The Fibroid Surgery Expert Edition

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 Last year, around this time, I had a bunch of fibroids taken out of my uterus. I was reminded of this because this photo popped up.

That’s me, your humble narrator, sitting up in the hospital bed, eating hospital food. I had just been told I could go home, so I changed into regular clothes, but they were taking so long with all the paperwork that I thought I may as well watch a quick episode of the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries. I was in hospital for about three days, including the day of my surgery and then I stayed home for about a week after that, but I was able to climb all the way up to our third-and-a-half floor walk up apartment.

Anyway, I remember right before I was going in, I kept looking for information on the internet and there was surprisingly little available. Fibroid surgery is super common now, one friend of mine had already gone through it the year before and she told me what she had gone through, and there was an endometriosis forum on Reddit, but none of it was exactly what I was going to go through. So I thought, one year down, this very specific newsletter should address it, in case you or someone you know might have fibroid surgery in the future?

Firstly, about one in five women have fibroids—is that a lot? I just totally pulled that figure out of my ass—okay, let me try again: out of my vast and varied friend collection, two people are going to have to have their fibroids removed and two already have. This is not counting all the random people I have met who also had the surgery. They’re little non-cancerous tumours that cluster in and around your uterus. No one knows how they grow, she says grandly, and also probably inaccurately, but they seem to have gotten quite common.

I had a lot, but the biggest ones were all five centimetres long and sitting in a cluster, so my uterus looked like I was five months pregnant or something. (I was very interested to see if my stomach would flatten after the surgery because it stuck way out, and because that was obviously one of my main concerns, since I am a combination of extremely lazy and also extremely vain.) (It did! Not a lot—still need exercise and diet sadly—but I am much flatter around the stomachular area than I used to be, which is excellent.)

There are still a bunch of little fibroids left after all that, so eventually the gynae says I’ll need a hysterectomy, but surgery is no fun, I really did not enjoy being at a hospital, and I have greater sympathy for those that have to go in on a regular basis, so I’m letting that be Future Meenakshi’s problem. They got them out with laproscopy, which is apparently the best way to go about it, but some people will also recommend a C-section. What they didn’t tell me was that my stomach was going to be covered with all these scars, I have like five of them, and they’re quite prominent, even if they’re small, so no bikini modelling for me in the future, although I feel sort of bad-ass with my scars as well. It’s like having a set of (really ugly) tattoos.

Anyway. What can you expect? You’re best of having some sort of health insurance because this is an expensive surgery. I mean, I don’t know what a cheap surgery is, actually, but this was quite pricey as far as these things go. I think it was the whole laproscopicness of it. You’ll be purging for the entire day before, thanks to some pre-surgery powder they make you have, so prepare to be close to a loo, but they’ll tell you that. There’s a whole enema thing, which is also yucky. The nurses can be very nice or they can be bullies, so remember to stand your ground (if you can) about stuff you want or don’t. I was trying to be a good patient, then I thought fuck it, who am I trying to impress, so I complained a lot, and it was okay, because I was the one fresh out of surgery dammit! I wasn’t planning on winning any bravery awards then.

I wrote that paragraph and then I thought about the conversation we’re having about doctors and nurses now, in the middle of the pandemic. Every now and then I forget where we are and what we’re doing here. Um. Yeah. Be nice to doctors and nurses but not at the cost of your own health, okay? Don’t be afraid to say, “Ow” and “That hurts!” and “Do we have to do that?” Because you are the patient and they will listen! That’s the amazing thing. I hated the intravenous antibiotics, they made my whole arm burn and sting like fire ants were eating me from the inside and I got them to switch to oral antibiotics as soon as they could, because otherwise they would’ve kept me on the damn needle forever. That’s why it’s also nice to have supportive people next to you, people who will take your side, instead of trying to please the doctor. I had my mum and K, and they advocated for me when I couldn’t.

Prepare to be tired for a few weeks. It takes a while for the body to heal and that means you won’t be able to stand up for ages at a party (I went to a party as soon as I could, but I spent the whole time sitting down) (PARTIES! This may no longer be a problem also. Dammit, this is a very forgetful sort of day.) Just when you think you’ll never have energy again, you surprise yourself by how much energy you have. A month after my surgery, I was walking eleven-twelve kilometres a day in Italy. I was fine. I was great, in fact. (HOLIDAYS.)

Some stuff hurt like a bitch. Waking up after the surgery, they’d pumped me full of carbon dioxide so my belly would swell, and that uncomfortable bloated feeling lasted a while. (I won’t be delicate: it feels like you have to fart and you can’t.) They are obsessed with your poop, by the way, because if you can poop, it means nothing went wrong in that general area. I am a nervous pooper and find it hard to go in strange places, so finally, I was begging for a laxative so they’d let me go home. There’s a drainage tube poking out of your side, and that hurts when they pull it out and the pain is unreal. (Here’s more about the actual surgery & aftermath in an older newsletter.)

Meanwhile, I was at this really nice, really fancy maternity hospital and people kept having babies and I was feeling bad for the nurses who had to cover my room because they didn’t get to look at babies, which I imagine would be one of the perks of their job?

Oh, I completely forgot one cool thing that’s happened post-surgery. One of the drawbacks of my fibroids was that they were pressing on my bladder so I had to pee, like, constantly. (If unattended, they can make you incontinent.) And now! I can go hours just like a normal person! This is particularly great when I travel. I still have a tiny bladder, but now I can plan my tiny bladder stops and not be caught unawares.

Feel free to write to me if you’re going in for this surgery some time post lockdown, post COVID, post whatever and you have questions. I am happy to be your Resident Fibroid Surgery expert.

