. While I would be taking pictures from the floorboard as the train would slow down as it pulled into stations, she’d stand leaning against the cheap sunmica-topped partition in the compartment, looking outside, taking the world in with those big, brown eyes of hers. 

Once she had started taking me in with those eyes, I took her home. Mamma seemed to take a liking to her immediately, but Rolfy was unimpressed. I was not surprised because I knew Marisca was not Rolfy’s kind of chick. (“Why are you chasing these reading types, men? They think too much, men. Makes it harder to get into their pants.”)

Meanwhile, Rolfy was not getting any better. At night, he would cough violently and it was not uncommon for me to see reddish-brown droplets on the sheets next morning. He would shuffle to the bathroom, and make loud noises as he gargled, battling blood with municipal tap water. Hobbling back to bed, clutching his side, he would sit down, breathing heavily for a few minutes. After lying down, he would toss and turn until he descended into the restless sleep of a man who has not known what it is to wear his heart on his sleeve. I would lie absolutely still for a while, and when I was sure he had dozed off, my body would relax, free from the strain of pretending to be asleep, and I would drift off to sleep myself.

Marisca had begun to come over a lot more and it looked as if Rolfy was getting used to having her around. Sometimes, Marisca would make dinner for all of us and Rolfy was considerably less crabby after having some of her chicken soup. After Mamma had gone to bed, the three of us would sit watching TV and talking till Rolfy would tell me that it was time to drop Marisca home. 

He was only three years older but we had never really bonded while growing up. Now, Rolfy and I were talking to each other more than we had in years. In my head, I would try to rationalize this change that had come over Rolfy. A part of me wanted to think that it had nothing to do with Marisca. It would have happened even if she hadn’t come into our lives (and, more importantly, our home). It was the kind of change that comes over a man who has grasped the finality of his time on earth. But to think that this was the only reason for Rolfy's bridge-building exercise made me even more despondent, and afraid of things to come. 

One day, after college, Marisca and I got into a taxi to go to Marine Drive. On the promenade opposite the Air India building, I started taking pictures. I dropped off my rolls of film at a photo studio on Hill Road on the way home. The next day, I laid out the photographs on the floor in the cramped living room. Choosing was much easier than I thought. The Arabian Sea in the background, its ripples turned golden-yellow by the setting Bombay sun. Marisca in the foreground, looking away, as if contemplating the Backbay, the heart and yet the end of this city, strands of hair strewn across her forehead, flush of pink in her cheeks, her jaw firmly set. 

Now I’m no poet so I struggled with the caption to describe the photograph. Rolfy saw me at work, impatiently tapping my pencil on the table as I tried to conjure up words that would do justice to the image. He walked over to me, picked up the photograph, stared at it for an uncharacteristically long time and put it down. Looking at me, he said, “It’s beautiful, Aaron.” Lightly tapping me on my back, he hobbled out of the living room. 

I saw Rolfy for the last time on the day before he died. Marsica and I were sitting by his bed in the hospital, hand in hand. He was so weak that he could barely talk. He tried to, but Marisca put a finger on her lips, to indicate that he must not exert. Just as we were leaving, he pointed at the two of us and offered a thumbs up sign. It was then that I realized that Rolfy had learnt to smile with his eyes. 

My entry did not win the contest. About a month after Rolfy had gone, Mamma handed me an envelope she said Rolfy had left for me. I opened it to find one of those lined pages that seemed to be torn out of a college notebook. Sitting on the bed that I once shared with him, I read what my brother Rolfred Coutinho had written in his cursive scrawl,

Green (with envy, when another woman pays me a compliment), pink (the colour rushes into her cheeks), yellow (when she had jaundice, of course), almond brown (her eyes, are they the colour of lies?), silver (subtle treasure on that hook nose), white (expertly concealed when I’m reading her my poetry), golden (the colour of warmth, and also destruction in daylight).

Technicolour is my strife, technicolour is my life.

My failure to complete Bangalore Blues was an early lesson that mood isn’t enough to carry a piece of fiction. My characters were shallow (“Trilok Siddiah, M.R., The Master of Fucking Rolls, our Hamlet of Hash”) and the words contrived. The plot was static. We escape into stories because they have momentum, unlike our own lives sometimes. Back then, I had made it a personality trait to grope around for meaning, and the strain came through in every sentence.

The memory of that story and those afternoons came back to me on recent work trips to Bangalore. Some feelings were new, like experiencing the city as devoid of a romantic or sexual burden. One of the symptoms of youth is the expectation that something is just about to happen. That’s why the air feels charged with the possibility of connection and consummation.

A nice thing about growing older is the mind-space to come out of oneself and take in the sights. It becomes easier to spool up the tangle of self-centred thoughts and place it neatly to one side of the brain. It’s then possible to look out on the world with a lot of familiarity and a small amount of wonder.

As I sat in Ubers that inched or cruised along the roads of Bangalore, I saw and silently named trees like tabebuia rosea, jacaranda and gulmohar. It struck me that even after spending five summers as a student in Bangalore, I didn’t have a single memory featuring a flowering tree. How and when does one begin to see? One way I approach this question is through an experience I had while living in Delhi. It had been a few months since I’d moved into a rooftop studio in CR Park. One summer day, as I sat working at my desk, I sensed a movement on the giant saptaparni tree in front of my terrace. Through the glass pane, my eyes landed on a shikra perched on a branch. It had a dead rat in its talons.

It was staring directly at me, its red eyes boring into my soul. The strange thing was that after this spotting, I couldn’t stop seeing different species of birds on this tree. It was like they were coming to me, instead of me going to them. I saw yellow-footed green pigeons, rufous treepies, coppersmith barbets—all without any serious effort. Even when I went out for errands or ambles in the neighbourhood, I felt more attuned to the flutter of wings or an airborne flash of colour.

I realise how kooky and comic book-like this sounds. Lock eyes with a bird of prey and be gifted the sight of a raptor. But I’m finding it hard to abandon the irrational idea that my easy sightings were related to the moment I shared with the killer, the shikra. Part of the reason for this belief is that my powers have objectively waned since I left the house and Delhi. Since then, I’ve developed a number in one eye and have struggled with spotting. All this has seeded a grounding thought in my head—noticing could be a reversible condition.

So might as well quickly list what I saw in Bangalore.

Over the grey wall, a single soldier standing sentry on the first floor of the Air Force Institute of Dental Sciences; pink and blue houses with yellow tanks and black antennas; advertisement for cement companies painted onto building facades; an invitation to an open house for parents at “Harrow Boarding School”, children breaking from school in a back-lane of Malleshwaram; cows at the edge of Bellandur Lake, wading into the hyacinth at sunset; little girls in colourful pavadais, standing behind their mothers outside a temple arch; a card promoting holige-flavoured ice cream in a restaurant in HSR Layout; yellow milestones with the names of mains and crosses sinking into the footpaths; the comforting voice of SPB filling up taxis cutting across a mammoth city.

On my first trip this year, work had booked me into an old-school hotel on Residency Road. It grew on me to the extent that I checked back in when I decided to extend my stay on a more recent trip. Mood lighting from the 90s, “Dew” soap in the washroom, a Voltas refrigerator. The setting inspired me to start another short story I will never finish—a washed-out R&AW agent checks into a room like this, determined to track down a mole living on the HAL campus and working for the LCA-Tejas Division.

