The quiet moments, the big questions, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else.
I grew up watching a driver shift gears in an Ambassador, listening to stories of my grandma who learnt to drive at 55. I wanted that — the freedom, the control, the confidence of going wherever I wanted. It took me decades, two
driving instructors, a pandemic, and a Maruti S-Presso to get there. And then, finally — four hours each way to Sakleshpur.
I could see all of it in the Mahabharata — the jealousies, the manipulation, the disrespect toward women, the power of money, fighting for what is rightfully yours. And then I looked at the modern world today.
Something about Karna’s life has always unsettled me. Not sympathy — something closer to recognition. A quiet awareness of how profoundly unjust a life can be, even one lived with extraordinary courage and generosity.
The most unexpected thing astrology gave me was not a prediction. It was relief. For years I carried the question of my career as though it were a verdict on my character. Then I found a different explanation — and it changed something.
If I could give my daughter one gift — not a thing, not an experience, but something that would stay with her through every season of her life — it would be financial independence. Her own money. Earned by her own hands. In her own name.
There is a kind of exhaustion that does not show up on your face. You still show up. You still manage. But somewhere beneath all of that is a heaviness that has been there so long you have stopped noticing it. Like furniture you have walked around for so many years you no longer remember choosing it.
She worked in my home for six years. Every time I see her — cheerful, unhurried, arriving with a smile that has no business being there given everything she carries — I think the same thing. Would I have her grace?
I kept trying to photograph the yaksha. Every time I pressed the shutter, Devi appeared instead. It took me a while to understand that she had been there all along — and that I had been dismissing her because she was not what I came for.
Some dreams you wake from and immediately begin to forget. And then there are the other kind — the ones where you lie still after waking, afraid to move, afraid that moving will shake something loose.
After eighteen years of relocations, motherhood, caregiving, grief, and putting everyone else first, I began tracing the quiet thread back to myself — through writing, memory, and the parts of me that never fully disappeared.