I Would Like

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I would like to have a dinner party. I want to dress up in my new dress that just arrived today, even though I have nowhere to wear it to; it’s a red shift with a colourful border at the hem and a transparent billowy thing that goes on top of it and the whole thing closes with a cloth belt that you pull through two holes and cinch up tight. I’d wear heels, even though I don’t normally, don’t ever wear heels. I’d wear one of my teetering pairs, the ones that always make me feel like my ankles are going to bend sideways. The house would be clean, and sweet smelling, and I’d light some of the incense I bought at the Aurobindo ashram shop, the stuff that smells like cinammon and richness, that I associate with PCO, this bar I used to go to a lot. The food would already be cooked, so I wouldn’t need to do anything, just put some lipstick on, maybe Ruby Woo, which I love or Diva, which also I love, and since I’d have a little time before my guests arrived, I’d do my eyes really well, gold eyeshadow that my friend gave me several years ago and that still has a lot in the tiny pot it comes in brushed across my lids, eyeliner swooshed into cat’s lines towards my temples. I’d invite about ten people, and us, so twelve people in all. I’d have some fancy wine chilling in the fridge, and I wouldn’t be able to wait for everyone to come in, so I’d pour myself a glass and select a good Spotify playlist, maybe Dave Brubeck, since he always reminds me of dinner parties. Everyone would come in around the same time, and we’d hug and kiss and exclaim how nice everyone looked, and the house would be warm and well-lit, the air conditioning blasting on naked shoulders and everyone would be holding a drink and there’d be loud laughter, as the party drifted in and out of the balcony where the smokers go, and the inside where we’d gather in knots and eat food standing up.

studio party by florine stettheimer

I would like to be looking forward to a holiday. Not on the actual holiday, though I love that as well, but in the right before. I’d have my tickets all booked, and my hotels sorted out. I’d have a list of things I want to do in a Telegram message, that’s how my partner and I organise holidays, on Telegram, lists from Lonely Planet or one of the newspaper’s travel section: 10 Things To Do For Free in X Destination! I’d be going abroad on this holiday, so my passport would be with the visa office, and as always, I’d be a little scared that this time maybe I wouldn’t get a visa, but it would be okay in the end, I’d absolutely get it. I’d update my Facebook, say, “We’re travelling to X on these dates!” and my friends and acquaintances in that country would message me and say, “Well then we must meet” and I’d say, “Absolutely!” and we would.

travelers awaiting a ferry by philips wouwerman

I would like to write about these things without thinking of worse losses than missing holidays and dinner parties. I would like to stop thinking about death and poverty and lost jobs and rising counts for just FIVE FUCKING SECONDS please.

I would like to meet you for brunch. Maybe we’d be slightly rushed for time and we’d go to Coast Cafe, where we’d get Bloody Marys and calamari rings or maybe we’d have a little longer and we’re celebrating something so we go to Olive and have their bottomless brunch, and we sit there for hours, drinking all the wine we can hold in our bellies, eating shanks of meat. You might get eggs, you like eggs, but I’d only be there for the big ticket stuff, the paisa vasool as they say. At the end of it, squint eyed with drink and the coffee we drank rapidly to sober ourselves up for the taxi home, we’d take a selfie, cheeks pressed together, grinning madly at the camera.

private meal by Jan Baptiste Lambrecht

I would like to go to a doctor’s office. Okay, no, no one actually wants to go to the doctor’s office, but I’d like to know that tomorrow if I woke up with a sudden desire to get my teeth cleaned or to have a quick check up that I can just go, no phoning in advance except to make an appointment. The same with salons. I’m growing my hair out so I don’t need a salon right now, but I want to know that I can go to one when I want to go to one.

I’d like to talk to someone I dislike again, do you know what I mean? I want to go to a gathering, and meet someone there that I realise I truly cannot stand after five minutes of their conversation and I’d like to duck away awkwardly and bitch about them on the ride home, like, “Can you believe they said that? What a douche!” and we’ll laugh and it’ll be a story I can text my friends about with lots of eye rolling emojis.

I would like to go everywhere and do everything. I would like for months not to roll into each other, for my planner to be full again, for me to roll my eyes and say, “Wow, I can’t believe this month is over already” because I’ve been so busy, not because each day melts into the last one and on and on till I can predict the days I am up and the days I am down, with the same predictability that I get my period or that we run out of groceries.

I would like to sleep for a year and a day, to wake up on the other side, be all, “What did I miss?” but also I want to stay awake and alert and watch everything with my beady eyes, take stock of your life and my life and all of our lives, but also wishing that Parallel Universe Me is doing something fun this year. Parallel Universe Me has also finished the edits of both the first drafts she wrote, she’s been sending out the manuscript, she’s organised and efficient and ahead of the game. I do not think we could get along, not when she is in her dress with the cinched waist and her heavy earrings shaped like beetles that she bought at H&M and I am sitting here without a bra, my whole body slooping downwards, feeling like even though I just woke up this morning, it’s already nighttime and time for me to go to sleep.

a sleeping bather by henri gervex

I would like to have faith in the system, to believe in the government must be as much an act of faith as believing in god, and how nice to just put your problems in someone else’s hands, let them deal with it, you just follow orders like a little mindless drone. “They’re doing all they can,” I would say, waspishly, to anyone who challenged my thinking. I would like to believe in a magic vaccine, one shot to cure us all, that will come out by the 15th of August, because they promised. They promised. I would settle for believing in one that comes in November, because I would like, oh, I would like, to celebrate my December birthday in a manner that is both social and minus any distancing whatsoever.

I would like to rejoin the world. I would like for us to emerge better people, and if not that, I’d like us to be the same garbage people we always were, the world a different kind of hellfire, but our world, our world, right? So vast, so peopled, not just narrow corridors and low ceilings and “what’re we watching with dinner tonight?”

Yeah, well.

Newsletter: Ground control to Major Tom

(Last week's newsletter. This week's just went out on Thursday, and I now have close to FIVE HUNDRED subscribers, so please join them by signing up here.)