Or maybe my informer could be living in one of the terraced houses of the Karnataka Public Works Department in Jeevan Bhima Nagar. A sucker for symmetry and attractive public housing, I strained to get a good look at the central staircase, the front gates, the units stacked neatly against and above each other. Even in the context of these compact units, there was a suggestion of open air, ventilation, a place to nurture a plant before going to work and then to smoke a quiet cigarette after-hours.

No surprises when I looked it up online—designed by the great Charles Correa. How grand it must be for even your humbler creations to stand out to a lay passenger in a running cab. From your imagination to the flat page to mortar, stone, concrete—how solidly the inventiveness translates and plasters itself on the beholder’s mind. Architects, you are allowed your artistic eccentricities.

And sticking with architecture, I went and gawked at Time, a project in the heart of Indiranagar by the magicians in brick and wood at Total Environment. There’s nothing discreet about this building, whose curves and rain-screens brought to mind the melting clocks in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Through the grill, I peeked at the swimming pool between the two wings, lying somewhat listless in the heat and dust.

Even the foliage outside was streaked with a dead brown, leaving an impressionistic account of the harsh start to the summer. In Yelahanka, where patches of tall, skinny trees and cordoned furrows of agricultural work remain as a marker of boondock origins, I watched a man spray another with water from a pipe attached to a tanker. From inside an AC room, I craved for what I assumed to be a cool gush under the white heat.

But there was one thread that distinctly tied my Bangalore with this new one. It was the draft of air that hit my face in the semi-open area at good old Arbor Brewing Company on Magrath Road. It was the first week of the new year. I’d met my colleagues S and G in person for the first time that day. The clink of glasses, chatter about life and art, the buzz of ideas for the future. A wet throat, a full belly. Bangalore Blues.

This edition of scattered thoughts is courtesy the Netflix show One Day. Based on a book by David Nicholls, the show’s premise is deliciously simple: every 15th July from 1988 to 2007, we enter the lives of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. They are friends, lovers, and much else a man and woman can be to each other over two decades.

This is not a review of One Day. It’s a four-item listicle of things I loved about the show and some memories it sparked about living in the UK. I’m painfully aware of how self-indulgent this kind of content is. But I’m trying to be less precious about genre and ideas of cringe. I’ve finally accepted that there is a thing lazier than maudlin personal writing, and that thing is not writing at all. 

(Spoilers ahead. Turn away if you care but then come back after you’ve watched the show?) 

Arthur’s Seat

Arthur’s Seat is a volcanic hill in Edinburgh. In the first episode, we see Emma and Dexter climb it after spending a night together (without having sex). Arthur’s Seat looms over the city in a very special way. In 2013, I climbed it along with a cousin. At the top, we took in the panorama and had a sandwich. He told me how locals can squeeze in a bike ride and a hike before the working day begins. That kind of life was exciting and within reach then. I was in the UK as a summer intern at a fancy law firm. 

In the 14th and final episode, which is about Dexter trying to grapple with Emma’s sudden death—a plot twist that left me shattered for a few hours—he climbs up Arthur’s Seat again with his daughter Jasmine. This portion is intercut with unseen scenes from his hike with Emma two decades ago. It’s a neat narrative callback. The whole sequence made me feel like I was there. I could taste and touch the years that had passed between Dexter’s assured youth and the burden of his grief. 

When they’re climbing down, Emma delivers a long piece about how she’s not interested in accompanying Dexter on his travels or even staying in touch. She comes across as prickly because she’s trying to protect herself—we’ve all been there. She closes with the one thing she really means: “I’m not being a footnote in the story of your life.” The camerawork is fantastic. You see the high blue sky above Emma. The perspective is Dexter’s, and you’re on the hill with them. 

And then we cut to a pale and beaten Dexter in the same spot in 2007, looking up at an Emma who isn’t there. The sky is flat. It’s been drained of colour. It’s at that moment that the haunting vocal of Vanbur’s ‘In Cold Light’ kicks in. The track has a bardic quality, kind of like ‘Now We Are Free’ from the final scene in Gladiator. 

Dexter’s hair flaps in the sharp wind, and he turns around and follows Jasmine down the hill. It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate just how much score and music choices create the conditions for a moment like this. The stomach drops, the heart soars. There’s something in the eye, maybe. It’s so enjoyable to be emotionally manipulated by TV and cinema like this. 

A Brimful of Asha

Speaking of soundtracks doing the heavylifting, my heart did a little somersault when I heard Cornershop’s ‘A Brimful of Asha’ at the top of Episode 10 (1997). Emma and her uni gang are getting out of her beat-up car and running up to reach the church where their friend Tilly is getting married. 

‘Brimful’, which dropped in 1997, is an inspired choice. In the show, Emma’s parentage is explained as Hindu mum-Christian dad and she’s played by actress Ambika Mod. I can’t pretend to speak authoritatively on the social history of modern Britain, but the sense I get is that ‘Brimful’ was kind of a milestone for the South Asian diaspora. Cornershop, which is fronted by Tjinder Singh and named for a stereotype (the Asian convenience store owner), nailed down the influences of a certain generation of British Asians in ‘Brimful’: 

Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Solid-state radio, Ferguson mono, Bande publique, Jacques Dutronc and the Bolan Boogie, the heavy hitters and the chi-chi music, All India Radio, Two-in-ones, Argo Records, Trojan Records

It was a generation that was making its presence felt in the British arts establishment. Two years before ‘Brimful’, the Asian Dub Foundation had released ‘Rebel Warrior’, which opened with a stirring rendition of lines from Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poem ‘Bidrohi’. The music video has shots of Bengali children in long-sleeved shirts and trousers playing football in the courtyard of what looks like an East London council estate. 

This was the music I was listening to on weekends in 2015, as I walked down Whitechapel High Street in London after dropping my suits at a laundry near the tube station. On the pavement, bearded men sold mangoes by the crate and chillies by the fist. I don’t think they pined for their Sylheti childhoods as a generation before might have. Their bonds with Bangladesh were very much alive through annual trips and LycaMobile SIM cards. 

Whitechapel didn’t really remind me of home. It was a creation of its own place and time, and I went there for the cheap laundry, a favourite pub and to feed my curiosity about the British Asian experience. I also went there for the small wonder of being able to see the gleaming glass towers of the City in the distance. On weekdays (and occasionally weekends), I worked as a lawyer in one of those buildings. 

On one of my early walks in Whitechapel, I crossed Altab Ali Park, named for the 24-year-old who’d been murdered in 1978, during a time of high racial tensions. Slowly, I began to understand the wider universe of ‘Rebel Warrior’ and ‘Brimful’. 

All this came rushing back when I heard those bars of ‘Brimful’ in One Day. Great art has a way of trapping a prolonged moment in national history in a throwaway manner.

Later in the episode, during the wedding toast, Emma calls Tilly’s union with Graham the “finest Grantham meets Grenada mash-up the world has ever seen.” And there, I think, lies quite another story about multicultural Britain, about the children of the Windrush generation mingling with and marrying people whose families have lived in the same market towns of England for hundreds of years. 

Now, god knows race relations in Britain have been fraught AF. And I know that One Day is decidedly not about race (in the way it is about class, for example). But my point is to say that to imagine Britain as anything other than many-coloured requires a wild imaginative leap for even the staunchest neo-imperialist. Segregation is a cold fact in the UK and it stared me in the face when I went looking for it, but it co-existed with the possibility of integration. Tilly and Graham, Emma and Dexter—they represent that possibility. 

