A roadside rescue
I woke up bleary-eyed just after 4 am. Cold in a hotel room. I realized the beeps of my mobile had woken me up. It was a message from Indigo airlines. The first few words — “We…
Chhath: A prayer for society and a quiet act of resistance
Each year, as dawn breaks over the ghats of Bihar and eastern India, the riverbanks shimmer with the golden light of the rising sun, mirrored by thousands of diyas floating on the water’s surface. Men and women,…
The ache that stayed
There are relationships that fade gently, like twilight surrendering to dusk. And there are others that fracture — suddenly, irrevocably — leaving behind the echo of something once whole. What remains is not anger, but an ache…
Dr Anita Borges: The doyenne of Pathology education
The strains of music wafted in through the open windows. We were reporting in the Histopathology OPD of the Golden Jubilee Block in Tata Memorial Hospital. “What’s the name of that tune?” she asked. “It is so…
Flying high
Sometimes you know in a jiffy how much a person enjoys their work. When they speak of “soaring through the blue skies”, you know that they have been able to fly after a long struggle. Just by…
New Year-induced stress
Last night a Whatsapp forward reached me, which was a translation of Taslima Nasreen’s poem Madhyaraater phone. Although the context of the poem is completely different from what I am writing about, the first two lines of…
Ways we work
I see her walking on the pedestrian pathway. I’m in a taxi crawling through the cramped traffic. She is walking in the opposite direction. Her hair tied severely away from her face. It is her attire which…
A prayer for peace in paradise
On day two of our Kashmir trip, I got into an argument with our driver, Javaid. He said that we would start from Srinagar for Pahalgam the next day at 10 am. Now, both Subodh and I…
Savouring Kashmiri hospitality
We are sailing on a brightly painted shikara on Nigeen lake in Srinagar in Kashmir. We have unexpectedly landed in Srinagar on the day of Eid. Our plans were to travel further north, but those have been…
The apparent parent
I chose not to have children. So I have never had to go through the rigmarole of attending parent-teacher meetings (PTMs as they are called) and have no clue of what this entails. Until now. My niece,…