This week in Inner Resources: Remember when you were a kid and you complained about being bored and some older person (usually a parent) told you "Only boring people get bored." And then you were all like, "Gee, THANKS for that, and now I'm STILL bored, but now mixed with my boredom is a sense of inadequacy because obviously I am boring as well." It was a bit like that one moment in 1992, when everyone insisted the dictionary definition of cute was "ugly but bearable" and you had to live with that for the next two years every time someone called you cute or you called something cute, some wit would pop out of the woodwork and wink at you and go, "DO YOU MEAN UGLY BUT BEARABLE HO HO HO." I remembered it the other day when someone said I was cute, and I was the wit going ugly but bearable ho ho ho. I couldn't even help myself, the eleven year old girl inside me just took over the steering of my brain for a second there. It's funny the things you retain--your old landline number, the lyrics to a song you haven't heard in fifteen years, the smell of other people's houses--not somewhere in your head that you can immediately access, but say you time travelled back to the year 1998 and had to dial yourself--your fingers would know the numbers that meant "Home" before it was just a single button on your cellphone.

But while we're on boredom, only because this week has been a waiting one, the week before I finish my book, so close to the end that I can taste it, here is my favourite poem about boredom, called Dream Song 14 by John Berryman, perhaps you know it already.  It goes:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. 
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, 
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy 
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored 
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no 
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

This week in Doing Something About It: So I went to a doctor about the RSI, and he said, as we suspected, that there was nothing much that could be done medically, and had I considered changing the way I type? I'm trying to touch type now, and also resting my wrists on an external keyboard, but it is so slooooow. Every now and then I get so caught up in what I'm typing I go back to my normal way of doing things, but that's not great. The other night I had a dream that my hand was amputated, and I was an artist, so I was very sad, and when I woke up and remembered that I was a writer, I felt a lot better. Once the book is done, once we make our travel plans for the summer, I'll take a nice long break from writing and come back with stronger limbs.

This week in Finally, I Have Earned My Indian Woman Badge: I put on a sari by myself and it only took me ten years to do it! I prefer dresses to saris, just because I find them more interesting. For me, the only interesting thing about a sari is the way the fabric looks, but it's always felt like just that for me: fabric. You wrap it around yourself, you look exactly the same as everyone else who has wrapped it around themselves. I mean, it's nice and all, but it's a little... boring. (I'm sorry, guys! I know a lot of you are sari fans, this is just a PERSONAL OPINION.) Given the choice between wearing a dress (made out of nice fabric as well, there are lots of "fusion" dresses out there these days) or a sari to a party, I would always pick the dress. But to a wedding, it's easier to wear a sari than try to formal up whatever dresses I own. I appreciate them as a wedding outfit, especially with a nice blouse. You look pretty mostly, and conventional, and if it's not YOUR wedding, then what does it matter in the end, right?

(Side note: your sari too can be sexy and unconventional, thanks to this website Janice pointed out to me. A lot of them look amazing, and I was fully inspired to try one myself, but the damn thing wouldn't drape as nicely as the girl in the video's.) (Side note two: a lot of the drapes on that website are the between-the-legs pants ones, and I wonder how you pee in them. No one has said.)

Anyway, with the help of a YouTube video and a little ingenious tucking in here and pulling out there, I managed  not only to put on a sari to a wedding party but also have it stay on all evening long. Hurrah for me!

 

 

 

And now on to the Link List!

OMG this column by a woman trying (and failing) to become a domestic goddess is making me so jealous because it should have been my idea!

Excerpt: As I scrolled through picture after picture of these fancy cookies, I became overwhelmed with envy. I too wanted to post a picture of my beautiful, salt-flaked creations with some self-effacing caption like “All aboard the shortbread cookie bandwagon!” or whatever. But the thing is, I dread baking: It requires a degree of patience and precision I simply don’t seem to have. The last time I baked, I was 12 years old and set out to make meringues for my mom’s birthday. I carefully measured the sugar, separated the egg whites, then one thing led to another, a carpet was ruined, and I was grounded for a week.

 

 

Beauty is the next big lifestyle beat, and this is a nice read about what it means to be a cult beauty product. (Also that fact about Ruby Woo blew my mind.)
 

Excerpt: “Classic” can be another word for basic; it’s not that fun to hand over your credit card for a tube of Ruby Woo knowing that somewhere in the world, three other people are doing the same thing that very minute. But cult classic reframes that experience. You aren’t joining everyone; you’re joining others like you, whose beauty journeys, particular needs, and discerning tastes have lead them to this singular thing.

 

If famous authors described my attempts to date. (OTOH, you could just read about my experiences in my essay in Eleven Ways To Love, out now in your local bookstore.)

Excerpt: Dr. Seuss on Texting

They had a great hang, so full of wonder and fun,
She felt happy to be passing time with someone.
When it had ended and good time had been spended,
She went back home feeling quite glad she attended.

 

I find myself thinking of this essay called Why Go Out a lot these days.

Excerpt: Of course, telling someone about an insult is like telling them about a dream; the specific emotional core of it cannot be communicated; all that comes across are disconnected and meaningless symbols. But let me assure you, this conceptual poet was digging his nails into my heart – he knew it, and, five minutes later, I suddenly felt it, too, like a kick in the stomach – which led to a week and a half of fuming in bed, unable to sleep, my declaring this man to be my enemy, the reconceiving of a magazine article I was writing in such a way as to include a subtextual layer that would annihilate conceptual poetics, a week and a half of going out every night and talking through the insult with each of my friends – what am I even saying? It took leaving the continent for the insult to finally recede into the background of my days, and for me to regain my equilibrium.

 

About fashion and women and Virginia Woolf and women writers and fashion.

