O n w a r d

I'm in the business of life stories, and often that makes me reflect on my own life. I've journaled since the age of thirteen, and blogged about my lifeworld for nineteen years, so this comes quite easily to me. I also keep a timeline of each year of my life, now divided into chapters – not for the purpose of writing a book, but merely because they feel like chapters. Sometimes I can't believe I lived those stories in this same life.  I've been realising that my life has been rather interesting, but I'm not sure if, on the whole, it has felt joyful or exciting. It hasn't really turned out the way I'd hoped in many ways. I've done my best, I regret nothing, I've laughed a lot. Good things happened, there were challenges and heartbreaks, there were large periods of just feeling meh and not looking forward to much and agonising about the future. Probably like most people.   But lately I've been looking at my life through the lens of magic.  I do bel...

I almost went to Chiang Mai for New Year's Eve 2016. I had been harbouring a dream of seeing thousands of lanterns floating up into the night, Tangled -style, even though this wasn't the main festival for it. I've also long harboured a desire to have a special last-day-of-the-year, which is usually a meh affair. So Thailand had seemed like a great plan at the time, but I was hesitating – and then, just as I'd made up my mind to click on the tickets, the prices suddenly skyrocketed. The universe decided for me. It was mostly okay; I was just embarking on my first relationship, there were things to look forward to. Maybe if I'd known that not going on that trip would start a seven-year travel hiatus, I would have booked it anyway. I had the money, though my job was in trouble. But we have no way of knowing the future, so I folded up the dream and put it away. Over the years, I thought about it again, but the discourse around lanterns had become dimmer: they were toxic...

How will I remember Korea? The thing about travel is that it's not really glamorous. It's not always happy. It can be overwhelming. Crappy at times. You're transplanting yourself so far out of your comfort zone. It can be scary, even. I find that my radar for risks is slightly wonky when the rules of daily life are temporarily suspended. But Korea? It was there for me. It gave me soft landings every time I felt vulnerable. I kept finding pockets of peace in unlikely places, in less-than-ideal situations, when I needed them most. Over and over and over.  My idea of peace is evolving. I made a vision board for what it represented to me last year – or what it was represented by – but recently I realised it needs some expansion. More on this another time, but as I was adding little peaceful vignettes to my Instagram collection, I realised more deeply what I had already figured out: as the days slipped across that June fortnight in Korea, a theme had begun to emerge. The first ...

Returning to my grandparents' home after seven years was bittersweet. Everything has changed; much of the time I felt like I existed between the wonder of the new and the ghosts of the old, trying to reconcile the familiar with the unfamiliar, separating the superimposed layers of what my eyes saw and my mind remembered.  It was the first time I'd returned since my grandfather passed away in this house that he built, this adventure that he gave us all. I wanted to feel his presence, imagine his movements, his path through the home, his favourite position with the best mountain view, the table where he would cut paneer with precision prior to selling, the sound of his army boots on wooden floorboards, the nook where he watched TV. Some of these, including the stove upon which I once burned my hand, have been erased. We can't live in memory and time won't stand still, and so much of the old is...just falling apart.  And maybe it's change that helps us cope, rewriting...

My heart had its reasons. An email and gifts from my cousin. Unsent letters from someone I would have loved long and deep – A life built within words and ideas and spaces "Meh" t-shirt to a dreamed-of address. It eventually found its way to me after years knocking together two heartbreaks. I was younger then, more hopeful perhaps naive  (I'm still naive  sometimes and I keep reminding myself to dream.) Ah, feet at last in Sweden. It felt like I should have big feelings,  but I didn't, not really, seven years since my past. Seven years since I'd traversed foreign roads but by the time I arrived in Sweden  I had my confidence again, and the comfort of my Korean playlist  in the chill of October autumn nights – the ways we build ourselves back up after being shattered all the way from India long-distance words once again.  The next day I switched ring fingers just to see what it felt like. I took myself to the ABBA museum  this music of my youth...

