When the cold would start creeping up on us early in November, Maa and I would take out the blankets from the chest, beat them, and leave them under the sun, where my brother, my puppy and I would play underneath those blankets hanging from those sturdy ropes looking like a warm, cushiony fortress.

Later, we would wash them up. And I hated this. I hate washing up. I hate how cold water feels in winters. And somehow, the water always seems to know it. The bite of the cold would curl up around my skin, seep down to my bones. We would hang the blankets up in the sun again, with chairs to support their weight.

I cannot picture our home in winters without steaming cups of tea. Maa had a love for tea, a love I inherited. In winters, especially when it rained, we would all sit huddled in the balcony, our chairs close, our knees touching, and a thin blanket over our legs, sipping on tea as rain swallowed up the meadow stretched out infront of us. I miss that. I miss the tea. I miss the coffee too, that my brother made with cream in it that looked like miniature icebergs floating on a sienna sea. The only coffee I'd ever drink without prompting, simply because he made it, and I was always curious to taste what it was that he had made.

I loved the mist in the hills and in the fields a few miles away from home. There was a spot we would go to, my brother and I, so I could see the tendrils of mist licking up the trees of the woods and the hills in the distance. We often went into those woods, climbed those hills. And we would sit there. Hours and hours looking at the shadows etched by the clouds on the face of the hills.

Even now, through all this distance and all these years, I think of my woods and my hills, of the shadows of clouds, of the strange, soft sort of grief that settles around you when you think of time passing.

I think of my brother, now grown up, taller than me in stature and calmer than me in temperament. It’s hard to reconcile the boy that shot orange seeds across the terrace with me with this grown up who sits beside me and talks about our shared childhood the few times a year we get to see each other.

Now that winters are rolling in where I live and I see the mist pooling in the meadow outside my window, I cannot help but feel the longing once again, for those unbothered winters- cold in all tangible ways- except in our hearts which were so filled with warmth, and brightness. Quite like the oranges we devoured.

Most recently, it has been because I came back to the quiet of my humble dwellings after being out in the world, in the very thick of things, for a handful of days. It was the quietest, most uneventful homecoming ever- me, hauling my bags up four flights of stairs in shifts because I could not lift it all in one go, and then struggling with the keys in the dark.

I was tired, I was sleepless, I had had a passing out episode and a throwing up episode in the days I was loose in the wild and I can only chalk it up to exhaustion, given the intensity of the itinerary I had prepared for myself.

Despite all of this, once I was back in the place I have begun to think of as home somehow, I found myself slowly walking into each room, opening the windows and letting the night air embrace the rooms once again. I ran my hands across the books on the table, greeted them, and then got to cleaning the house because the idea of resting in a place that has gathered some dust is just unacceptable to me. Such ordinary business, such unglamorous work- cleaning the house after ten hours of travel.

And yet, all I could feel, beside my spinning head, was how grateful I was in that moment. How absolutely fortunate I felt to have a place to return to, a calm place that I had made a home out of all by myself.

I have always suspected that I am a little solitary by nature. Not in the sense that I don't enjoy company; quite the contrary. I love meeting new people, discovering new places and throwing myself into the world. I have simply learned that, sooner or later, I must return to myself.

While we are still in the middle of things, I must confess that the escapades and the socialising and the whole business of being “everything, everywhere, all at once” are my own orchestrations. But I am not too proud to admit that I miscalculate rather spectacularly at times. This time, it was the unforgiving pace I had set for myself while traveling. I don’t regret any of it. In fact, I think I would do most of it again, if I had another go at it. It was both enjoyable and important. However, a thing can be enjoyable and important and still completely wring you out.

I knew I was completely spent barely halfway through my itinerary. And yet, I pushed on. You could call it will, or stubbornness or some unfortunate combination of the two.

Which brings us back to our original theory. We are only wise in retrospect. We only truly understand things in retrospect. I hadn’t known how accustomed I had grown to living with myself in this place I now call home for most of the month. I hadn't known how much I loved it until I was out in the world and, halfway through my itinerary, found myself thinking of home. Of the moonbeams falling against the white tiled floor of my room in soft golden shafts. Of the walks I take on the terrace after dinner, watching the starry sky and tracing the few constellations I recognise. Of the familiar walk to the gym, the little shops I frequent where the shopkeepers have come to know what I want, the small rituals that have come to resemble quiet prayers.

It has been a happy realisation, albeit a little late. Or perhaps just in time. I am not sure which. I am not quite bothered by it either because it is nightfall in this place I hadn't known I had come to love and I must go to the terrace to meet my stars, finally under a sky that I recognise as my own.

Perhaps I will tell them that in retrospect, I have finally understood this much: that I have an appetite for the world, for its escapades and its novelty, but that there is a quiet, ordinary life waiting for me here, and I love it just as fiercely.

One of the rooms is in a place facing the hills. Right outside the window of that room, lies a sprawling meadow. Every morning, at around 8:40 am, a group of girls walk across it, dressed in their school uniforms. I don’t really see their faces but they walk through the tall grass, each clad in white salwar kameez, their blue dupattas neatly pleated into Vs. In the distance, I can see the hills. They look almost blue from so far away and they are draped in white clouds, almost as though they saw the girls walking through the meadow every day, dressed in white and blue and decided to do the same. I can't help but think that the hills wanted to write a little poem for the girls honouring their daily pilgrimage.

The other room is in a town with an ocean view. Every time I walk into that room, I dig my feet into the sand, and stand as close to the waves as I can possibly get without being swept away into the ocean. (Because despite my ability to swim and my general stubbornness, I know I don’t stand a chance against the strength of the waves). Sometimes, I see a bunch of kids building castles and go up to them asking if I could join. They say yes. And soon, I am on my hands and knees, saltwater sprays from the waves coating my tongue as I laugh with the kids. Together, we build a castle that we will later watch the waves swallow while we yell our goodbyes to it.

The last room has my friend. Its window opens to a giant tree and an urban landscape. I would not usually prefer it- the urban landscape, not the tree. But the room has my friend. When I step into it, she is there, ready to take me into her arms, while I complain about how hot it is outside and how much I hate the scorching sun and how my skin is peeling from the sunburn and oh did I mention how much I hate the sun? I rush into the shower and only once I have stood there long enough that my skin resembles a prune do I step out. And then I rush to hug her because I couldn’t hug her back as well as I would have liked when I had just stepped in. In this last room, my friend always makes sure there’s plenty of food at all times. Simple, homecooked meals, because she knows that is what I like. Later, we turn off the lights, lie down on the floor and share our favourite poems with each other, reading them out loud turn by turn. I scream every time she reads something that I love and she laughs.

Now, like all rooms in all homes, my rooms share walls, despite being thousands of miles away from each other. And much like all rooms in all homes, I can hear the sounds from other rooms all the time.

Sometimes, I press my ear to one wall and hear the waves crash against the shore. It is my most beloved sound in the whole world, second only to the sound of my puppy's bark. And I miss it, nearly as much as I miss the sound of my puppy’s bark.

Then, I press my ear to the wall and listen to my friend in the other room. She says “You shouldn’t be so scared of the things you love that you do not allow yourself to even go near them.” Through the wall that separates us, I tell her it is not so easy but that I will try. I tell her that I love her a lot and that I miss her even more than that.

So I have a home with three rooms. It’s a simple home. Just the three rooms. Sometimes it takes me months to step into all these rooms that make up my home. And sometimes, that thought just breaks my heart. But then I tell myself that not all rooms in all homes have what I have in the rooms of my home- I have love and warmth and acceptance in all these rooms. So much that I can feel it embrace me through all this space that exists between my rooms.

We all know that rich people have really big homes. In fact, I have seen these homes although I have never really been inside these homes. But I think no matter how big their homes are, mine is bigger. Because the space between my rooms swallow up entire stretches of the country. That’s how big my home is. And that’s why I think that I might just be the richest person in the world.

It is true, right? Most of our lives are so different from how we had imagined them as kids, and then as teenagers, and then as adults. Hell, most of our lives are very different from how we had envisioned them a year ago.

Maybe Ben Franklin was right. Maybe it really is death and taxes that is certain. But then I refuse to believe that. It’s so cynical, so devoid of life that it just breaks my heart.

And so I sat down with it. To think about what is certain in my life. Other than death and taxes.