Excerpt: Another product of 1925 was the woman’s ‘pullover’. Not today the most exciting item in anyone’s wardrobe, it was in its way revolutionary. A pullover is pulled over the head both on and off and the person who does the pulling is the wearer. Yes, I know, but until then it had been, for more than a century, virtually impossible for a woman to get dressed – or undressed – by herself. The rich had ladies’ maids, the poor had one another, but the laces and hooks and eyes, the fastening behind, required assistance. This was not true for men. In the persisting convention that women’s clothes have buttons on the left, for the convenience of the average right-handed dresser, while men’s have them on the right, to suit themselves, there remains an archaeological trace, a fossil record, of the different history of women and men in their relation to their clothes. Fashion writers, who are apt to discuss new trends with the urgency of war reporters on a particularly dangerous front line and to misuse the word ‘iconic’ relentlessly, can be forgiven for idolising the Italian couturière Elsa Schiaparelli and her ‘cravat’ pullover. It stands for a new age in women’s clothes. Not only could you get in and out of it by yourself but the fiddly bits, the bow and ribbons, are knitted into the one piece. Schiaparelli, who was a surrealist and worked with Dalí, had made a satire, a cartoon of female dress.

 

An oldie, but suddenly relevant all over again: when Salman Khan shot that blackbuck.

 

Excerpt: If any of the villagers in the area of the hunt heard anything that night, they kept quiet about it. Likewise, the guide, the driver, the hotel staff and the cook. The party, again led by Khan, went out hunting again and again: on the 27th, the 28th, the 30th. No-one breathed a word. These, after all, are the kings of Bollywood, India's new maharajas, and they do as they please. By day Khan strolled around the Umeda Bhawan Palace topless, baring his glorious torso; management implored him to cover up but he ignored them. By night he and his friends hunted. Who could deny them? Who would have the courage to stop them?

 

Newsletter: So my pop culture references are mostly from the 1800s

This week in feeling like Beth March and/or Ruby Gillis (which is an actual thing my friend Sam referenced the other day, and I am totally stealing it from her) (actually in my case, it's more like Katy Carr): My hand is WORSE, well, it was worse this whole week, so I spent yesterday resting it, and today I am writing with a timer on so I can take a break every ten minutes. Not to worry, friends and concerned citizens, I am actually going to see an expert about it this week, and not just stick to this home doctoring. From what I understand though, there's not really a "cure" for carpal tunnel, but at least the physiotherapist will give me some exercises so I can stretch out my arm and make it feel less stiff.

However, it was not a wasted day, because I got to do my number one favourite thing to do when I am ill, which is watch TV mindlessly propped up on my pillow like an invalid. The Germans have a word for mindless watching: glotz, which I just love. Glotz, glotz, glotz. I glotz-ted my new binge watching obsession, Friday Night Lights, which I hadn't seen before because it's supposed to be a show about American football and sports are very much "who cares" in my book. HOWEVER, it is about so much more than football! The football is the background, the reason for the show existing, etc etc, but it's really small town teen drama with all sorts of small town intrigues and set in the American South which might be my favourite setting for small town TV shows (think True Blood). Try it, it's on Amazon Prime, and I'm pretty sure you'll be super into it after you watch that pilot.

(While I'm on TV recs, Parenthood, one of my favourite shows of ALL TIME is also on Amazon Prime, and you must watch that also if you're in a heartwarming drama mood, and really, who isn't, right?)

This week in sometimes we are also Ruby Gillis in other ways, which is when we go to parties and toss our hair around: My friend Ameya (I realise I say "my friend so and so" a lot. Can I just stick to their names? You'll know it's a friend, right? In the case of a FRENEMY, I'll say "my frenemy" just to set the record straight) (HAH AS IF! I am way too chicken to actually call out someone's shitty behaviour in real life on the internet! I'll just turn them into a nasty character in my next book!) ANYWAY, Ameya is obsessed with this new jazz bar in the usual no-fly zone of South Ex II, called The Bar Cat and it's like all the good things of Piano Man and PCO with none of the bad (too crowded and too trendy and so too full of children respectively). She took K and me there last week to see a band called Los Catphonics, who were okay, but the bar was really nice. Good cocktails, swing jazz house playlist, and nice food too. Pricey, but it can be your "let's get dressed up and go out with friends" place. Or maybe you have a full time job and are not peering at everything through the shredded remains of your last freelance invoice.

This week in practically turning into the Jetsons:  Here's a first world problem for you: what do you do when you are in the middle of crafting a perfect sentence and your cook comes in at just that moment and asks what you want her to make, turning your thoughts from High Poetic Ancient India to mmm what shall I put in my mouth today? (We have a feminist household, and our division of labour is pretty equal, and I decided to take on the meal planning because, well, I enjoy it, and I care more about what's for dinner than K does.)

What do you do? You do as I did and get an Excel sheet going! I commissioned K to build me something that would let me not only put out all the meals for that week but also have a running grocery list by the side so if for eg, we're eating daal and we have no daal, I just have to check the column in red to see what I'm missing. You can update the list of dishes and ingredients and now it's mostly smooth sailing. I will send you a link to the spreadsheet next week as soon as he tinkers with it a bit more because right now he says it's not yet ready for public consumption. Still it has made my life a lot easier.

Also since all that fuss about antibiotics in your chicken, I have been trying to find a better source. I use the app Fresh To Home which has really really nice fish--we've been eating a lot of fish these days, and I've been using our wedding present Suriani Kitchen (thanks Mihir and Snigdha!) to make all sorts of nice things. The chicken is not the best though, but Zappfresh has been recommended as another good source of antibiotic-free chicken, so will try that next.

This week in stuff I wrote: My monthly books column this time featured statuses: Facebook, singledom in your late thirties and the state of the world in a post apocalyptic future. An excerpt:

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu’s Status Single is the result of her interviews with about 3,000 single women on the realities behind being single in this country. It’s very much a PLU (people like us) book, and yet, it is an important one simply for taking into account the stories of thousands of urban, educated women and what happens to them in this country when they are minus a husband or partner.