Episode 5 and the train station bridge 

In Episode 5 (1992), a badly hungover Dexter spends the day at his parents’ home in Oxfordshire. His mother is severely weakened by cancer, and he must carry her up the stairs to put her into bed. Fatigued by liquor, drugs and despondency, he lies down on the bed in his childhood room. 

When he wakes, mid-morning has become late evening and his father is livid that Dexter has wasted the day because of the state he is in. It’s an affecting 15 minutes of television—we see mother, father and son grapple with the finality of their lives never being the same again. One person’s disease has eaten into three dispositions. Love and fealty endures but it comes with a sediment of resentment that hangs heavy during the life of the sick person. 

We see Dexter standing forlorn, outside the red-brick facade of a deserted Radley station. He takes the foot-over bridge to reach a pay phone on the opposite platform. He leaves Emma many messages, but she’s left her apartment to get to a date. It’s a staggering performance by the actor Leo Woodall. His sniffles and sobs are stifled, a shudder is seemingly involuntary and he clutches his chest in a way that somehow doesn’t come across as hammy.

And then there’s a money shot, taken from the foot-over bridge. It’s late on a summer evening in countryside England. I’d put it at 8.30pm. Green trees on either side, not a soul on the platforms. And we see Dexter bent over, holding his knees, trying to keep his balance.

This scene spoke to me because it showed a child grappling with a parent’s disease and his own slackening grip on the narrative he had created for his life.

It also stuck because of the preciseness with which it evoked a train station on a British summer evening. I used to love the ritual of train rides in the UK. The ticket with the orange bands on top and bottom, a Cornish pasty and a packet of crisps, the hushed voices and comfortable seats. And from the window—predictable, manicured country. I’d be so absorbed in the showreel of my own protagonist (the solitary-dutiful-charming young man abroad, meaning myself) that I never thought that the houses and platforms we were speeding past could be hosting their own dramas. Maybe the party boy sitting next to me on the 20.19 from Oxford was struggling to come to terms with a parent’s illness. 

Emma/Ambika and Dexter/Leo

I’ve been marvelling at how the character arcs play out over the 14 episodes. Emma: I feel like I know her well. Some of it has to do with her ethnicity, but I found it easy to map her onto people in real life. The cutting sarcasm, bookish brilliance and insecurities of the early 20s; the coming into her own in the 30s, on the back of professional, sexual, romantic success. And through it all: the easy empathy, the solid female friendships, the determination to build beautiful lives, homes and safe spaces in a world of emotionally stunted men. Ambika Mod, you lived Emma!

Dexter, too. Nicole Taylor, who headed the writer’s room, told The New York Times that she didn’t want to make him an “archetypical posh boy” but wanted to emphasise his vulnerability. And Woodall does a fantastic job of translating how a man can go from cocky lad who’s constantly thinking about his next lay to a grief-stricken father. I came across a few tweets that said that the makers dragged out the last few episodes but I loved them for what they do with Dexter’s character. 

There’s a scene on a bridge in Paris, where Dexter goes to meet Emma in the middle of his divorce. When he says that everything seemed possible when he was younger and nothing seems possible now, Emma, looking very chic and every bit put together, rubs his arm and says “You’ve just lost your confidence, that’s all.” 

That hit hard, and home. How does a dude who swaggered bare-chested on a beach in Greece, glistening with youthful vitality, become a jaded man who’s somewhat in touch with his emotions? And how does this phase often coincide with the period when the women in his peer group are living their fullest, most authentic lives? It’s one of modern masculinity’s interesting questions, and a great leveller of our times. 

End notes: 

1. This Substack recently crossed 100 subscribers! I hope this will seem like a small number one day, but right now, it feels very big. A massive thank you to everyone who subscribed, shared, commented or sent me a message saying they enjoyed reading something I put out. I always write to be read, so it means everything.

2. Also, thank you to my friend J, who messaged asking if I had “seen/heard of One Day on Netflix.” I hadn’t. She asked me to look up the lead actress because she resembles someone we both know. I tried to guess but it took me a couple of clues to get right. Then I watched One Day and now Ambika’s Emma reminds me of many people I know and have known.

At Sealdah, I made my way through the throng, grateful for the sharp nip in the air. My denim jacket and travel-weariness made me feel sexy, like an unconventionally good-looking hero of a Shoojit Sircar film, at home amidst the babble of Bengali and the kind of Hindi spoken in Bihar. Since the possibilities seemed endless in the moment, I allowed myself to be persuaded by a young hustler to drop me to my hotel in Ballygunge on his motorbike.

As I rode pillion, I took in my first few breaths of the streets of Calcutta, the whole heaving humanity of it, and the screaming yellow cabs with the ‘No Refusal’ signs and bespectacled drivers. Even the exhaust being belched by the lurid blue-and-yellow buses (all of which seemed to be going from Kamarhati to Alipore Zoo) couldn’t kill the buzz of a new city on a pleasant night, with no one to call on or answer to.

As we careened on APC Road, I half-heard the hustler’s diatribe on ride-sharing apps while taking in the smell of frying poppy seeds and the taste of dust. I was really in Calcutta, almost four years to the day from my last trip here, which was also the last trip I’d made before the world closed down because of the pandemic and changed my life as I knew it.

I’ve presented myself as footloose in the preceding paragraphs, but I’m a more rigid traveller than I ever was. For instance, I knew exactly where I wanted to have dinner that night and I wasted no time in leaving for a bougie eatery in Hindustan Park after dropping my maroon suitcase and laptop bag in the hotel.

At Sienna Cafe, which was done up in the hipster way that makes city-slickers like me feel comfortable, I was led to a blue-tiled table within earshot of three Bengali woman who were discussing the fabric and design for a chef’s apron. The chef among them was gorgeous, speaking a British-accented English with a smattering of Bengali, her hands moving this way and that as she detailed her artistic vision in a mildly nasal and highly attractive voice. I gathered that she was in the city of her youth for the winter, and I wondered about my own friends who live outside—at what point of their month-long trips to the motherland do they start longing for their independent lives abroad? I would last 4 days, I thought. Above us, there was bamboo, cane, a canopy of cloth and pretty little yellow lights

After main course, I wanted dessert, so I got dessert. The smallest things are thrilling on a solo trip, imbued with meaning and feeling. It was makha sandesh with fresh strawberries, wood apple and nolen gur. As soon as it landed on my tongue, I forgot the women on the next table; concerns over my weakening eyesight; the little corpses in the graveyard of my creative dreams. It was just my tastebuds and the sandesh, in a delicate dance that my feet could never manage.

The next day was Republic Day. I woke up at 6.30am, bathed and put on the denim jacket that makes me feel more confident. I booked an Uber to the North Port Police Station, which was the starting point for a heritage walk I wanted to do. The radio in the car played “Door hato duniyawalo, Hindustan hamaara hai” while I watched Calcutta limber up in the morning light. As we approached the CESC building from Chowringhee Road and then zipped past it on Central Avenue, I had a vision of Calcutta as it probably saw itself—at the centre of things, the grandest metropole this side of London. Faded glory is one of my favourite tropes so maybe this is why I was so happy in Calcutta. The city seemed chill about the fact that it was something once but now it is not.

But all my lazy, romantic assumptions were thwarted on the walk, led by T, a passionate Calcuttan with a smile that reached her eyes. My co-walkers were C & R, residents of Bromley, London. From the eastern end of Howrah Bridge, T presented us with a vista of the flower market. We took in the thick ropes of marigold, the sellers with their morning mufflers and brown sweaters, the orange flags sticking out from the shanties. Down at the Mullick Ghat, we stood on the slippery landing and watched the Hooghly, grey under the smog and silent in the face of the blaring horns from above.