1. It is certain that every time I tell my friend I miss her, she will say Come over. Right away. I will take care of you. And I know she will. Because she does. Every single time.

2. It is certain that every time my mother asks my brother where is your sister? What is she up to now? He will always say “I don’t know” because I haven’t given him the script yet. (God bless him.)

3. It is certain that every time I gaze at the stars, they will take my breath away. I would trace the few stars and constellations I recognise and whisper their stories into the thin air of the night and feel the wetness on my cheeks from the tears that decided to arrive to keep me company so we could marvel at the enormity of the universe together.

4. It is certain that every time I come across a bookstore in a row of stores in a busy market, I will immediately come to a halt, reading the titles of the books through the glass, no matter how late I am running.

5. It is certain that every time I watch the rain, sitting in the passenger seat of a car as we drive through a row of street lamps at night, I will place my arms on the dashboard under the golden glow of the light and watch it scatter the shadows of the water droplets all over my skin.

6. It is certain that every time I break down and go to the people I love, with whatever pieces of myself I could somehow salvage, they will help me piece it together. No matter how many times I broke, and no matter what broke me.

7. It is certain that no matter how many times the world wrenches my heart out of my chest and breaks it, I will still carry some stubborn remnant of hope, love and kindness. And when I gather the pieces and put them back between my ribs, bruised and misshapen, I know they will grow again through the cracks. Like a dandelion pushing through a concrete sidewalk.

Maybe Ben Franklin was being pragmatic. Maybe I am a tad too emotional, bordering on foolish. After all, he founded America.

All I have ever done was to write and share stories, and love and be loved by the most wonderful people, and take myself on the wildest adventures from the hills in the east to the heart of Chandni Chowk.

So maybe he will forgive me for disagreeing with him, and believing instead that death and taxes may be certain. But what is even more certain is the abundance of love and joy and passion that I will keep crafting out of this life with my own two hands again and again and again.

I remembered this as I was looking at the moon. It's purnima today. The moon is a full, incandescent bubble in the sky- its glow so bright that you can barely see the stars, which is not uncommon for full moon nights.

And here I am, sharing it with my friend, and a bunch of people who were strangers to me until this morning. We are sprawled out on a grassy slope, watching mesmerised as musicians weave magic into the air. In the day, this was Ziro valley- a sprawling expanse of golden from the fields ripe for the harvest with green accents in the distance from the hills that embrace the valley on all sides, like Van Gogh’s wheatfield in the flesh, only far more breathtaking. Thanks to our stars, this has been the backdrop to the music festival. Now that night has fallen, this has turned into a landscape is steeped in darkness, and then, bathed in moonlight, so much so that even the grass underneath us is gleaming.

We had gone on a trek earlier. Who would have thought I would come to enjoy trekking so much? Whenever I ask myself this, I remember something one of my cousins had recently said- “I had always known you were eventually going to be like this and you would love to wander around. You simply had been too caged up and too comfortable in your cage to know this yourself.”

I think about that now that I am learning these things about myself in real time. As though I had been as much a stranger to myself as these people seated around me in a circle strumming the guitar and singing together.

We became friends after I helped one of them during the trek today. Now, here we are, sharing this moonlit night together. There’s also a bunch of other things we have shared. I have painted a smiley face on a pebble and given it to one of them. Another has twisted a strand of dried grass into a ring and put it on my finger. My friend has brought me soft pastels and socks from his travels. And I have made him grilled cheese sandwiches. Someone else is lying beside me, drunk to the nines, twirling my hair every now and then, and whispering “Just look at those curls”.

A while ago three of us were huddled over, plucking those little grassy seeds off my stockings.

“You look beautiful but did you really have to wear stockings? Just take them off.” One of them sighs.

“I saved your life at the trek today. So quit complaining and help me.”

“Wow. You are such a bully.”

We laugh. It’s the kind of loud, carefree laughter that only friends and wine together can bring.

A while ago, someone asked me what it is I like to do apart from trekking. I could feel my face break into the widest grin. “I swim, I write, I paint. I tell stories on stage at times.”

So naturally, they made me perform- with the moon as the spotlight, the grassy slope as my stage, this group of strangers-turned-friends as audience.

I have performed in rooms with hundreds of people. But somehow this gathering just shy of a dozen brought me to tears by the end as I finished my story saying “If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.” and they broke into applause and whistles.

How wonderful it is to be able to share something like this with such a wonderfully strange group of people, on an even stranger night.

I have always believed “যিটো সূৰ্যাস্ত আপুন জনৰ লগত ভগাই ল’ব নোৱাৰি, সেইটো সূৰ্যাস্ত বাৰু কি ধৰণৰ সূৰ্যাস্ত?" (What kind of a sunset is a sunset that you cannot share with your loved one?)

I suppose that is what I have been learning lately- that there are so many kinds of আপুন জন (loved ones) waiting to be found in unexpected, unexplored places like these.

It turns out my cousin was right. I had been too comfortable in my cage to know that there was a world outside it that I would want so badly. That I would love wandering through it. That I would love the people I met there. That I would to climb mountains with strangers, make friends halfway up a hill, perform under the moon, and lie on the grass laughing until our stomachs hurt.

I had been far too unaware of my own desires in my cage to know that I wanted all of this.

But now that I know, I cannot imagine it any other way.

On the night of the wedding, after the rituals around the sacred fire were complete, the bride and groom exchanged garlands. After that, something astonishing happened. In a fraction of a second, the groom bent down and touched the bride’s feet. The bride looked stunned. And then, she was smiling the widest smile while tears were streaming down her face.

I had been seated beside my friend and I remember, everyone erupted into claps and cheers. Whistles and yayys and oooohhhss everywhere from the cousins and friends.

I had gasped, my hand flying to my mouth. A little "whaaaa-" escaped me, as I watched it unfold in front of my eyes- the groom slowly bending. But soon I had joined the cheers too, laughing alongside the others.

Everyone around us, the grown ups, especially the ladies giggled “Did you see? Babu touched her feet. He really does love her a lot.”

Another lady said “I remember when he first introduced her to us. He would stare at her every now and then for a few seconds. I don’t know if it was to make sure she wasn’t nervous or because he just wanted to look at her. But the boy does love her.”

Another voice said “May God always keep them like this.”

I heard several things like these as I sat amongst their family, most of whom I didn’t know except their parents. And it made me understand one thing very clearly- “He really does love her a lot” was a common sentiment amongst everyone.

I turned to my friend and smiled widely. “Your brother is the sweetest lover boy ever.”

He grinned, nodding. “It’s not that surprising to me, you know? I have always known he is devoted to her. They have fought a lot of odds to come together.”

The numerous wedding photos and videos were shared over a drive link yesterday.

I watched them all, especially the one where Babu dada touches her feet.

I want to say that in hindsight, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But I cannot. It really is. To do that publicly, amongst everyone they know, surrounded by friends and family, there’s a very specific brand of bravery that it would take- the kind of bravery that only love could offer.

My friend will once again be leaving for the US. So we decided to catch up yesterday, before there's two and a half continents between us once again.

At some point, he asked me, “How many people do you think are lucky enough to have what Babu dada has?”

“Well. In many ways, your brother and sister-in-law created their own luck. They struggled a lot and only then did they end up having what they have. So I would say whoever is willing and capable of doing that, might have a good shot at it.

“You are such a strong advocate for it.” He grinned.

“Good things are worth fighting for, no?” I shrugged.

We went on to talk about career, love, geopolitics and memories of our shared past after that.

Later, on my way back, I thought that my friend is right. Many people are not lucky enough to have the kind of love and contentment that Babu dada and Bou share. I have seen people I know enter marriages with people who, on paper, seemed just right for them. They were also stamped and approved, sometimes even pre-chosen by their families. Yet, I am watching some of these marriages fall apart.

When I had said this to my friend, he simply replied, "Yes, it's very common now."

As though, that thought should comfort anyone.

I thought about Babu dada bending down to touch Bou’s feet in front of everyone. A man showing his love and devotion, surrounded by people, without hesitation. And the woman he loves- stunned and moved to tears by the gesture.

But I also know from my friend over the past year and a half that luck didn’t always look like this. Babu dada and Bou had been tested to their very limits- often breaking down and almost losing hope- before they were granted this life by the fates. What we saw on the night of the wedding was simply two people celebrating their bond after literally walking into war for each other, knowing that they had finally won, knowing that whatever struggle life threw at them hereafter would pale in comparison, and would have to bow down to them because they were now together.