I do love this gig, and how it makes me think about the stuff I read and how to structure it into themes each month. Speaking of reading, it was this month (sadly after column was published) that I got into Cynthia Voigt's excellent series about a family called the Tillermans. The first book is the strongest, and the one I would recommend the most: Homecoming about perhaps my favourite kind of kids-making-it-in-an-adult-world theme, the survival type story where you live off the land by making fires and fishing and hiding from grown ups. Very good. I'd recommend it highly for your next reading fix. 

Sunday link list here to destroy the other things you had to do this afternoon

 

Our top story this week is a woman who befriended a bumblebee. Befriended. A. Bumblebee.

Excerpt: Since the bee, now formally named Bee, would have to walk from flower to flower to feed, Presly built her a private floral buffet. Using some netting, she built Bee an enclosure full of blossoms where her winged counterparts couldn't reach to deplete the pollen.

 

Heh, never date a writer, kids.

Excerpt: Well. If I was going to be in this dang book, at least that gave me license to pick it apart.  I snickered at the skewed grammar — was the foreman blonde, or the daughter? — and rolled my eyes at Carl’s middle-class depiction of my working-class upbringing. And that tentacle thing. The narrator, named Frank, had just met Sophie at a gallery opening, it seemed, and they hadn’t even spoken. How did he know what her ego acted like? I could already see where this was headed: A 64-year-old man turning an insecure 25-year-old woman into an emasculating shrew, her sole goal being to suck his life energy. And this was only page 17.

 

Hey Ladies used to be one of my favourite series over at the late lamented Toast, and I'm glad to see they're turning it into a book.

Excerpt: Ali, since you’re the Maid of Honor I’ll let you handle dress code, but please, ladies, be prepared to wear a pastel or muted shade that goes well with your skin tone. If you’re not sure, google! Or go to a high-end luxury clothing store and make a consultation appointment with a stylist. As for shoes, just because this will be outside doesn’t mean you should sacrifice looking good for being comfortable. I am going to have a photographer on site, so keep that in mind! As for hair and makeup, please call Meegan at Hair Today in VA for consecutive day-of appointments so we can have consistency in looks.

 

A lot of chatter on my Twitter timeline recently about whether internships should be paid or not. I got paid for my first gig which was technically an internship--and I learned a lot from having that money + having to work for it. (I had one unpaid internship just before, which was perhaps a job I learned the LEAST from, and quickly quit about ten days later.) This Guardian article is interesting in that context.

Excerpt: You can only shrug off being paid in change if you’ve got somebody else picking up the tab. If my partner hadn’t had a well-paid job, I would not have had the money to eat that week, or any of the other weeks I worked at Monocle. My “job” was basically a hobby that someone else was funding. One of the other interns in my cohort juggled a second job at a ramen shop, but most had parents who subsidised their rent, bills, travel and food. Journalism has shifted to a greater degree of social exclusivity than any other profession, according to Alan Milburn, the former Independent Reviewer on Social Mobility and Child Poverty. In a report published in 2012 headlined “Fair access to professional careers”, he found that 49% of journalism students come from the top three socio-economic groups, and just 14% from the bottom three.

How to be a good mother (if you're a Southern African python.)

Excerpt: Although the mothers wrap around their eggs, they don’t rhythmically contract their muscles to raise their body temperature. Instead, two times a day, they lie at the entrance of burrow until they bake to 40ºC before returning to coil around their eggs, transferring the heat from their bodies. For the three-month incubation term, these massive mammas live an austere lifestyle, alternately sunbathing and curling around their precious loads. They don’t eat or drink.

 

Is it really love if you are not posting a hundred pictures of the two of you on Instagram?

Excerpt: It is so early in this couple’s relationship and I’m already exhausted. So are most of our mutual friends. The responses on their weekiversary posts have dropped from dozens of “You two!!” and “Cutest couple ahhhhh!!” comments in the early days of their relationship to just a single comment from one of their moms. A lone tumbleweed of a comment, rolling through the dusty, echoing canyons of Shut Up You Guys National Park.

Okay, my hand is starting to hurt again from all the copy-pasting so I'm ending this week's link list with this nice gif instead! Subscribe here to get this newsletter in your inbox every week!

 

 

Newsletter: Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As always, you can subscribe to my newsletter here for it to arrive into your inbox instead of waiting for me to post it here! 

This week in further signifiers of my old age: I taught myself to type. I learned online--the best way--by going on chat rooms and talking to people around the world. Age 14. The internet was brand new in India, my dad needed to amuse me one long summer, so he took me with him to work every now and then, where there was an internet enabled computer. Everything took several minutes to load, but worth it. We got the internet at home, eventually, and soon the speed picked up and so did my typing skills. (You can read all about my early experiments with the internet on this longform piece I did for Yahoo Originals a few years ago.)

So, I wrote everything--six years of journalism, ten years of freelancing, almost ten years of book writing--using my two index fingers. The hunt and peck style so favoured by grannies around the world, except I can go damn fast with my hunt and peck, at my prime, I was averaging five thousand words a day without breaking a sweat. (Now I am old and my words are more considered, so it's down to 2000 including sweating.) Alas, friends! Alas for everything, because now my money makers, my two index fingers, have been FELLED by old age and greed! I started developing a TWINGE in my right forefinger which quickly became an ache which quickly became so bad that I couldn't open things or pull tabs off packets or do all the motor skills stuff you depend on your forefinger and thumb to do.

K is sadly familiar with carpal tunnel syndrome (also known as repetitive strain injury or RSI) but I was foolishly hoping to wait until I finish my next manuscript before I mentioned it, because even as I'm writing this, I'm forcing myself to try and use other fingers but I feel CRIPPLED. Anyway, the pain got too much to ignore and I started to worry about seriously doing myself an injury so now I'm wearing his old wrist guard and I've swapped my mouse around so that it's on my left side (very hard but you have to begin using your left index finger) and I'm trying to type this half on an external keyboard and half on my laptop. In the meanwhile, if any of you have done exercises for your hand and wrist with good results, please share them.