T showed us many things, all while fluently narrating anecdotes from the past and present of her city. A cavernous room that was used by women to change after a dip in the river was now used as a flower godown. There, we saw dirty green-and-white tiles engraved with roses. In the market on the way back up to the bridge, T got a lotus-seller to coax a flower to life by gently running his fingers over the petals. C, polite to a fault, held on to the precious gift, even at the cost of taking pictures on the way.

On the other side of Howrah Bridge, we hopped onto a ferry, walked across it, and then jumped over to another boat that had docked adjacent to the ferry. As we sailed under Howrah Bridge, I thought of how nice it would be to capture the essence of this city on film, the way I think Mani Ratnam, Shoojit Sircar and Sujoy Ghosh have done. I marvelled for a moment at how easily the mind reaches for the reference of a moving image, captured by a camera one day and then consumed in a dark room many months or years later—cinema is truly the top dog in the hierarchy of arts; writing and painting don’t come close. I would like to direct a movie some day but it feels impossible from where I am now.

I saw a couple at the head of the ferry, silently holding hands, as if drinking in this January morning on the Hooghly. And my mind went back to a hotel room in Dhanbad from a couple of nights ago, where the wives of my friend’s friends lovingly listed their husbands’ quirks. And then further back to December, to a chilly terrace in Mahabaleshwar, where a woman lifted the cap of a hoodie to cover her man’s ears, in an action so natural and matter-of-fact that I felt this must be love.

In Kumartuli, where we disembarked after crossing the hulking remains of jute godowns on the west bank, T got us to cross the railway tracks and enter the potters’ colony. Idols of Saraswati were being prepared for the upcoming Puja—“Bengali Valentine’s Day”, T told us with mirth. Peeking into various cramped workshops, we saw how an idol was put together—life breathed into the straw scaffolding by mud, lime, paint and fabric. It was dark in most of the workshops, and men (and one woman) seemed to be working with focus and faith. Muddy rivulets had formed on the ground, ruining the sneakers of the tourists who’d come to gawk.

At the end of the lane, T announced the end of the walk, but not before showing us a water hydrant that was some 150 years old. On her recommendation, C, R and I took an Uber to Kona Dukaan at Dalhousie Square, to grab a bite. But they were winding down, so we waited for another Uber to take us to Park Street while the last of the Republic Day processions petered out in front of the black anti-riot vans of the Kolkata Police.

On Park Street, as we munched on kathi rolls, C & R asked me intelligent questions about the political and social climate in India. They seemed to be such engaged travellers, keen to unravel the layers of meaning they’d been bombarded with in their travels across this vast land. I considered myself lucky to have spent the morning with such polite and curious people.

After we parted, I hopped across the street to Flury’s, where I ordered a puff and a pot of Darjeeling tea. The puff’s ratio of flaky to crusty was just perfect, and the thing disintegrated in my mouth and not on my plate, which is how I like my puffs. Spoilsports would say ‘oh but you paid 10 times you would in a local bakery’ but to them I’d say that sometimes you don’t want a puff from a local bakery, you want a puff from an iconic eatery on an iconic street in an iconic city. So yes, on that day, only a Flury’s puff would have done.

Then, I crossed over to the Maidan, the vast expanse where mostly young people were playing cricket, having picnics or just shooting the breeze. From a distance, it looked like a lovely place to take in the mild afternoon sun. Up close, the grass looked parched and it was strewn with litter. Still, I was taken in by the hazy vision of the Victoria Memorial in the distance—its cupola floating above the trees like some imperial fantasy—so I started walking towards the southern end. When I reached the road again, I was seized by a different idea. I’d seen a signboard for Shakespeare Sarini (unforgettable name), and I remembered it as the street on which Hotel Astor was.

Astor was where I’d stayed on my first ever trip to Calcutta, in 2003 or 2004, to represent my school in the national rounds of the Bournvita Quiz Contest. So, for old times’ sake, as a hat-tip to the wide-eyed little boy I used to be, I crossed the road and onto Shakespeare Sarini for a glimpse of Hotel Astor.

On the way, I passed a dilapidated building called King’s Court, where I spotted a rufous treepie on a high branch. The gnarly roots of a banyan tree had attached themselves to the dusty brick of the building and the green slatted windows were broken in places. If you feel this description and this post are going nowhere, you’re right. Kind of like my Astor mini-excursion. There was no great denouement there, no catharsis for our first-round exit from the quiz show, our humiliation on national television. The spruced-up building with its red brick is still very much there, looking spiffier and much bigger than I remembered it (hello, child’s perspective).

Then, I took a yellow cab to India Coffee House, inspired by a suggestion by S, my favourite Calcuttan. The cab dropped me off on a pavement where the booksellers of College Street were hawking their wares, perhaps to a sparser crowd than usual because of the public holiday. I looked around while crossing the tracks, but no tram was forthcoming and I made a mental note to look up routes and frequencies to see if I could get on one later.

Before I took the grimy stairs up, I took a photograph of the impossible tangle of electricity meters that looked like they were older than the water hydrant T had shown us in Kumartuli. Almost every inch of the walls was covered in political notices and announcements about cultural events. Again, this challenged the stereotype of indolent Calcutta. The notices conveyed a sense of urgency. The city is home to busy people who are always organising and attending things. This idea was tempered again by the atmosphere of the Coffee House, where cigarette-smoking men gave the impression that this is how they have been spending their evenings since youth.

Behind my window-side table on the first floor, there were a couple of women talking about boy trouble. What a grand place for young women to discuss boy trouble, the languorous, unhurried environs of the Coffee House. The ceiling fans whirr glacially, time flows like a river here.

And that’s why I lost track of the clock in the Coffee House—editing photographs, eavesdropping on conversations, texting, fretting about work and money. Before the sun was out, I wanted to take a photograph of the mosaic art on the exit of the Maidan metro. I walked to the Central Metro, passing sewers, a line of Muslim-owned shops specialising in wedding bands and the Calcutta Institute of Tropical Medicine.

The dinginess of the Central metro station came to me as a surprise. In recent years, I’ve used the overground metros of Bombay and Bangalore, and, most frequently, the brightly-lit stations of the Delhi metro. This one reminded me of some of the U-Bahn stations in East Berlin. I was also thinking of the cold shock of watching that terrifying Bob Biswas scene in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani.

I got the photograph of the Maidan mosaic, but not quite in golden light, as I’d hoped. As shadows fell, I walked over to Blue Poppy Thakali, a restaurant I first heard about when Chef Sachiko Seth appeared as a guest on the delightful YouTube series Rannaghore Ke? After dinner, I walked around some more, considering whether to have a coffee, thinking about how best to further juice this feeling of anonymity and abandon. I wondered what it might be like to live in Calcutta, in a house with chequered floors on a road named after an Englishman. As I walked, I listened to Rashid Khan’s Aaoge Jab Tum Saajana. He’d died a couple of weeks before. I was in his city.

By 9pm, I was in the four-poster bed in my hotel room. The mattress felt a little too soft that night. The din of the cars on the street below carried through the wooden slats. But my legs felt good. I had walked long and hard, and I was being rewarded with the sweet pain of exertion. Sprawling on the clean linen of a hotel room after a long day has to be one of life’s greatest pleasures. And then, there’s something about Calcutta.