Maybe that is what luck is. Not something that arrives at your doorstep, fully formed and ready to be enjoyed. But something that you forge- slowly, stubbornly- with your own hands, with people you love. Luck asks for humility, patience, courage, and sometimes the willingness to look a little foolish in front of everyone. Much like Babu dada.

I don't know how many people are lucky enough to have a life filled with love like that. But perhaps that isn't quite the right question.

We often call people lucky when what we're actually witnessing is them finally achieving what they were brave enough to fight for.

I suppose, the better question would be- how many people are brave enough to build a life like that?

After all, good things are worth fighting for, no?

That’s how we ended up in a club on Saturday night. And now we are sitting beside a waterfall. He has fallen asleep on the grass. I am watching the water dive several feet from up hill.

It’s the kind of day where you just watch the clouds swathed across the sky like large, lazy spaceships.

“That one is a dog” I whisper and look over to my friend, knowing he is sleeping.

I am grateful for the break.

Last night, a while after we had all stepped into the club together, I had shouted over the music “I want to dance. But I don’t want to dance alone.”

That’s how all of us ended up dancing until well past midnight. By the end of it, my heels had gone from being strapped to my feet to my hands.

We didn’t leave until I was prepared to put on my heels again, much to the amusement of my friends.

“Maybe we should all lift you like you’re royalty”, one of my friends had said.

“Or like you are about to be sacrificed.”

“Given my luck, the latter seems more likely”, I yelled over the music.

In less than 12 hours, we have gone from club music and dancing to this expanse of green, completely quiet except for the sound of water crashing against the sun.

As the car had come to slowly come to a halt in the meadow, I had almost stopped breathing.

“This is so beautiful.” I had whispered, still inside the car. The whisper was involuntary, nothing to do with the fact that my voice had failed me after all the yelling and hysterics last night.

“I told you I would take you to all my favourite places, didn’t I?” my friend said grinning widely.

I laughed and followed him to the waterfall. “Your favourites span from the club to this. It’s a whole spectrum.”

He turned back to look at me, for a second “Tell me you didn’t enjoy them.”

“I did. Very much. All of them.”

Saying it out loud surprised me because I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to it until then. I had told him how my previous experiences in a club (only two if we leave out yesterday) had been underwhelming. And that it was years ago.

He had told me a lot of that experience depends on who you are with. He was right. He is usually right about these things.

Before he went to sleep, I looked at him, perched on a rock beside the waterfall where I am still seated and said “Listen. Thank you for taking me along to all these places. I have slowly been trying to explore new things myself. And I have found out so much more about what I like. I liked yesterday and I like this too.”

“I know. I told you that you would love it, didn’t I?”, he grinned, arrogant as ever.

We sat in silence after that, in which he drifted off to sleep. And I am here watching this. In an hour, I will wake him up because I have to be on stage in a few hours to perform spoken word poetry in a room full of artists. He will be there with more of my friends.

It’s wild how just a few months ago, this would have sounded like somebody else’s life to me. There was a version of me who had a fairly fixed idea of what life looked like and the things that I love. And then, somehow, life started accumulating these strange little experiences.

A club in the night, a waterfall and a meadow in the morning and a studio in the evening, would have sounded fascinating to me but it would not have been recognisable as my own. Yet here I am.

It’s crazy how the stars shift to change us and our lives. However the stars have shifted, though, I am glad they have led me to try out things I had only looked at from a distance, to discover parts of myself I hadn't really known before.

I had spent so much time blaming the stars. But maybe the fault wasn’t in the stars after all. Maybe all I needed was a little push and a few people who loved me enough to drag me out of my comfort zone.

And then, almost without noticing, I discovered that I am not one thing. I am a little bit of this, a little bit of that; sometimes contradictory, sometimes surprising, but still myself.

And somewhere between the music and the waterfall, the meadow and the stage, I began looking around and realising:

Oh.

I like this life.

“My birthday is in December.”

“Yes. 25th of December. You’re practically Jesus. I am so excited.”

He laughed. “Isn’t your birthday before mine?”

“Yes. So? Anyway, tell me what you like. I have to prepare for your birthday.”

I have been asking him what he likes for a while now. And he really has no clue. I have spent enough time with him to know what it is he would like to eat though. That’s because it’s the one thing where I believe his likes and dislikes are pretty obvious. Even to him. So every time I go back home, we have what I call junk food. He calls it food. I take a few bites of the samosa chaat, bhel puri, aloo tikki chaat because he insists. He eats the rest of it because he loves it. I watch him eat it and tell him "Let's have curd after this. Or coconut water. You need one good thing in your body too."

He makes a face. This is the arrangement we have and it works. He has been insisting on paani puris from a place and I have told him it looks unhygienic.

He says “Oh it is. Very much so. That’s what makes it tasty.”

“How about we go to Sharma Sweets?” I say. “I’ll get you something there.”

“No. I want this specifically.”

It makes me laugh every time. “Atleast you know what you want in this case.”

I have slowly started exploring things with him, to see what it is he would like to do. He finds it strange and funny. I find it fun.

I think a lot of why I am hell-bent on exploring things is because I have discovered several new things out about myself- I was so sure of the things I like before. And I do like them a lot. But turns out I like a whole bunch of other things too, that I had no clue I liked before simply because I hadn't explored it well enough. Either due to time, or circumstances.

I have discovered I love trekking and going on hiking trails (who would have thought?). And that I love swimming (I barely knew how to swim before). The sensory deprivation from when I am in the water is a feeling I now crave so often, I sometimes wonder how I had been missing this all my life and had no clue. The moment I step into the water, and it envelopes me, there's this feeling that washes over me that I can only describe as peace. It was scary at first, but I pushed through that and now, all I can feel is the thrill humming in my veins as the water rushes to meet me. I love rafting too. Anything with proximity to water, I seem to like.

I don't think I ever disliked these things before. I just had no clue I would like them so very much because I had not had the chance to explore that side of myself. And now that I have, I am stunned by how much I enjoy it. I suppose, sometimes, you don't dislike something. You simply haven't been introduced to that version of yourself yet. I wish I had explored it sooner. I wish someone had said "You know what, let's go. We are doing this."

So this is why I have decided, I gotta do this with my friend. He seems okay enough to cooperate every time I come up with a new plan. He just has one thing he said once that he repeats every now and then, "I work every day of the week. If, on the day I take a holiday, you make me trek, I will not do it."

I say "Trekking season is actually post summer and monsoon. It will be good then. Even I can't stand it when it's unnaturally hot. Nobody can. Your body has a temperature and if the wet bulb temperature exceeds --"

"No", he says before I can finish and I laugh.

Maybe trekking will take a little more time and a lot more convincing. So it will have to wait.

I have convinced him to go rafting in October though. I have told him I'll take care of the rafting with the others on the raft. He can just rest and watch the river and the trees. He is right. He does deserve a day off.

But I am right too. And I think the more we explore, the more chances he has of realising he likes something like I did for myself. Because I wish someone had taken me somewhere and said, "Come on. Let's try this." And talked with me through the initial fear or hesitation when trying something new and unexplored. It might have been scary at first, maybe even a little difficult, but oh god it would have been so much fun.

So I have decided I'm going to be that person for my friend now.

Who knows maybe I'll find more things I like along the way as well?

Maybe that's the whole point of life.

And maybe, just maybe, we will find out what he likes just in time for his birthday.

It’s not enough though, it never is. I always get this urge to talk to the people seated beside me. It’s simply how I am wired. I like talking to new people. To my left, by the window was a middle aged man. To my right, a girl roughly my age. The choice was obvious. I saw that she had a crochet key-chain. A fish. I turned to her, smiling and asked her if she had made it herself. She nodded. We began talking from there. She showed me her crocheting. I showed her my paintings and pottery.

At some point, we fell silent. And I thought about the conversation we just had. How we had both talked about how happy it makes us to give the people we love something that we made with our own two hands. Creation is one of the highest acts of love, I believe. I love you to the point of creation, we were essentially saying.