This week in VOGUE VOGUE VOGUE: Went to Sarojini Nagar with my mother--an outing we do quite a lot. I have some secret shopping places both within the large Sarojini Market, some stalls to hit which always yield good results, as well as one more export surplus-y place in East Delhi quite near her house where I always score pretty incredible accessories. I have a rule of thumb when buying stuff off the road: mostly it's about fabric. The synthetic stuff always looks cheap, unless it's got a nice geometric or some such pattern--and you're looking for BIG prints not small. Fitted dresses are tricky to figure out size for, I bought a lovely white cotton dress, but alas, it doesn't zip up all the way, so we had to go to the tailor this morning and get him to add a panel to the sides so it expands a bit. This time though, there wasn't such an embarrassment of riches as there usually is, so I think I'm going to need to make another trip soon. *yay*

Oh, the tailor! It is a temperamental shop with a revolving cast, one masterji, who I barely see and instead deal with a tall, handsome young fellow who appears to be second-in-command, but it is right down the road from me, so I go often and I am ALWAYS optimistic. There's always some dress I used to love but is now too old, too faded, too worn, and I want to revive it by giving it an all new cast and crew as it were. This time I'm aiming for a lovely grey kimono/kurta/dress thing with an orange embroidered panel at the back, and it'll either be AMAZING or.. well, it HAS to be amazing because I am paying seven hundred bucks for it, which may not sound like a lot to you, but is roughly double of what he normally charges because of the complicated sleeves and pockets and what not.

Also last week I bought a lovely dress off Olio Stories. I've been wanting to buy a dress from their website for a while, because it all looks so airy and COOL, like with-sunglasses, not temperature, but it's always been ridiculously expensive (you see how I'm wailing about 700 rups also here, so you get my general spend on clothes) but they're having a clearance sale, so you should check them out while the going's good. (Tip: everything is a bit big so even the small which I ordered is slightly loose on me, but in a nice way.) (I normally wear a medium.) (Check the size charts before you buy ANYTHING on the internet.) (The dress was cheaper when I bought it.)

This week in food and drink: Have all the men left after all that chat about clothes? WELL ANYWAY, I am now going to talk about sausages which is a very manly food--both in shape and in cooking techniques, so come back, men!

Vir Sanghvi just wrote a long wailing column about how there were no good sausages to be had in Delhi, unless you go to the OBEROI, DAHLING, but only because they export everything. Now, Vir Sanghvi is very posh and I am not, so I have ONE WORD to say to him, and that word is Pigpo. Pigpo continues to knock it out of the park in terms of sausages. I am no connoisseur, unlike certain Germans in my life, but the teeny Pigpo sausages, about the size of your thumb, are delicious, freeze well and are incredibly easy to just pop into a pan. With them, last week, I made Instant Pot Mashed Potatoes off this recipe from Lifehacker, which you can also make in your pressure cooker. I substituted the half and half mentioned with coconut milk, and they came out just as creamy and no lingering coconut flavour also. (I seriously pop coconut milk into so many things these days that I've just begun buying loads each time I do.)

Sadly, Pigpo is very far away from me, and while the meat delivery website Lionfresh looks nice and all, it is really only Pigpo I crave. Next time I'm just going to buy two kilos and freeze all of it. Instant sausage fest! Perfect for Sunday night with Netflix.

Wednesday Link List!

When Harry Met Sally is definitely on my top five list of best movie of all time. ALL TIME!

Excerpt: Perhaps because Ephron took so much from real life, When Harry Met Sally is a surprisingly grounded romantic comedy. It’s made up largely of low-stakes hangout scenes that have more in common with today’s more realistic rom-coms than they do the glossy rom-coms of the 2000s. For instance, the film contains perhaps the most hilariously accurate depiction of a game of Pictionary
ever captured on screen. Although the dialogue often has the patter of a play, Reiner and Ephron anchor those well-written conversations in the natural milieu of New York City life. Harry and Sally discuss their dating lives while unrolling a rug or wandering through Central Park or spending a day at The Met, delivering silly banter in goofy voices.

Basically: eat your vegetables.

Excerpt: The body detoxifies itself daily; that’s a primary job of the liver and the kidneys, and they are really good at it. (The intestines, spleen, and immune system are in on it, too.) So, you want to take good care of your liver and kidneys, gut, and immune system. That’s a far better “cleanse” than any juice. How do you take good care of all your detoxifying organ systems? By taking good care of yourself, of course. That means eating well, not smoking, exercising, sleeping enough, managing your stress, and so on.

Why should you care about all that Facebook stuff?

Excerpt: If you keep secrets about yourself, even innocuous ones, Facebook is likely aware of them in some capacity thanks to the sites you visit, the profiles you linger over, the comments you leave. And it’s not comforting to think that you’re not in charge of that data. Remember when we found out the NSA was spying on everyone, and people argued that “if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t be worried”? This feels kind of like that. You should care about what companies can learn about you without your permission, and what data they can retain against your wishes.

Three links about pets this week because I will read anything domestic companion animal related. (Sadly, these are all about dogs, but they should get some internet love too.) (Dammit, I want a dog for my collection.)

Who is my dog? This writer did a DNA test on her mutt.