There comes an age in every person's life when they accept that disappointment is inevitable. It may not come easy, however, and on the warm bus back to Reykjavik on a cold midnight, I tried to placate my slightly sinking heart.  "At least I saw something."  "We've got like three more nights."  "I can return someday."   It sort of worked. I was a little sleepy, and the disappointment was no longer in waves, slowly ebbing into acceptance. All we can do is try, and try we did. The aurora answers to no woman, and she appears at will – this much I had learned from my antsy walks peering at the sky in Rovaniemi a few nights prior. The clouds and the weather might cooperate, the app might show false promises, and she might appear as white wisps to the naked eye, which, to be fair, she had. The camera picked up more colour, but was hard to operate in darkness with frigid fingers, and I hadn't done my research on the ideal settings. At any rate, there ...

CAST OF CHARACTERS: Patsy (Patience), later known as Tara, my nani or maternal grandmother Heather Cameron, her lifelong friend Vindri (Virendrapal), my nana or maternal grandfather His parents Me Joni James (soundtrack) When my nana would visit us in Delhi, he used to look up at the sky – infamous for its haze – and point at the lone(some) star that was visible, saying to me, " Be like that star. Always be an individual, no matter what others say or do. "  An article in The Times of India in 1953 described his plans to travel the world on a bicycle. He did embark on this journey. It took him 12 days to reach Bombay from Delhi, from where he hopped onto a vessel to Basra, Iraq. I don't quite recall all the places he travelled to, but most likely they were Kuwait, the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Mosul, possibly Syria, and he did make it to Turkey – where one of his favourite stories involved being kicked out of a restaurant for abusing their offer of free unlimited bread....

It has been a couple of weeks since I returned from my grandparents' home in Himachal, not without a couple of heirlooms. Among them, some albums that my nani dug out from her big box bed because I asked if she had anything for the archives, convinced that she didn't, that I had already seen everything on my last trip seven years ago. Three albums emerged, black sheets alternating with fragile butter paper, two filled with monochrome square memories secured with tiny triangular corners. My mother said that had been my nana's role – or passion, perhaps? – arranging the photographs into narratives. I wonder how he managed it with his giant fingers that made it impossible for him to play the guitar, he'd complain, because he couldn't press down on just one string at a time. One album filled with photos he took of his wife, hand-coloured, sometimes a little too vivacious. As I perused the pages this week, I realised two things – I had never seen most of these photograph...

CAST OF CHARACTERS: Marina Keys, my great-aunt Patricia, her childhood friend My grandmother Mr. and Mrs. Keys, my great-grandparents Marlene, my (older) great-aunt Mother Dolores, a nun at Loreto Convent, Asansol On 22 October 2021, I received a very mysterious message through my website.    Patricia wrote that she spent her adult life trying to reconnect with her "very best school friend" and "soul mate", Marina Keys, who happened to be my great-aunt. They went to school at Loreto Convent, Asansol, and were "inseparable" – but lost touch when Patricia's family moved back to England.  I used to spend many weekends at the Keys' house. We would leave the convent, cross through Saint Patricks' boys' school, over the wall and into the Keys' garden. Many a time we would sit under the tamarind tree, eat lots of tamarind and then wonder why we would get [a] tummy ache. I have always lived with regret that we lost touch. I remember that when w...

We were both young When I first saw you I close my eyes and the flashback starts I'm sitting there At my computer in a wicker chair... I can't quite recall exactly how I first came upon Taylor Swift's music. I know I was in college, in Delhi, and it was either through watching Faith Hill on Oprah and finding the song Taylor named after her husband; or it was the collaboration " Breathe " with Colbie Caillat, whose songs I listened to rather a lot at the time. Either way, I was quickly enamoured by this young woman, a kindred spirit the same age as me, with the curls and dresses and boots, and the ability to tell entire stories in a single song.  She wrote of love and youth in words I thought I'd use if I were in a world like hers. " Love Story " and " Teardrops on My Guitar " were inescapable on MTV. But it was "Tim McGraw" that spent weeks in the sidebar of my blog, which was really as big an honour as being on any music chart. I...