After a while, the cabin crew had come for clearance. The man in the window seat passed on the package in which he had ordered the sandwich, used a sanitiser and then, took out his wallet, flipped it open for a few seconds and then flipped it back. He hadn’t taken out any cash or cards. But my eyes had tracked what he did. I turned to the girl beside me “You know he carries a picture in his wallet. It’s him and his wife, I think? He just flipped his wallet open and looked at it for a second and then put it back. Isn’t it amazing? All that love after all these years?”

I was beaming by the time I had finished whispering it to her. So was she. “Where would you find love like that in this day and age?” She was right. It’s hard to find love like that in this day and age- this kind of love that makes you carry the picture of a person in your wallet and look at it randomly, thousands of feet up in the air.

Instead, our day and age is plagued by what I believe is one of the most pathetic traits there ever was- nonchalance. The other day I was on call, telling a friend of mine that nonchalance is for cowards, for people who have nothing and nobody to truly love, or nothing they feel deeply about. Or more likely nothing they want to admit they feel deeply about. It is a cry for help. No passions, no loves, nothing that moves their hearts. It all points to a frightening lack of courage and personality. And it's also the saddest thing in the world, don't you think? There's no joy in not being able to love wildly and wholeheartedly, I had concluded.

I believe this wholeheartedly. Yesterday, another friend of mine asked me when I would come to Delhi. I had given him a rough timeframe before and I thought he was asking me for specific dates because he had plans of his own. Perhaps a trip to a different city himself. So I told him the dates. And I asked him why. He said “Oh because I’m looking forward to you coming.”

That was just it. That was his reason. The simple fact that he was looking forward to seeing me.

The other day, I had randomly asked another friend, who happens to live in Gurgaon, ‘“Do you want to go to the Guns N Roses concert with me, darling?”

“You know what, why the hell not?” she had said. And now, she’s going to fly over half the country to watch a concert that I have been excited about for the longest time.

There are very few bands/artists that I would want to watch live with all of my heart. One of them would have been The Beatles. The other was Fleetwood Mac. Neither is possible anymore, because they have both lost band members to that flightiest of mistresses, death. But Guns N Roses, Arctic Monkeys and Hozier are still out there in the world. Still performing. And the fact that I will get to have one-third of this dream turn to reality soon has my heart soaring in my chest. But perhaps, even more than that, it’s the fact that she said yes to being a part of this dream of mine, right away, without batting an eyelid, when I know for a fact, Guns N Roses wouldn’t be the first band she would name if someone asked her which artists she would want to see live.

There’s another friend who is coming over for two weeks because we kept on trying to make plans for us to meet in different cities but none of it panned out. So he said “You know what, it’s absolutely unfair that the last time I saw you was almost two years ago. I will just come to Dhemaji now. I’ll see you and we will just take it from there.” So he has taken care of his accommodation. He has made plans for both of us for the Ziro music festival. The rest, he says, can be whatever I want it to be.

A couple of weeks ago, when I had injured my foot, a friend sent me flowers. In Dhemaji, where I am posted. I remember saying “Good luck sending flowers here. This is a village. There’s no ferns n petals.” Her reply was “My middle name is jugaad.” And within 36 hours, I was holding the biggest bouquet of my life- roses, chrysanthemums, baby’s breath, all held together with the prettiest bow. I cried a little. Then I took a whole bunch of pictures and sent them to her.

I was in Mumbai what seems like a whole lifetime ago, meeting people I had been the closest of friends with for nearly half a decade now but had never met before. We hugged, cried, ate, solved a mystery room in record time, sat on the shore watching the sea. And when I left, I was carrying with me a book, a bouquet of sunflowers, a shirt which one of the girls said screamed like it belonged to me and it haunted her dreams until she bought it for me. And a painting she made of the night-sky with our constellations facing each other. It was all I could do not to fall to my knees and cry because how can a heart take in all this love? Where do you keep it when it becomes a lump in your throat that refuses to move because how do you make sense of the amount of love that’s showered on you?

But oh God if there’s any other universe, and if I ever get a say, I will always choose this. This universe. These people. This immeasurable amount of love. I will always choose people who know how to love so deeply and so openly, without restraints. People who stun me with how much they care for those they love. People who hear the word nonchalance and laugh at it asking “Wtf is nonchalance? I believe in soul-crushing devotion. Can I interest you in some of that?”

I asked her later what she thought about it- about finding a love like this, love that was just right for us and then losing it. I asked what she would do in a hypothetical scenario where she knew she was going to lose this love. Would she still choose it?

“Yes. We have just got this one life. अब थोड़ी देर के लिए ही सही ज़िन्दगी में सच्ची मोहब्बत न नसीब हो तो क्या फायदा जीने का?”

“Even if you lose it?”

“Jaana, imagine living your whole life and never once experiencing love like this? Would you want a life like that? That would be such a sad life.”

“Would it be sad if you didn’t even know what you lost?”

“Of course it would. Say you are born without the sense of sight. You have never seen the sun rise behind a mountain, or the river flowing like a giant snake underneath a bridge, or a flower blooming, or any of it. So you don’t know what you have lost. But is it not heartbreakingly sad that you never even got a single chance? Not a single memory of something so wonderful?”

I was quiet then. For someone who had started off extremely undecided on the question I had posed, she had offered an answer which had forced me to acknowledge her perspective.

It’s a difficult fact for someone like me to swallow. To willingly accept unimaginable grief in the future for a short period of bliss- why would you do that? I wasn't always like this. I was never someone who would ask this question. But I have had my heart broken in a manner so cruel, that I don't rely on my perspective, or even my doubts for that matter.

So I asked a few other friends. One of them said “Shabnoor, life is broadly a tragedy. If it’s offering me a shot at this kind of love that borders on devotion, I will take it. It’s okay if I lose it. I will spend the rest of my life thinking about it on and off. My life will not stop. And you’re right, it will always seem less vibrant after this kind of loss. Something will always feel missing, not quite right. But you know what? It’s still worth it.”

I am almost ashamed to admit how much I have thought about it. Long, long after the conversations ended. It was in the middle of one of these thoughts that I was broken out of my daze by a sound downstairs. I looked outside the office window to see the people putting up the fence. They are redeveloping the garden. When I had first joined this office, the space where they’re building the garden was just wild growth. They’ve cut up the climbers and wild shrubs and planted flowering plants- hibiscuses. And because I requested it- a bougainvillea. "All of this work", my analytical brain chimes in, "it's going to require maintenance every season."

It reminds me of growing up in my childhood home- my mother spreading out the loose soil on a series of gunny sacks to dry just before winter would set in. She would break the soil with her hands and fill the numerous pots with it. Then, gently place the saplings that would later become chrysanthemums, marigolds, and sweet williams. As a child, I would ask her every now and then if it was worth it. After all, these flowering plants only last until spring. All this work, only to have it turn to nothing in a few weeks. She would say “Even if it’s for a short while, it’s so beautiful. It lights up the whole yard. Of course it’s worth it.”

Maybe this is what my friends mean as well. It’s worth it to have your life lit up for a short while just to feel the joy of being blown away by the beauty and depth of love. I want to say my friends are a bunch of incurable romantics at heart- people who will simply accept and believe in true love and do not care about mundane things like the practicality of heartbreak. Because love changes you in ways you don't notice them until love leaves you and you find yourself looking at flowers, or trees, or the sunset, or the moon and where you once found ordinariness, you now find breathtaking beauty. It was all there before, but you truly see it now and think of this person with whom you wish to share them.

To my friends, life is one shot. Not only is true love rare, it is also worth all the pain it causes when you lose it because of the simple fact that you got to experience it once.

अब थोड़ी देर के लिए ही सही ज़िन्दगी में सच्ची मोहब्बत न नसीब हो तो क्या फायदा जीने का?

I think what he means to say is that if you really think about it, there are two great tragedies in this world. One is death, and the other, life. There’s not a lot you can do about death. There’s no remedy to death.

Life on the other hand, does have a remedy. It is love. It really is that simple. You could think it’s money or power or influence and you would probably even be right by some measure. But it wears off. It never is enough.

My beloved Mary Oliver arrives at the same conclusion when she writes:

"We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins."

You could have all the money you want, you could land your dream job, you could be maxing out the machines at the gym but nothing will ever feel right in your heart if it’s weighed down by the absence of love. You could surround yourself with people, so you don’t feel the emptiness in your chest. You can hold someone’s hand and even convince yourself for a while that it’s love. You could chase wealth and fame and power. But the heart wants what it wants despite all these mental hoops and ladders and failsafe mechanisms you put in place to stop yourself from feeling the absence of true love.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz puts it beautifully when he writes:

तेरी आँखों के सिवा दुनिया में रक्खा क्या है

तू जो मिल जाए तो तक़दीर निगूँ हो जाए

What is the point of this world, if not your eyes?