Excerpt: Oh, you would like to know even more about Peter? If you insist. He has velvet ears. He has a spotted tongue. When he walks down the stairs, at his moderately paced gentleman’s trot, you can tell he’s a bit bow-legged. He has the heart of an angel and the soul of a poet, and there’s a hint of sadness to him that makes you want to protect him against all of the world’s harshness. He has whiskers that are so prominent they make you second-guess whether whiskers are a typical dog trait, or whether he could potentially be part mouse. He will sit his big, fat butt on your lap like he’s tiny, when he is actually 25 pounds. He’s affectionate, but not needy. “He’s just so...kind,” is how a cousin of mine once described him, and it’s true: he’s just so kind. Also he loves to burrow under the covers, and he loves to sleep with his head on a pillow like a tiny little man.

We treat our pets around the same way ancient cave people treated THEIR pets.

Excerpt: As civilization proceeded and small-scale hunter-gatherer societies gave way to urban elites and subservient rural populations, pet keeping entered a completely new phase. In the generally egalitarian communities of the Paleolithic everyone could keep animals as companions, whereas in the highly stratified societies of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, right up until the twentieth century, the poorest had little opportunity to acquire pets for their own sake. That’s not to say that they didn’t feel affection for dogs and cats, but those animals had to earn their keep. The surviving evidence generally suggests that from the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries bce) until the end of the nineteenth century, pets played a part in the lives of the wealthiest members of society. As the less well-off inevitably left fewer traces of their lives, we can only guess at how they interacted with their animals; no doubt they had less time and fewer resources to devote to them. Not until the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle classes, did the keeping of pets for their own sake become widespread once more.

The long and complicated relationship between humans and wolves.

Excerpt: It is alarming, although perhaps predictable, that in the US attitudes toward wolves are becoming divided along political lines, with Republicans continuing to introduce and support laws that restrict or persecute them, while First Nations people and many Democrats are much more tolerant, or even encouraging, of the animals. In Europe, by contrast, a more easygoing relationship is being established, as was demonstrated in 2016 when one of the first wolves to enter the Netherlands in centuries crossed the border from Germany. It wandered the streets of a village for several days, the sanguine Dutch displaying little more than minor concern. Elsewhere in Europe, however, where wolves cause more harm to livestock, schemes are in place whereby farmers are compensated by the EU for losses to their flocks. Conflict between wolves and humans in Europe will doubtless continue, but in Europe wolves have a bright future, in part because most landowners seem willing to abide by laws and regulations formulated to address their interactions with the animals. In the US, however, wolves continue to be shot whenever they encroach onto private land. As a result, today more wolves can be found in Europe than in all the US, including Alaska, despite the fact that Europe’s human population is more than twice as large as that of the US.

FOMO? More like HAMO!* (on social menopause in this busy age)

(* that's... errr... happy about missing out.)

(This piece was first published in Scroll at the end of 2016 and since then, the symptoms described have become even stronger.)

It's a surreal sort of feeling when you realise that one of your favourite sensations is when a plan that has been laid out and is waiting for you has been cancelled the afternoon of the event. There's a sense of liberation, an “ahh, now I can stay indoors,” a cozy, pit-of-your-stomach warming that comes with the anticipation of an evening spent in your pajamas, doing nothing but surfing the internet or reading a book or binge-watching a TV show. It's almost as if this plan cancellation has created time out of thin air, a pocket of free hours to do with as you wish.

Long ago, in a book of fairy tales by Alison Uttley, I read a story about a man who was selling time. He offered a free hour to anyone who wanted it, and the story went on to follow a busy housewife who wanted to dance, a painter who wanted an extra hour to paint and so on. The children in the story followed behind the vendor jeering, “Who needs time? We have all we need!” and since I was those children then, I too wondered at a world where adults would need to “buy” an extra hour. It was never my favourite story in that book, but if a time man came by today, shaking his golden hourglasses, I'd buy one. I might even buy two, if he'd let me. And what would I do with this spare time? I suspect I would do what I usually do—spend it reading or thinking or talking to someone one-on-one, close activities that conjure up nothing more exciting than a cup of tea or a purring cat.

And yet, I used to be one of Those People in the early 2000s and the beginning of my twenties. You know “those people”: they're always on the go, their Sundays require a Monday because Sundays are full on, restless activity, from a boozy brunch to late dinner, phone constantly buzzing with texts and messages. A weekend that isn't complete with at least three house parties, preferably all on the same night so you could prove your social credentials by hopping from one to another, never putting your handbag down, because you could never settle. I took pride in my ability to socialise, relentlessly, without getting bored of having the same three conversations over and over again, pride in my throbbing head the next few days, because I knew what FOMO meant before the acronym was even invented. I went to parties and I blogged about them later; not because someone was paying me for it, but because by then my audience expected to see what I had done that weekend by Monday night, they waited for it, fingers poised above the comments button. What had I worn? Who had I kissed? What was Delhi like? And I delivered—spilling out insecurities and nausea, a little banter which I wished I could have actually said instead of only writing out on my blog, and so on and so forth. And, yet, I never realised that my favourite bit was actually the sitting at home and writing about all of my activities later.

I only came across “social menopause” as a term when this article was commissioned and I went looking for it. But it's so perfect! The feeling of slowing down in your late twenties and early thirties, when you'd rather go to a quiet restaurant than a heaving nightclub, when your best social evenings can be summed up with three friends and a bottle of wine on your coffee table, and you try and not schedule more than one engagement per weekend, because it takes you the rest of the week to recover. Everything is slowing down, and unless your friends keep pace with the extent of your ageing, sometimes it's quite lonely. They're all “WHEE CLUBS!” and the most exciting thing on your calendar is finishing watching Stranger Things on Netflix finally.

Especially now with the end of December upon us. Is there any other month in the whole year so full of anticipation and dread as this month? For me, in particular, this is also the month of my birth, so there's always that great expectation. As far back as I can remember, I've spent the week running up to my birthday wishing that birthdays were never invented, but also really looking forward to it at the same time. The day of my actual party, I'd be the one probably having a nervous breakdown from all the emotions, and so was fairly casual about the rest of the year. (Happy to report that this year, as always, I had a super time.) Anyway, for those of us not born in December, and there's the whole New Year's Thing. Oh god, the New Year's Thing. Anxious emails start going out in August, your social media feed gets filled with people running away, and finally there's only about a handful of you left in the same city, and what do you know? Each of those people is having their own individual New Year's Eve party. This is where you can either ride out your ageing (“I'd rather stay home and celebrate with one other person and a nice whiskey”) or be rebellious and rage against the dying of the light.