Inside, there was a rumbling. Not a jumbled one, where I couldn’t separate the sources of the sound. I heard it like an intricately constructed background score—low hum, droning buzz, a crescendo with a clash of cymbals and drums. When I jogged on the beach on a good low-tide day, all these sounds mixed with the sitars and synths on the earpods to make me forget my thin arms and knobbly knees and narrow shoulders. A goddess in her tavern, lightly buzzed and a little bit in love, was directing this part of my life. When I snapped out of the spell, the goddess was replaced. But I enjoyed being conductor of this inner orchestra, less ashamed about the things I feel, more sure about the time I afford myself to think.

This year, I got hung up on plot. I lost interest in vignettes, in scraps, in fragments. I sought out a narrative spine in everything. Give me an epic sweeping thing and take me from Point A to Point B. But later, in the dark or during a solitary commute, I ended up dwelling only on moments—cannonballs shattering the ice in a battle scene in Napoleon, my father trying to thread a needle on a smoggy morning, my mother pausing for a breath on the stairs, N’s kind eyes as they shared a last stock of Samahan with me.

The preoccupation with plot doesn’t mean I stopped caring at the sentence-level. Asymmetry bothered me—and abruptness. One of the most satisfying parts of my day job is to write up connectors. Even for a ghostwritten article for a finance industry publication, I agonised over finding the right transition sentences to close one paragraph and open the next. I didn’t expect a corporate client to validate this kind of work, but it released a knot in my back. That’s how I know I want to work with sentences forever.

Yet, it’s what kept me from writing on this Substack. There were a lot of thoughts, but I couldn’t tame them into some kind of narrative order. I wanted to tell stories that were internally consistent, where one thing follows another. I’d scribble a few lines and then lose the thread. Some reasons for this: imaginative leaps were too convenient, it was easier to trawl the internet, I wasn’t buying into my own characters. The only character I am convinced of is myself, but I don’t rate the life story enough to believe that even a thinly veiled version is valuable. Like I said, nothing much happened in my life, and I was in a phase of only valuing stories where things happened.

Like years past, I took some photographs this year. I didn’t mean for these glimpses of the outside life to always say something profound about the inner soundtrack. For better to worse, social media has rewired my brain into the 1:1 aspect ratio. If I can’t say it in a perfect square, I don’t feel like saying it. I felt a workman’s sense of pride in two rows of squares in the Favourites section on my phone. I know the images don’t have any artistic value. But there’s something I like about seeing a frame with the naked eye, as if it were a photograph, and only then drawing the imaginary boundary around it with the touch of a screen.

So that was this year. Complete lack of plot (though I did write a story that tried to have one), but the moments, despite my efforts to let them pass, were very nice to marinate in. There’s a lot more I want to say but can’t for various reasons: can’t articulate it, don’t want to jinx it, could mislead or upset people, want to publish today i.e. 31 December. Most of my reasons have something to do with fear. You don’t even have to peel away the layers to sniff the fear. That’s the case with so many of us. When will we transcend it? Next year, duh!

And to whoever is reading this—hope you had a wonderful year and wish you a happy and satisfying 2024.

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I’m trying to forget the moment she walked in. Stage Number 4, Mehboob Studios, Bandra. I was sitting inside, coiled and tense, while the production folks fussed with the lighting. With movie stars, you sense and smell before you see. The waft of something strong materialised as a vision in athleisure, aviators, a messy bun. But the skin, man. Skin is the calling card of showbiz. Hers was like marble with a wet polish. It made the face look closed off and categorical.

I was the new guy there, the cricketer doing his first advertisement. The betting ads with the lads didn’t count. You arrived as a brand only after you did your first consumer product with a Hindi film actress. I know she played up my awkwardness in an interview. But actually I took to fame and cameras quite easily. I talk sheepishly to the press about not getting used to the attention. That’s one of the little lies we tell to appear humble to the public. 

But it’s true that I’d come from nowhere. Six years ago, I was playing tape-ball cricket and riding a motorbike under billboards of her face in Sangli. My life changed overnight after I was scouted by the country’s richest sports franchise. You tear up a season of the Indian Premier League for the Mumbai Rockets and next moment, you’re jetting around the world on an industrialist’s private plane. And then you’re trying to play it cool when Nisha Sharma rocks up to you and snaps, Saurabh, you think we can wrap this up in a couple of hours?

When he introduced himself at the shampoo shoot, I knew he was playing the fake humility card. I do it all the time. It’s a cheap thrill. I go into business meetings and say ‘Hi, I’m Nisha Sharma’ as if they don’t know. He’d almost won India a T20 World Cup. As if the picture of him sitting forlorn on the Lord’s balcony wasn’t splashed across every newspaper and feed. 

I still look at that photo sometimes. But I have to google it because I’ve purged my phone of his traces. He looks so young, so vulnerable. It makes me think of the times we argued. My anger would dissolve when I’d see this six-footer make himself small, wounded by my words. It made me want to envelop him with everything I felt. Sometimes, I hurt him only so I could make up to him. 

I was going to Himachal for a long outdoor schedule. I had to dash to the airport after the shoot. Saurabh was meant to take me by the waist and whisper a silly catchphrase in my ear: ‘No dandruff, no tension.’ He pulled me lightly towards himself, and then fluffed the line. My team was on edge. But I felt a frisson with each take. My face was opening up, my body dropping its guard. His eyes were soft and kind.  

When the shot was okayed, he asked about my ‘skincare game.’ I burst out laughing. Guts. He had a strong Marathi accent. He looked into my eyes when he spoke. We exchanged numbers, pretending it was only to share my dermatologist’s contact. A cricketer and an actress, a story as old as time. Or at least as old as Sharmila-ji and Tiger Pataudi. 

The texting was fast and furious. In those days, the tabloids were fanning the embers of her split with Siddharth Kapoor. Why me, I wondered. But not for long because I was the flavour of the season. Highest run-getter at the T20 World Cup, a mainstay in the Test squad, earmarked for future captaincy by the Skipper himself. I’d just moved my parents into my sea-facing flat. Another IPL was around the corner and all eyes were on me. You don’t get to where I had by dwelling on people’s motives. 

She was shooting near Shimla. She said she was sick of the industry, tired of the constant scrutiny. On Instagram, she posted aesthetic photos of the landscape with philosophical captions about love and light. I don’t judge celebrities who do that because I know it’s sincere. When you are that sort of famous, my therapist said, you need to believe in something beyond your own myth.

Her mask peeled away on WhatsApp. She was warm, spontaneous, open about her insecurities. I found it incredulous that she’d cared to file away things I’d only mentioned in passing. Attractive people can float through life, but she was interested in things beyond herself. I had to ask her to slow down because I couldn’t keep up with her thoughts. No one’s ever told me that, she said, it’s kind of nice. 

One night, when I was eating dinner with Aai-Baba, she video-called me. I hadn’t told my small-town parents that I was texting Nisha Sharma. We don’t talk about such things. I excused myself saying it’s a call from Mrs Samtani, owner of the Mumbai Rockets. Nisha was drinking wine in her hotel room. 

Meet me when I’m back in town, she said tipsily. 

The date was a delicate operation, as it has to be for two public personalities who’ve had nothing to do with each other. A pan-Asian restaurant in a Lower Parel hotel arranged a private section for us. His people sent mine a list of dietary restrictions. The hotel manager was told the rules: no phones on serving staff, no asking for photographs, no guests in line of sight. 