If I ever got you, even destiny would bow down.

Life is unpredictable- short and yet unbearably long. It seems to be a chain of one tragedy after another. And the worst thing is we just get one shot at it. All of that is true. It is also true that the universe doesn't promise us much. It doesn't promise justice, or fairness, or happiness.

But what’s also true is that while the universe gives us this life with all its tragedies, it also gives us the cure in the form of love. It holds our hand, walks us out into the road, points to the other side and says "There. Look. That person over there. Do you see them? That's love. Go across the road and stand next to them before your roads diverge and you have lost each other."

Some of us listen to this voice. We cross the road, walk up to the person and hold out our hand. We smile at them saying "Hello, Love. Here I am. Come, take my hand, please?"

Some of us take too long, or wander too far away and end up finding ourselves in the middle of the road looking everywhere and not finding the love we were afraid to reach for. Only its shadows. Small, momentary feelings; passing things that we try to convince ourselves is love because how do we tell ourselves the truth instead? That we let love slip past us? That we weren't brave enough?

Perhaps that is all any of us are ever asked to do. Cross the road. Oftentimes, love isn't just something we find, it's also something we are brave enough to choose everyday, no matter how much life keeps getting in the way.

Not because the universe gives us the guarantee of "forever". But because love asks for courage before it asks for certainty.

We spend so much of our lives trying to insure ourselves against heartbreak. We wait until the timing is perfect, until we are richer, wiser, more attractive, more successful. We convince ourselves that if it is truly meant to be, it will somehow arrive at our doorstep without asking anything of us, without demanding that we pour our soul, and every bit of our courage into it.

Life is very often a tragedy. That much is true. But perhaps the tragedy is not that love leaves us. It is that we keep standing on the pavement, watching it from across the street, failing to be brave when love asks us to, believing that fate should cross the road on our behalf. Perhaps the tragedy is that we fail to meet love when it arrives.

Samwise says this when all hope is as good as abandoned, and it makes little sense that a man (a hobbit, in this case) would hold on to this belief.

But isn't this the only time you can truly have hope, the only time you can truly be brave and believe in the goodness of things?

It is so easy to believe the world has good intentions, that there's good in this world, when we have not been put to the test. But unfortunately for us, there are a few things- hope and courage and goodness of the heart- which can never really be determined until the person has gone through the tests life throws at him and come out still holding on to these.

I remember very little from the Materials Science course back in college but what I do remember is in order to determine the strength of a material, you subject it to a battery of tests and plot a stress-strain curve until it shows the first signs of deformation.

Back then, if I had thought of how poetic this is, I would have paid a lot more attention in the lab.

But being good is rotten work. A lot of times, it leads to nothing. A lot of times, it causes just as much pain in the end as it would had we abandoned our goodness. Possibly more because there's a part of us that wonders of taking the easier road would have hurt less.

The other day, I was talking to a friend about this when he said "Why should I hold on to morality and land in the same awful place that I would have landed in if I had chosen to be selfish? Atleast that way, I get to have some fun."

Is it worth it to live with the disgust after, I had asked. And to that, he didn't really have an answer. Being good is rotten work. It is rotten work to choose goodness, especially knowing you don't stand to gain anything from it in the end. That, on the contrary, you will be subjected to grief and despair just the same.

This is essentially what my friend was saying after all- Why should I be moral if I end up in the same place?

I hadn't told him it will all work out in the end, that his choice to stay good will be rewarded. Instead, I had pointed at a very simple truth- that, you will still have yourself. You will not have lost the best of yourself to the cruelty of the world.

I read this thing someone wrote in the vast graveyard that is the internet "Cruelty is so easy. You are not special for choosing it."

I think pop culture has glamorised the anti-hero- dark, brooding, often cruel- to the extent that we think it's alright, that it's even cool to be that way.

But the thing is evil and cruelty are very simple impulses. It's the easier choice to make when you are cornered, or scared, or hopeless. And therefore, it will always be predictable.

Goodness, on the other hand? How do you explain how someone who has been dragged through hell and high water still has sincerity and light in their heart? Goodness is complex and beautiful. It is defiant. Because it survives all rational incentives to abandon it. It refuses the easy arithmetic of selfishness and cruelty.

We think the most interesting people are those forever dancing on the knife's edge of morality. But I believe, with all my heart, that there's another kind of complexity altogether: the complexity of someone who has every reason to become bitter and yet doesn't. Sam is not simple because his choices are consistent. Because consistency, after enough suffering, is not simplicity. It is extraordinary. It is an act of creation, and rebellion against the world that has tried very hard to convince you to abandon all that is good in you bit by bit.

This is why I love Samwise Gamgee. For all intents and purposes, he is a very straightforward character. If I were to make a character sketch of him, these were the adjectives I would think of- good, sincere, kind.

There aren't many layers to him. He remains steadfastly good throughout.

There was a phase in my late teens when I had begun to think of that as a character flaw. Samwise is fine, but dull, I had thought. Not a lot of layers to him. To a teenager battling with anxiety in isolation, only moral ambiguity seemed complex.

I am older now. I have gained- however alarmingly little it may be- some knowledge of the intricacies of the world because of the tests I have been put through and I am convinced Samwise is one of the most complex characters out there, for the simple fact that he held on to all that was good inside him when the world had nothing but desoation to offer to him. This is what makes him interesting- this ridiculously high elastic limit of his mind that refuses to break when breaking seems logical, even inevitable.

Over the years, I have thought about him a lot, whenever I have encountered something that has broken me. Whenever I have wanted to give in to the temptation of cruelty because of the grief I have been put through, I have repeated Sam's words so many times in my head, it's like a talisman I use to hold on to sanity-

"How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer."

Maybe this is what courage, strength and goodness have always meant- not the absence of grief, but the refusal to let it take away what's best of us, the insistence on choosing hope and kindness even after witnessing horror- much like Sam.

I remember from my classes that every material has a point at which it yields. And I know that every heart does too. Sam reminds me, whenever I need it the most, that the measure of a person is not whether he bends when force is applied- because chances are that they will- but whether he chooses to bend toward the light, still holding on to the good inside him.

If you haven’t guessed it, the fruit in question is Dragon fruit. Every summer, the plant, perched on an areca nut tree in our frontyard, offers its bounty as though saying "Do you see how beautiful I am? Come, look. Go ahead, I will welcome your touch. Come, look. Taste this strange looking fruit that I offer you that resembles a gentle beast more than anything else."

You would think a fruit that looks like that would need more than just the hands to break open. But even if you are touching a dragon fruit for the very first time, you would know how easily it gives. In the long afternoons of the summer months, I pluck out a dragon fruit every few weeks, and peel it open with my hands. And, just like that, it offers its flesh, staining my fingers the colour of sunset- soft and eager- as though it wants nothing more than to dissolve in my mouth. And so, it does.

Fantasy dragons, I have learned from years of growing up on the genre, are much the same- covered in tough scales everywhere but their undersides, where it's said to be soft and vulnerable- where their hearts reside. That's where the dragon slayers aim their arrows.

I am convinced whoever named the dragon fruit was a writer at heart. Or at least an avid reader.

I often get asked about my name- “Shabnoor is such a beautiful name. What does it mean?”

I grin, falling into the familiar lilt of an answer I have repeated so many times now that it almost comes to me like a rhyme. “Noor means light”, I say. “Shab means shaam. Night. Shabnoor means Light of the Night” Towards the end of it, I am always smiling. Because over the years, I have gone from thinking to myself that my name is too much to “You know what? My name is kind of beautiful.”

It was my mother who gave me that name. She is neither a writer, nor much of a reader. But she tells me she knew the moment she had decided with absolute certainty that my name would be Shabnoor.

I have always given names of my own to the people and things around me.

I named my puppy Wall-E because I rescued him from the back of an auto-parts workshop. He had been alone, devoid of a mother or a litter, and he had very clearly never come in contact with a human before. Almost as though he had been inhabiting a whole different planet. So I called him Wall-E, after his namesake from the movie with the same name. My comb is named Toothless because it’s missing a tooth and it’s the colour of the beloved Night Fury from the movie How To Train Your Dragon. I have steadfastly held on to Toothless despite the fact that it’s missing a tooth, or perhaps because of it. My earphones are named Raahi, because they travel with me everywhere I go. We have crossed cities, looped our way through the serpentine roads that slither along the Northeastern hills, we have floated over the clouds together- and through it all, we have been each other’s companions.

My friends find this very adorable and whimsical- this habit of mine. But I think it’s more than that. More sacred. More intimate. Just, more.

In the book Anxious People, Frederick Beckmann says “We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone”.

I think this explanation is as close as it could get to how I feel. It is not whimsy- though I do practice whimsy almost as a discipline in defiance of the cynicism and negativity in the world- but love, that makes me name things and people I call my own. Naming something is an act of love. It doesn’t merely describe love, but creates it. I am going ahead, heart on my sleeve, calling something mine, in the most intimate way possible. It’s sacred. Because I believe when I give a name of my own to something or someone, I have etched a connection- something that exists between us alone, regardless of the world around.

Like a little, secret offering of my heart- a meagre thing made out of a syllable or two- that I hold out to them, insisting wordlessly, with every fibre of my being-

“Do you see how much I love you? Come, look. Come, hear me say your name over and over, like a prayer to a God that exists for us alone.”

Zhuzh. You say this word with your eyes closed, lips curved in a smile as you wrap your lips around the single syllable. And then you laugh at the silliness of the sound of it, at the absolute abandon with which you say it. Later, as you sit with the remnants of your laughter, you run the word through the maze of your memory. How many times have you witnessed it in person- you think to yourself. 

A friend of mine is a filmmaker, who taught himself how to play the piano. I met him after half a decade recently. We were talking about everything we had missed in all these years with the kind of comfort and familiarity that both surprised and warmed my soul. We discussed music and I remember telling him I have discovered and fallen absolutely in love with Hozier in these few years. And then, without missing a beat, he had brought over his guitar (again, self-taught) and started strumming a tune. 

“CHERRY WINE!” I half-yelled, half-laughed, clapping my hands. He played the entirety of the song on his guitar and I watched, barely blinking, completely in awe of both the song and his skill, but more so because he played it without my prompting, because of the simple fact that he knew I would love it. 

The next day, I saw he had taken out a harmonium and the first thing he told me when I kept looking between him and instrument was “I do love Indian instruments but I don’t like how you have to sit cross legged with your legs folded under you and hold the instrument away.”

And then, while playing the harmonium, he had said “Oh you will love this, Shabnoor. You know harmonium is actually not originally an Indian instrument? It’s Danish. They wanted something more portable to replace the Church organ.”

I had nodded, wide-eyed, at the flurry of the information. Not the Danish origins necessarily. Not that this person I know, taught himself to play three different instruments with such natural ease. But more because he knew this is the kind of information that I love, this random nerdy fact that I will stow into the libraries of my mind. 

Zhuzh, I think, and smile to myself later reminiscingthese small kindnesses in his actions.

I have a cousin, who taught herself mehendi art nearly a decade ago. Whenever there’s Some occasion, I find myself seated across from her with my palm splayed out on her lap. I watch her- her head bowed down over my palm as she holds the tube of the mehendi that she prepares on her own, and then, with the lightest of flicks of her wrist, etches the flowers-and-vines on my skin resembling filigree. She does this for all her sisters- and there are a lot of us. Later, when the mehendi stains itself on our skin- the colour resembling a darkened cherry tomato’s- we wave our palms excitedly in her face and she laughs. 

She tells me “You too can do it, you know? You paint so well.”

I nod. Maybe she is right, I think absentmindedly to myself because what I am really doing is running my eyes through the paintings on her wall. She has painted them over the years. It’s a love we both share. In fact, she insists I was the one who passed on to her, the baton of this love for painting. She is so good at it, even though neither of us does it professionally. Painting, for both of us, is a hobby, but also a little more. It’s a sort of love, a relief we seek time and again to drown out the noises in our head.

I look closely at the finesse in her brush strokes, the care with which every hue was laid onto the canvas.

Her voice from somewhere behind me asks -“Do you remember you had told me once that even if you mess up a painting, you should not stop there because nobody apart from you really knows what you had intended to paint? So you should just get in there, with more colours, perhaps with a different perspective and just paint.”

I turn around and grin my toothiest grin at her. Because I did say that, but it was when we had barely stepped into our early teens. I am grinning more at the fact that she remembers something I said from so long ago. It warms my heart. She grins back, as she briefly lifts her head from over our sister’s palm splayed out on her lap. 

I have been very lucky when it comes to the people in my life. They are all incredibly creative, and smart, but more than anything else, the thing that stands out, is how sincere they are, how kind. 

There’s a friend of mine who asks me “How are you feeling, love?” when she knows my heart has been feeling heavy for a while. 

A friend who has stepped into my life very recently texts me “Let me know when you reach home safe, jaana”. 

There’s a friend who knows the entirety of me, my best and worst instincts, my greatest strengths and my biggest failings and tells me “I love you a normal amount, you know?” We both laugh because there’s nothing normal, or even measurable about the kind of love we have for each other. It is all-consuming, fierce and so so warm to the touch that it sustains me on days that settle into my stomach with the heaviness of lead. 

It’s this kindness that makes them so incredible- these amazing humans I so casually happen to call friends. It’s this kindness that stands out in the dreary alikeness of everyday life. It’s this kindness that serves as the hearth that warms me when I occasionally- like every human to have ever existed- come face-to-face with the cruelty and indifference of the world. 

Perhaps that is what zhuzh really is. Not talent or skill or creativity, though they do stand out. Not brilliance, though many of them possess that too. It is simply the small kindnesses they carry, the willingness to pay attention- to a song someone loves, to the shape of another person's hand waiting for mehendi, to a sentence spoken years ago and remembered still. And every time I think of the people I love, I find myself returning to that silly little word and smiling. Zhuzh.

Zhuzh. You say this word with your eyes closed, lips curved in a smile as you wrap your lips around the single syllable. And then you laugh at the silliness of the sound of it, at the absolute abandon with which you say it. Later, as you sit with the remnants of your laughter, you run the word through the maze of your memory. How many times have you witnessed it in person- you think to yourself. And you come up with a treasure chest full of it, hugging it to yourself with both arms, stunned by its plenty.

Now that we are older and our father is finally at home post retirement, our mother has taken to caring for our father and the house that has always been too big for us, like she did for us when we were children. Once again, she is performing a two-person job on her own. She does not think there is anything wrong with that. It is after all, natural, is it not? You tend to your children and your husband, oscillating between them, until fate gets in the way and removes them- work, marriage, death or otherwise.

When I go home now, I am old enough that aunties smirk at me over the rim of the tea cups asking me when I plan on getting married. I sip on the tea my mother made, on the chaise lounge my mother made me sit in to socialize with the aunties because it would reflect poorly on her as a mother if I refused to sit with women who I know speak ill of both my mother and I behind our backs. The question sends my mother into a panic. Not because, like me, she too believes it is none of their business when or who I choose to marry, but because she is afraid of what will come out of my mouth in response. Her eyes fly to me, in warning. I know the look. Play nice, she is saying. I hum into my tea, smile a polite smile and say “I will when I am ready. There is no hurry, right?” I look sideways at my mum, her mouth pressed into a thin line. She, like the aunties, does not agree with me but she will not voice it out loud in front of these women. The women, however have no such qualms. They are quick to point out that I am a girl and therefore, like all girls that came before me and all girls my age, must bow to time’s demands which if I am to believe them demands nothing short of my marriage and an eventual fruit out of my womb before it is too late. How else will I have a child and then raise one if I am too old to do it? By old, they mean, thirty, whose threshold I am not to cross without getting married because that labels me as damaged goods- too old to be wanted by any self-respecting family and by extension a man, because naturally you marry the family, not the man.