We arrived separately and entered through the back door. He was wearing a fuckboy cap that reminded me of Siddharth. I asked him to take it off, and he looked virtuous again. His hair was thinning, he said. We ate steamed bok choy and truffle dimsums and talked about properties and fitness. He asked me questions about specific scenes from my films: how I prepared, how much was improvised. I haven’t met a professional male cricketer yet who isn’t obsessed with films. To them, the movie business always feels like something within reach.

He spent a lot of time online. It was one way to fill up empty evenings on tour. What about going out, meeting women, I asked. Too many phone cameras around, the Cricket Board is always watching. So the boys get together and make Reels in hotel rooms. Ex-cricketers grumble about how much money there is in the game now, but there’s a lot to be lost too. 

I knew why he read everything they said about him. The rafters were chanting his name then. But one wrong step and the rabble turns against you. I’d been through the cycle of adulation and rejection. ‘Slay him, slay him’ they’d say in unison from the cheap seats. When the tide turned against him, I was left with the old pang of wanting to protect him from this fickle and broken world. 

I hadn’t been on a date with an actress before but I’d met some of them socially. They expected you to amuse them and moved on quickly if you didn’t. But Nisha took the initiative. We went to her place after that dinner. I, a 27-year-old grown man, called my parents and told them I’m staying over at my friend Ajinkya’s place. 

I was somewhat clumsy in bed but she was forgiving and gentle. 

We tiptoed around each other the morning after. I wanted to sit inside her brain and inhale what she was thinking. She kissed me after eating cold Oreos. They don’t get soggy that way, she said. My fridge is always stocked with Oreos now, no matter what diet I’m on. I have to have them cold. 

The IPL began. We met clandestinely at the team hotel. There are corners of my heart where I don’t admit anything from outside. The therapist recently told me it’s an only child thing. But a few minutes with Nisha and I’d feel those walls start to crumble. When I was alone again, I’d wonder if I gave too much of myself away. I envied and admired how she seemed to go all-in, like only the present moment mattered. 

She’d just signed a biopic of the Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam. A performer like her, with serious acting chops, wasn’t irrelevant in her thirties, but something had soured after her breakup with Siddharth. She’d been frozen out of the family-run camps. A big producer had described her as ‘passé’ in his bitchy way. 

When she spoke about Siddharth, I felt hemmed in, like I couldn’t escape who I was and where I was from. I could hit a cricket ball long but I didn’t have a hairy chest or a manor I was born in. My wrist was too thin for the kind of chunky watch men like him wore. When news of our affair broke, I came across a tweet with our pictures side by side. The caption said: Omg!! Nisha Mommy really went from Daddy to Twink!! But these are our times and this is the life I’ve chosen. A random tweet can feel like a punch in the gut. 

He was inexperienced for a famous man, too eager to please. I found myself holding back, not wanting to overwhelm him. He looked like he wanted to say things and the words were stuck in his throat. I felt like he was thinking about my previous lovers. But there was an earnestness about his efforts that melted me. He even moaned when he came. Later, in the dark, he held me close and kissed the back of my shoulders. The next morning, after I kissed him, he pulled me towards himself and whispered, ‘No dandruff, no tension.’

I booked a room for myself at the Trident, where the Rockets were holed up for the duration of the IPL. Saurabh wasn’t ready to go public yet but tongues were already wagging. A blind item on the Mumbai Masala Instagram page triggered our first fight. I asked him why he was getting so stressed. You don’t understand, he told me, I’m new to all this; it might just be another thing for you. I lost it. I had no time for allusions. His cageyness was beginning to grate. 

A week later, he smashed a century at the Wankhede. I was in the VIP box at the invitation of Mrs Samtani. The giant screen showed a sexy, curly-haired woman with a poster that said ‘Marry me, Saurabh Gaikwad.’ The socialite Shobhaa Mirchandani turned towards me with a conspiratorial wink and called him the most eligible bachelor in the country. I went back home feeling unmoored. He texted saying he wanted to blow a kiss to me when he got his hundred. In full view of the cameras and on national television. 

Why didn’t you then, I replied coldly. 

The Skipper knew what was up. His was the ultimate small-town story. From a backwater in Bihar, he’d risen to the top of the game. His fan following was like a cult leader’s. We were in Hyderabad when he called me to his room. You know what you’re getting into, he asked. There was a history there: an affair with an actress that had coincided with a drastic dip in form. There was also a girlfriend from the hometown. They had gone to school together and now she was his wife.

We’d never spoken about it, man to man. Look, he told me, everything is going well, why rock the boat. They are from a different world, some rivers can’t be bridged. The Skipper often spoke in aphorisms and metaphors but then he said something directly. Look at the age difference, you’re in different phases of your lives. You’re going up, she’s on her way down. Soch le, he said. Think about it. 

I was also thinking about my parents. They were outwardly simple but calculative in spirit. They’d clung to me tighter after I made it. They viewed my success as a form of payback. But I don’t think they knew any other way. Nor were they curious about expanding their horizons. My mother is happiest gossiping about relatives, my father when he’s left alone to watch videos forwarded on WhatsApp groups. 

Nisha grew up in an army family in Delhi. Her father gave talks at the India International Centre, her mother had a killer sense of humour, her brother was a fashion photographer. They were the kind of people who’d have friends over for drinks on a weekday. I couldn’t stop overthinking about how Nisha’s planet would collide with mine. 

I’ve not been brought up to go with the flow, especially when shit gets real. But I did something very uncharacteristic later that summer. I was going to play a Test series in England. I asked Nisha if she’d like to come along. I wanted her to want me because she could have anyone she wanted. 

I was older by six years but it was Saurabh’s view of the world that was set in stone. But I understood the neurosis of fresh fame—I’d lived through it in my mid-twenties. I’ve always been deeply desired but the yearning of complete strangers is a drug. A lack of interest seems like a personal affront. You want to preserve your mystique while giving the impression that you are somewhat available. It’s quite like a game, and there are people paid to advise you about all this. 

I was surprised when he asked me to join him on the big UK tour. I was still smarting about his hesitancy to make it official, but I folded without protest. Mumbai had become stultifying. The noise of construction was everywhere. The highways were a hellscape. Some of my mutual friends with Siddharth were giving me the cold shoulder. A month’s getaway would be good. It would put me in the right headspace for the Amrita Pritam shoot. 

I met the other wives and girlfriends in London. They wore their spiffiest boots and jackets, and did their best to act casual. It was quite endearing actually. But I think I messed up the dynamic among these simple sweet women who were overly grateful for the golden ticket they had been given. I would later be told how important it was for professional cricketers to be with someone homely. They travelled too much, the pressure was unreal, they needed someone to hold up the domestic fort. It was always that word: homely.  

For a brief, mad moment, I fantasised about being Saurabh’s trailing spouse, following him to cricket grounds around the world with an infant or two in tow. When I told him this, he gave me his nervous laugh. He thought of me as someone who means everything she says. That scared him. 

He was a different person abroad, away from the cameras and the chaos. I remember one perfect evening in London. We bought sandwiches and Pimm’s from a supermarket and then went up Primrose Hill. We sat there in our caps and hoodies, through a 9pm sunset, and watched the lights come on in the office buildings of the City. In the shadows, we were just another couple enjoying an evening out. 