I look at my mother between sips of tea, black with just the perfect amount of ginger. Mum always did know exactly how I would like things, after all. So when I look at her, surrounded by these women, whose intentions are the same colour as my tea, I ask myself how she could want the same thing for me. I cannot imagine our father made marriage fun or even something that a woman should want, or that we made motherhood fun for her. The conversation is so stuffy, I excuse myself from it and go back to my books. After they leave, my mother comes to me, broaches the topic in a way you approach something you believe can explode at any moment. I glance at her the same way. That is simply how much we trust each other with our emotions. She tells me that I may not like the women who brought it up but it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are born, you must marry, and if you are born a girl, you must marry early. She says early in a way that makes it clear she does not believe I am early by any means. In fact, I am overdue. There are a thousand things I want to say to her about the state of affairs of her marriage, and the marriages of the women I have seen around me, including those aunties, one of whose husbands had an affair, and the other’s routinely indulged in substance abuse. Is it not enough that they have lost their identities to these men and in trying to make a home out of the wreckage that came along with them? Is it not enough that you did not pursue the jobs that you wanted, that you did not go on the vacation you dreamed of because you were pulling a 24 hour shift every day of your lives at a two-person job? Mum understands my frustration before I voice them. She knows I am afraid I will, one day, become like her. I don't say it out loud, because of how ugly it sounds. But this truth sits between us, permeating the space with its stench like rotting flesh. She tells me it is not the same anymore, that times have changed, and with them, the people. I find it hard to believe. Because the people were here, sat opposite from me on the sofa, telling me my time and fertility and youth will run out. The people sipped on tea and insisted that this older girl from my neighbourhood whom I grew up watching is obviously not marriage material because he is now a model, pushing thirty-five, living on her own in Mumbai. Who would want a daughter-in-law like that, they say? I wonder what it is they do not want- her independence? The fact that she can pull off a bikini so well? Or that she is doing well financially contrary to their opinions (and hopes) when she initially left our small neighbourhood in our small town? I wonder if they believe she cares all that much about their approval as a good prospective daughter-in-law. Nobody seems to care to ask her. But on the plus side, I believe she does not care to ask anybody either.

The conversation becomes stilted when I don’t participate in it. My mother has once again given up for the day, hoping I will come around sooner than later. I go back to pack my books into my travel bag. I will leave soon. It was only a two-day trip to home, after all.

In the kitchen, I see my mother has fixed me a wrap to have during the journey. The dinner is ready. Fish- the way my father likes it, brinjal- the way I like it. The home is spotlessly clean, the remnants of the conversation with the ladies wiped clean from the sofas along with the cookie crumbs they dropped. My father is lying in the bed, propped up against a pillow, flipping through the newspaper with the kind of comfort and ease one has through a lifetime of knowing someone is always holding the fort down. The food will arrive before him on time. He needn’t ask. I place the wrap into my tiffin look through the slightly ajar kitchen door at mum. She is ironing a shirt- crisp and white. It is not hers, of course. But how does that matter? She has always been good at this two-person job.

CQD. We've hit an iceberg. Please help.

CQD. There are women and children on this ship. They won't make it.

The ship closest to it was just 20 miles away. The Californian. It would have been so easy for The Californian to save all of them, to let Titanic be an emergency, not a tragedy. But The Californian had turned off its wireless for the night.

The sea cackled as it crashed against the dying body of The Titanic. Wrong place, wrong time, my love.

When I was younger, I had already drowned a few times, in the dead of the night.

CQD. I'm fine.

CQD. I had a good day. How was yours?

CQD. Please see through my lies and save me from myself.

I went from an emergency to a tragedy enough times to know it's not a game of chance or probability. Tragedy is the norm. Happiness is an anomaly. Wrong place, wrong time, my love.

When The Titanic drowned, the ship that reached to rescue the voyagers first wasn't the one closest to it by a long stretch. But Carpathia came anyway, wading through the night and the cold waves. It was the only ship that saved the people marked for death that morning. As though saying, "Here. Take my hand. Stay afloat. Live."

I have floated past the times since I had been a shipwreck. I am no longer a tragedy. Sometimes, I'm not even an emergency. I've waded past Californians that never answered my distress signals, and I've sunk into the seas. There were so many icebergs I didn't survive. Wrong place, wrong time, my love.

But I've also found Carpathia. Several of them. Strangers who were so far away from me, there was no rational way they could have saved me but they came anyway. "Here. Take my hand. Stay afloat. Live." It astonishes me how acts of kindness have kept me from drowning so often over the years.

The other day, a package arrived for me a few days prior to my birthday. It was a gift from a friend; a book I had wanted for a long time but never let myself get. She had said "I hope you don't delay your wishes anymore". I had held the book close and wept for hours. The book in itself seems inconsequential to the kindness behind her thought. Before that, there was a stranger who had excitedly shared her favourite anime with me at a bookstore. Before that the stranger on the train who offered to braid my hair because I was struggling with the frizz that day. And the friends who leave me voice notes and messages cheering me on, no matter how mundane my task is.

Life is so punishing so often. There are times when it'd be easier to drown rather than stay afloat. And yet somehow I don't. So much of it is because there was at least one person out there who intercepted the quiet distress calls I made to the universe in the middle of the night. To every one of my Carpathias, I hope you see me now, from wherever you are. I held on, see? I stayed afloat. Thank God for you.

I read somewhere that those who have had a very hard life, weighed down by grief and loss and heartache, those who have known no peace in their lives, come back in their next life as a tree. So that they can finally put their roots down and breathe, and have decades and decades of rest.

Sometimes I imagine this- coming back as a tree. In my heart, I have already decided what tree I will come back as. Aahot gos. Peepal ka ped. It’s this giant tree. Mighty. Unshakable. Centuries old. I imagine every single aahot gos as someone who had only ever known grief in their lives. 

That is what I want for myself in the next life. In lieu of all the grief, all the struggles, all the tears, I want to be this tree that rests, that Stretches itself out on the earth, like it’s making up for a whole lifetime of strife. This tree that breaks into new leaves in the spring in the softest shade of pink, the colour of a blushing sunset. This mighty tree that begins to look like a shy little girl, come spring. This is the tree I dream of becoming in my next life. I would lean against the wind, my leaves blowing to its rhythm. I would stretch out my branches so wide that my shadow would swallow an entire building. I would yawn under the night sky as the moon beams slithered through my leaves and rested against my branches. And as dawn would start to break, I would take a deep steadying breath, and soak up the sun light, like it was the one thing keeping me alive. In the afternoon, I would hold perfectly still as a group of friends would run from across the meadow, laughing, chasing each other and finally rest at my feet, talking about the only things that truly matter in life- friends, crayons and lunchboxes. At twilight, my leaves would sway along with the breeze and I would quietly hum along to the last of the day's birdsongs before night came and enveloped everything in its dark blanket. 

Sometimes I imagine this- coming back as a tree, after a lifetime of grief. I imagine grief returning with its familiar taunt: Do you remember me, old friend? You didn't really believe we had seen the last of each other, did you?

I imagine myself as the Aahot gos, greeting grief with my arms open. I imagine myself saying "Hello, old friend. There's enough space here for the both of us", inviting it to rest in my shadow. Because I finally see grief for what it is- it is the remnants of the things I once loved with nowhere left to go.

I imagine grief pausing to look at me for a brief minute, stunned by my greeting and my repose, and eventually saying "Do you not remember how I haunted you in another life?" 

I take in a breathfull of sunlight and feel my roots firmly in the depths of the ground I call home and say "I do. But I am rested. It's your turn now. Rest. Forget that you ever haunted me. Forget that you ever broke me down. Forget that we knew each other. Forget that we were old friends. Let us start over. A whole lifetime has passed after all. Do we not deserve that?"

I watch grief hesitate, not used to my acceptance. Then, slowly, gently, it relents.  

And we rest, lying against each other. Neither of us has anything to say to the other. So we fall into a quiet companionship. The silence is restful. And the rest has been a long time coming.

The Artemis II crew recently returned from their lunar fly by mission, becoming the only four humans in the entire history of the earth to have travelled the furthest distance from us. You know I could get into the science and wonder of all of that. But that’s for another time. The reason I am bringing this up is this: four people travelled over 250,000 miles that way- away from everything they had ever known, and seen and loved and touched. There, they saw a bright spot on the moon, just on the boundary between the dark side of the moon, the side that we never see and the nearside of the moon which is the side that has always faced the earth. They saw this bright spot on a crater nestled between the bright and dark sides of the moon and named her CARROLL. After the deceased wife of their commander.