Those weeks were an education in his quirks: he brushed aggressively, chewed his fingernails and washed his hair under a scalding shower. On the morning after an exhilarating win at The Oval, he paced excitedly on the balcony of our hotel room. He was on the phone with his manager, discussing endorsement deals. I sat on the bed and watched him through the glass, thinking back to the heady days after the release of Pyaar Hota Ek Baar Hai. 

The early flush of stratospheric success makes you expansive. In my case, I forgave everyone I felt wronged by. In our part of the world, there’s always someone who’s out to get you. If you don’t have enemies, you must invent them. That’s what keeps many of us going. They’d said he would struggle against the swinging ball in England. That morning we posted on his Instagram: ‘If you come at the King, you best not miss.’

I was middling everything in England. For a batter, it’s all about the sound of leather hitting willow. There’s a right sound and a wrong sound, and those dictate the rhythm of your days. On that tour, my bat felt like an extension of my body: a record 784 runs in a five-match series. I was seeing the leather ball like a football. 

I wanted to bottle this form. Muthu, our video analyst, said that I wasn’t doing anything too different from the usual, but I badgered him until he said, This is Lord Ayyappa’s blessing so just accept it with gratitude.

I talked about it with Nisha, my fear of losing the magic, the touch. She told me about a recurring nightmare. It’s always a street in New York City. The director is always Martin Scorsese, who I hadn’t heard of until I moved to Mumbai. He says ‘action’ but she’s rooted to the spot. The dialogue is stuck in her chest, her palms feel clammy, the director throws down his headset.

Now, I often think about that time, when we shared our nightmares over breakfast, waded into the freezing sea in Cornwall, took turns to be the little spoon on cosy hotel beds far away from home. I feel a knot in my stomach when I think about the genuine effort she made with the other girls; the way she coaxed them to look this way and that while taking their pictures for social media. They couldn’t quite believe they were getting styling advice from Nisha Sharma. Over an Italian meal, she told me she was secretly writing a film she wanted to direct. 

On the last day of the tour, we drank a lot of wine. She was wearing a printed green dress I will never forget. In the backseat of a black cab, we kissed until our lips were tender. London sped past us in the lamplight. Everything seemed possible. 

The unravelling started with an Instagram post by Rajesh Ramaiah. He was the executive chef of a fancy restaurant in Mayfair. He was also a cricket tragic, like so many middle-aged Indian men who moved abroad in their twenties and then never came back. He wanted a photograph of Saurabh as a keepsake. 

In that image, the two of them are beaming in the foreground but a stray arm appears at the edge of the frame. That was enough for the internet’s amateur sleuths. A few months earlier, I’d worn the same printed green dress to a promotional event at a college festival in Ahmedabad. Some accounts even zoomed into a black onyx ring I used to wear then. 

Throughout the tour, we’d been careful to ensure we weren’t photographed together. But Saurabh was in an exuberant mood that night. His senses had been dulled by success and by the chef’s Malvani prawn curry. I had no recollection of this photo being taken. I think I might have been in conversation with the Skipper’s wife. We’d been having pinot noir all evening. 

I was shooting for Pritam in Punjab when my publicist Dolly called. Don’t stress, okay, but it’s all over social media, she said, It’ll blow over, you don’t have to say anything.

My mother called me, harried and indignant. Don’t these jobless people have anything better to do, she asked. My people traced the original post back to a page called Nisha Sharma Fan Club Original. If they can make you, they can also break you, I told my mother. You would know, I added cattily. I like to think that I’ve made my peace with the cost of celebrity, but the cracks show up from time to time. 

Saurabh was in transit to the Caribbean. By the time he landed in Barbados, #nishabh was trending on Twitter, Siddharth Kapoor fans were spewing hate on his Instagram and entertainment websites had already put out the clickbaits. England seemed like a distant dream. The outside world was back to buzzing around our ears like houseflies.

I wanted Saurabh to call me and say it’s not a big deal. The furtiveness was thrilling initially, but its appeal had worn off. I wanted to power walk out of airports holding his hand, and playfully tell the waiting paparazzi they’d be the first to know about wedding bells. 

My actress friend Sunaina told me that famous men like to keep their options open. But I knew Saurabh wasn’t like that. His problem was that he was tethered to his past, to the unchanging moral lines he had learned in his constricted childhood. He fell in love with me because I smelt like freedom. He was ashamed of me because I was free. But he never said he loved me, and he never said he was ashamed of me. 

Someone in the chain had fucked up. My manager forwarded the email he’d sent the restaurant. There was a line there: ‘No photographs to be uploaded to social media without explicit permission from Saurabh Gaikwad’s management team.’ We could have asked the chef to delete the post but screenshots live forever. 

I had four missed calls from my parents but I wanted to talk to Nisha first. It was late at night in Ludhiana. What do you want to do, I asked her, trying to maintain an even voice. I was beyond annoyed at her nameless fans, who counted the number of breaths she’d take. Think about it: these were a bunch of strangers who could identify her from a sleeve and a ring. 

Hiding it is exhausting, she said. You don’t get it, I said, I’ve worked hard to build my own identity. I don’t want to be known as Nisha Sharma’s boy toy. I regretted it the moment I said it. You should have thought about it before sleeping with me, she fired back. I could conjure up her face in my head. When she was upset, her nostrils flared and her lips quivered. It always unnerved me how she could be breathing fire one moment and then completely shut me out in the next. 

I was weak. When I argued with her, I felt it in my body. It was like a bad workout. My neck picked up a dull ache and I lost my appetite. I hadn’t used the word ‘love’ yet, because I didn’t think it was that. You’re embarrassed by me, she said. Her hard voice suddenly broke. You have boxes for everything you want from life and I only fit into them as some kind of conquest. Then the line went dead at the other end. 

Nisha was used to having her way. She was privileged, beautiful, accomplished. Life had always presented her with options, and it seemed to me like it did so in the Japanese lacquerware boxes she had decorated her minimal house with. I, on the other hand, had grown up amidst a culture of accumulation where things were hoarded not because they were useful but because there was a time when they hadn’t been there at all. That was the unspoken chasm between us. 

I spoke to my parents on video call the next day. I know you’re flying high, my mother said through her tears, but think about us. I’ve read all about her affairs in the papers, I know what these film actresses are like. Don’t forget where you come from, my father added, we will find you a nice, homely girl.

He wasn’t someone who could compartmentalise. All aspects of his life blended into each other. He’d never really had girl trouble before, so he was completely out of depth in the Caribbean. The first few days, he stayed up late texting me, trying to work things out. We’d make up and then circle back to the same arguments. On the telecast, I could see the bags under his eyes. 

After the first Test, I told him we’ll talk after he gets back. But he said no, he could only get his head straight if I wasn’t fighting with him. I thought that was cute until I didn’t. His parents were giving him a hard time, too. I was the bold actress with questionable morals. I hadn’t brought up marriage but it was the elephant in the Gaikwads’ room. They couldn’t conceive of a relationship without it as the end goal. 

He wasn’t a cool guy. He fretted, he overthought. On the good days, this quality translated as sensitiveness, as attentiveness. It’s what had drawn me towards him in the first place. It was so different from the spaced-out vibe of spoilt filmy men. Once, he told me he used to be so sorted before he met me. It was painful to watch him become less himself in real time. It was more painful knowing I was the cause for it. 

There was another match to stoke his fire. A viral video of me leaving a Japanese restaurant with Sarabjeet Dhillon, who was playing Sahir in the Amrita biopic. A couple of outlets had put out insinuating articles. Yes, I’d hooked up with him while we were shooting a film many years ago, but he was not much more than a co-star at the time. I tried to explain to Saurabh that it was natural for co-stars to hang out, especially to build chemistry for an intense romantic part. 