They said “We would like to name her Carroll” and then they hugged their commander and shed tears together. 250,000 miles away from everything, in this vast emptiness of space, people are still thinking about love. About a person, a name, a face that you love. Even if it’s no longer there. This is what I think love is. It defies distance and boundaries and common sense.

There is this other idea I toy with in my mind sometimes- there's nothing special about Love. We are ordinary people- you and I. We are not going to space. We are not going to name a spot on the moon after someone we love. But we have felt love too. Deep, life-altering love. In a million ordinary ways, we have felt it.

There’s this line in the movie Everything, Everywhere All at Once that I think a lot about: “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you".

I think love is miraculous and extraordinary because it's hard to find and harder to keep, because it makes us look at a crater on the moon and remember a face engraved in our heart even when we have lost them. But I also think so much of love is laundry and taxes. What I mean to say is love resides in the ordinary things. So many of us keep waiting for love and life to happen in the grand scheme of things that we forget to witness how love is actually the sum of a million small things.

Has it ever happened that you have flipped to the back of the notebook and absentmindedly doodled your name and then right next to it, without even thinking, you have doodled the name of someone you love as well? Such a simple thing no? Tell me you don’t think this is love.

How many times have you seen something beautiful- a flower, a landscape, a picture, a movie, the way water flows in a stream catching light, or the trees in the distant woods and immediately thought of a face in your mind, wishing to share it all with them- this simple, beautiful, absolutely ordinary thing. Tell me you don't think that is love.

When you remember someone's quirks and nuances, like how they make their subway sandwich, or the flavour of icecream they love. Or how they make little hearts on their wrists on the days they feel low. Or remember how they sound when they sleep or cry or laugh.

Simple, ordinary things. But they do seem revolutionary, just because of how rare being able to find it all is. Because so much of love is about finding someone you would enjoy doing even laundry and taxes with. Someone whose heart feels connected to yours, someone whose soul makes you believe in goodness and sincerity and the little joys of life.

Another friend of mine says if we don't enjoy the way a person's mind works, if we are not in awe of their soul, we will grow out of whatever attachment we had as quickly as we got attached in the first place. "The first few weeks of knowing someone - we tend to think everyone is absolutely incredible. After the 2-3 month mark, you tend to see them for who they are. It doesn't matter how pretty they are, even the shallowest of us, when we finally allow ourselves to be honest with our own hearts, will want to look for something deeper than just skin and looks and the shape of their body after the first few weeks". I think of this every now and then. He was essentially saying: Laundry and taxes.

Love is probably the most ordinary thing in the world. And somehow the most marvelous, for the very reason that it is ordinary. Not just because it is the instinct that makes us want to name a crater on the moon. But more so because it is nothing short of a miracle that we find someone whose mind and heart and soul captures us so completely that even laundry and taxes- and the million mundane things that make up life- feel worth doing beside them.

Four people travelled a quarter of a million miles into the dark and named a crater after someone they loved. Most of us will never do that. Most of us will never leave Earth, never stand on the edge of the known world and look back at everything we have ever loved.

Most of us will simply spend our lives looking for someone we'd happily do laundry and taxes with, build a quiet, fulfilling life with. And maybe that's what my friend when he said, "Prem xongrami hobo lage jana ne? Bidrohi hobo lage."

Maybe love is a rebellion. Not because it asks us to do extraordinary things. But because in a world that keeps pushing us towards convenience, speed, cynicism and distance, in a world where we are taught to be cautious of someone, and worse dislike them or stay away, simply because they are different from us, love asks us to care, despite everything we have been taught. It asks us to remain soft, it makes us remember a face when we are living through the small, beautifully ordinary moments of life.

And perhaps that is why four people could travel 250,000 miles into the darkness and still think about a person they loved.

Because there is nothing special about love. And yet every act of love feels revolutionary.

In our culture, we believe there's a day in the year when the souls of the people we lost walk amongst us. So on that day, we pray for their souls, hoping they can hear us. And as long as we pray, we believe their souls are content. And in believing that, so are we. A couple of years ago I watched the movie Coco and realised there’s such a thing in Latin culture too. Dia de Muertos they call it. The day of the dead. Look at all these efforts we make to keep love from dissolving into absence.

We believe in second chances, in miracles, in the magic of rainbows, in wishing wells—anything that allows us to hold on to the promise of happiness. Even eyelashes. If that sounds silly, that’s because it probably is. And yet here we are, believing it anyway. And I think that is the most beautiful thing about this wild, untameable hope we carry—this belief that happiness is still possible, still waiting, still ours, if only we chase it. This is sometimes fragile, often irrational, and yet it endures. Because maybe happiness does not come from certainty. Nothing in this world is certain. So no, happiness does not come from certainty but from this very refusal to surrender to despair, from this insistence on being brave in the face of fear, on holding on to hope like our lives depend on it. Because maybe they do.

Isn’t it beautiful that humans, collectively, have found ways to prolong happiness, to make things stay, to hold on to hope. Not gravity, not rationality, not even death can fully take it away from us. We sneak in five seconds to save our soul food, we carve out a day to pray for those we lost, we take a flower in both our hands and ask the petals: do they love me or do they not, we send "hold on we will make it out of here" texts to our best friend when we can't hold them close, we write "This too shall pass" on our checklist when it seems like we can't go on anymore, we make post-it notes and breathe all the hope we carry into a few bullet points and put it up on the mirror, so we see our reasons to keep going, even before we see our own sleepy-eyed tired faces. We keep our oldest friends as 'favourites' in our contacts even if it's been months, possibly years since we last talked. We never change our answer when someone asks "So, you still hope to have that holiday in the French riviera?" We nod- a huge emphatic yes- even though Delhi is the farthest we have ever travelled towards the west, because we hope, despite everything, that there will be a day when it'll happen, and when that day comes, we will be ready for it.

God, we are so silly and so so hopeful that happiness will grace our doorstep sooner or later. But you know what? I think happiness was never something that arrived at all. I think happiness always just lived here- in these small, stubborn acts of holding on, in the rituals we create to keep love, memory and possibility alive- even when the world gives us every reason not to. Perhaps that is where happiness begins. Perhaps that is where the root of happiness lies.

So up until the mid 20th century, coal miners used to take canaries down into the mines in cages. Now you know canaries are song birds, small yellow songbirds. So even locked up in cages, in those mines, they would still be singing. Because you know, despite all your cruelty, you cannot take a song away from a canary.

And the miners knew that. In fact, they counted on that. You see mines have so many invisible dangers. But the worst of them is probably a gas leak. Carbon monoxide, methane. You won’t even know that you’re dying.

And this is why the miners took the canaries. Because when there would be poison in the air, the canaries would detect it long looooong before the miners would even start to show any symptoms.

You know canaries are song birds.

Despite all of your cruelty, you cannot take a song away from a canary. But down in the mines, when the canary senses the poison, its heart grows weaker, it starts to falter and it eventually stops singing. And the moment it does, the miners know it’s time to go. That’s how they survive. But oftentimes, the canary dies.

Despite all of your cruelty, you cannot take a song away from a canary. But you can stop its heart. That is the only time the canary will stop singing.

Down in the mines, the canary's heart is the first to stop, the canary is the first to die. In fact, its death is important to the survival of the miners.

It’s a sad story right? But I am not here to tell a sad story. So what if I told you that occasionally, the universe steps in, chooses a canary and says: Enough. You have suffered enough.

And this cage that the canary was locked in? That she couldn’t open on her own? The universe opens it and sets her free.

Before we know it, our canary has taken flight into the bright April sky- this small yellow creature filled with love and hope flying across an infinite stretch of blue.

Down in the mines, the canary's heart is the first to stop, she is the first to die. But out here in the skies, she is the first to feel the sun on her face, and the wind against her body.

She flies to long forgotten places and says hello to new faces. She listens as the trees laugh alongside the wind, and the birds cheer for her from invisible branches spreading out in every direction. And for the first time in a while, she thinks to herself maybe there really is a God out there and maybe he really is looking out for me after all.

She watches from up above as a field of bright green unfolds underneath her.

In the distance, where the field meets the sky, there’s a river, and on the other side of it, the promise of a future.

And our canary is flying, ready to meet it- wings spread, heart beating safely underneath her ribs away the mines and their poison and miners with cruel intentions and everything that ever threatened to stop her heart and take away her singing.

Because remember what I said?

Despite all of your cruelty, you cannot take a song away from a canary.