Why didn’t you tell me about Sarabjeet, he asked. When was the last time you fucked? The language shocked me. What happened to gentle, tender Saurabh, I wondered. The one who’d ask to be held close when we went to bed. Jealousy makes a monster of men. His beloved Skipper, whose sagely persona I usually found phoney, may have been right. Our lives until then had deposited us on opposite shores. We could take a boat to cross sometimes but there was no bridge. We were already tired of rowing. 

I was dropped for the last Test in Guyana. The Skipper told the press I was out with a neck strain, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. But basically I was wrecked by everything that was going on. An English allrounder had recently taken a break to sort his personal life out. Mental health was the talk of the Western cricket press. But it’s different for Indian cricketers. You take your gas off the pedal, and there are fifty other guys waiting to pounce on your place. Next thing you know, you’re spending your days on dance reality shows and giving interviews about being a forgotten talent. 

After the Test, the Skipper took me down for a coffee by the beach. He had a lot of time for me, because he saw himself in me. A grey and foaming Atlantic stretched beyond the hotel wall. I know you’re young, he said, you can have some fun. But remember: no matter how far you travel, you end up craving water from your own well. 

I bombed in the T20 series too. Uncles in sports journalism, paunchy men who’d never picked up a bat, wrote long tweet threads analysing what had gone wrong. Some of my teammates came up to me to sympathise, but I know they enjoyed seeing me suffer. Those waiting in the wings for a chance were licking their lips. My aura was fading. 

Once, when we were children, Aai-Baba had taken my cousin and me to the national park in Tadoba. We didn’t spot a tiger. Seeing our dejected faces, a forest guide said: You may not have seen the tiger, but it has definitely seen you. This lifted my cousin’s spirits but it filled me with a kind of sticky dread. I recalled that feeling during the long layover at Heathrow. There was something elusive about Nisha. She could tread softly in the world and still be sought after. I was a mere visitor in her territory. 

When he came back from the West Indies, he looked like he’d aged a couple of years. He’d lost his levity, the spring in his step. Had I done this to him? How had everything changed so quickly? Why did everything have to be so difficult with him? 

One night, with his head in my lap, he said that being with me wasn’t good for him. I think I will be happier by myself, those were his words. I’d been preparing for this but to hear him say it so baldly still felt like a hammer blow. He was unformed, that was the truth. He had one foot in his past life, and the future was happening to him too soon. That’s just the nature of sudden fame in this country. Nothing can prepare you for it. 

What are you so afraid of, I asked. 

Of not knowing you fully, he said. Of you getting up one morning and walking away because you’re bored of me. 

Those were not the only things he was afraid of. His battle was with himself. He was afraid of transcending his skewed sense of duty, of being tied down, of making choices. He thought he’d lose his gift. But I spared him the indignity of spelling all that out for me. 

Walking away is what you’re doing right now, I said. 

I have to, he said, forgive me if you can. 

On the morning of our final night together, I watched him sleep. He had a tick of gently biting his lower lip as he slept, making him look like the beatific boy he was when he didn’t have to play the hero. When he woke up, I didn’t let him kiss me. He wanted a souvenir: a worn-out yellow tee shirt I used to wear to bed. He said it smelt like me. We cried, hugged, and then he was gone. That is literally how it ended. 

From the maelstrom of what I was feeling, it took me a few months to separate the strands of rage, love, disappointment, regret. But at least I didn’t blame myself the way I used to. If he cared enough, he would have fought for us. Perhaps it would have been a failure, but at least it would have been an honourable one. Maybe I would get bored of him. But the difference is that I was ready to give it my all. He wasn’t. There’s no need to understand anything else. 

It’s been a couple of years since that last night in her apartment. I’m in Sydney for another World Cup. On the bus ride to training the other day, we crossed a cinema. I saw a poster for Tujhe Phir Miloongi. There she was, Nisha Sharma as Amrita Pritam. 

A charge cut through my spine. It happens every time I see her face. It’s like being on the sets of the shampoo commercial again. I feel the pinpricks of the past, blunted now but still very much there. 

When I was with Nisha, a life with her seemed impossible. But now, when Sundays get boring, only a life with her seems possible. I crave her loud laughter, her simmering rage, the feel of her fingers in my hair. I wait for those moments to pass. The tang of the past is only overwhelming when your present tastes like nothing. I train hard, I travel the world, I buy things my parents didn’t allow themselves to even dream about. So I just have to breathe deeply and wait for those moments to pass. 

And yet I couldn’t stop myself from sneaking out of the hotel that night. I settled into a seat at the back of the cinema, and allowed the frames to wash over me. Nisha was born to play this role. Both women wielded their words like a weapon, both couldn’t be contained. Nisha had transformed into Amrita but I could still see through her disguise. 

There’s a scene towards the end where she’s reciting some lines in the radio station. Imroz, Amrita’s companion, stands outside the cabin and looks through the glass. Nisha’s eyes pool with silent tears like they used to, her voice cracks. But she adjusts her glasses, clears her throat, and recites Amrita’s lines: 

Rall gayi si es vich ek boond tere ishq di 

Esse layi main zindagi di saari kudattan pee layi

Because a drop of your love was mixed in 

I drank all of life’s bitterness

People, and the press, had many names for our relationship: affair, involvement, liaison. My favourite was dalliance. It sounded flattering, like I was a European arthouse actress who’d spent a summer aiding a young director’s sexual awakening. It made me feel very Monica Bellucci. But this is India, and life is not Notting Hill. Everything has an afterlife if you’re famous, and even supposed well-wishers never let you forget. 

Civilians can unfollow, block, ghost. But what if you were seeing the hottest thing in Indian cricket? He’s in every second commercial on your screen, dancing badly but enthusiastically. His Instagram thirst traps are news items. His face stares at you from billboards. When he’s selling you a refrigerator in a maroon suit, you think about the perfect falsetto of his snoring. When he takes his shirt off for a deodorant commercial, you know they’ve airbrushed the birthmark on his left shoulder blade. You’re so alive to his name still. When it’s mentioned, even in passing, it makes you start, as if someone is calling out to you. 

It’s the worst now, when the World Cup is on, and as the nation rests its hopes on his slender shoulders. India needs 41 runs in 12 balls to beat Pakistan at the Sydney Cricket Ground. You’re sitting next to Sarabjeet, the man you live with. He is a wildly talented actor and treats you like a goddess. 

Babe, you don’t have to watch, he says considerately. Let me turn it off and we can go for a drive. Men in love are something else.

No no, you insist, don’t be silly. Those things are long past. It’s such a crazy game! Do you think we’ll make it? 

I don’t think so babe, 41 in two overs is too much. 

But it’s not too much for Saurabh. Only I was too much for Saurabh. He steps out of his crease and smashes the world’s fastest bowler for six. He makes room on the legside and cheekily scoops the wicket keeper. He runs like his life depends on it. I know it does. 

When it’s done, he walks to the centre of the pitch and takes off his helmet. He puts his lips to his bat and blows kisses to the spectators in the Bradman Stand. He turns around and does it again. And so he completes a circle on the spot, blowing bat-kisses to the adoring masses, taking it in until his teammates mob him. 

Fireworks go off outside my window on Juhu Beach. 

Come, I tell Sarabjeet, let’s go for that drive. 

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