I found my friends in general falling into two camps: the ones that had achieved social menopause (SoMe) before me and the ones who were still ready to put on their high heels at the slightest bell of a Whatsapp group message.

The older SoMes usually had some sort of extenuating reason: some had married, and as marrieds, you were more excused from the usual carousel of social stuff than single people, the reason being that people with husbands or wives had to answer to one more person at home. Some had embraced their SoMes way before any of us did, and you knew not to ask those people out on Saturday night. They were your Thursday evening coffee friends, or your Tuesday impromptu early dinner friends, they could usually cook pretty well, and because they spent so much time at home, their homes, unlike yours, would be tidy and perfect, no plastic dishes, no need to BYOB either. You judged them a little bit before you went over, but there'd be a moment, when you'd be standing by their bookshelves, and it was only about 10.30 pm but the night was obviously, clearly over, and you'd envy them their surety. How nice to be so certain about your place in the world.

The ones not yet in SoMe desperately clung on to the last of the partying like they knew what was coming. Every time you messaged, “Not tonight, I'm tired” it was a betrayal. They were an army poised against ageing, and you were the person down, leaving them with fewer and fewer to fight. They took to new friends sometimes, and you'd see them smiling out at you from Facebook or Instagram photos, each captioned “best night ever!!!!” with duck face and glitter shoulders. Some, you'd lose track of entirely: there they were at a music festival in Berlin! There they were on a beach! There they were anywhere but home where things grew old, trying to recreate Neverland. They were the Lost Boys and Girls, and sometimes you run into them at parties, but often you take in the feather headpieces, the carefully faded t-shirt with an aspirational slogan and you hide behind the kitchen cabinets so they won't see you, and anyway they're not at the party long enough to notice you were there. Others come limping back to you once they're done, and now it's them who message you, “Can't make tonight, have had a hectic day at work.” And you message back a sad face, but secretly you're sort of glad that the guilt of cancelling isn't on you.

But I recently hit my mid-thirties. And I can see a glimmer—the very faintest little Tinkerbell light—in the distance. Now that it's okay for me to stay home for three weeks in a row, I'm suddenly up for being social again. I've accepted my SoMe, made peace with it, and as a result, my calendar is filling up. My blog is a thirty something's musings now, people don't engage with me on it, but occasionally there's the fun of taking the perfect picture, writing the perfect caption, composing the perfect tweet storm. Interestingly, my older SoMe friends are feeling more and more that way too—a few are hunting for the perfect New Year's Eve bash, while my friends who had not yet achieved SoMe-ness, are talking of quiet evenings at home. Maybe this is how the world is going to whirl now with all of us and longer life expectancies, maybe it will ebb and flow, like the end of Gatsby: “and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Newsletter: Year end recap edition

December 31st, and tomorrow is both a Monday and the beginning of a new year. It seems a bit silly to set so much store by a calendar date, but I'm sort of swept up in the global excitement. It seems like a new year is like a blank page in a brand new notebook: anything could happen. Anything could also happen on the first of September for example, but you know what I mean. It's also the day when you look back on the year that passed and do a report card for yourself. Ends of years are useful for taking stock, especially on a cold morning like this one, when the sun is weakly pushing through the fog, and your hot water bottle is warm against your belly.

I had a pretty good year. Some self-doubt crept in re: my writing, but I hope to conquer the little critical voices in my head and move on in 2018. After all, as a writer of fiction, you should exist only to please yourself and not the sales figures or literary festivals or what have you. Maybe there will always be self doubt, because there's always someone you compare yourself to, and we all, ultimately, want to be JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, or failing that, Margaret Atwood. I'm grateful to my readers though, and everyone who has sent me a message or an email saying that they liked my books and what I do, it's very heartening, especially when you think you're going it alone. A few things will be recalibrated for me in 2018, but they are all baby, nascent ideas, and I'll tell you all about them when they are actually in practice. I will be finishing the next book of my Girls Of The Mahabharata series early next year and I have an essay out in a Penguin anthology which will be released in February, so I'm still writing, and writing makes me happy. (It's only post publishing that all the doubts start to creep in.)

Anyway, that's the bitterness of the pill, here's the sweet!

This year in life events: We got married! We were never very marriage-y people, but we came to the decision with the same certainity we've approached most things in our relationship: it's the right thing for us to do at this point. The boring reason: we wanted it to be easier to live and work in each other's countries. The romantic reason: love and all those other things. Our wedding was almost exactly how I wanted it to be (the only thing I would change was not being so tired after three days of partying--despite the fact that we had a "low key" wedding, we wound up having three parties anyway. Small intimate parties, but parties nonetheless.) Life has... not changed a bit. Most often, we forget we're married, except when we're using wedding presents around the house.


This year in bucket lists: I loved my month in Europe, even though now, five months later, it's taken on the dreamy quality in my memory of someone else's life. We went from Germany to Spain, from Spain to France, from France to Luxembourg, from Luxembourg to the Netherlands (via Belgium.) I got to see Europe by road, by train and by plane. I got to have expensive meals (at the beginning of my trip) and two euro steak and wine (at the end) and I loved all of it, even being broke, a little bit. Through my entire trip, I had this vague feeling of standing outside my body watching myself: pinch me, this is real, this is happening.

This year in writing: Many MANY freelance assignments. A few of my favourites: fancy book launches in Mint, how The Handmaid's Tale is relevant in modern India for Scroll, re-examining Marilla Cuthbert for Indian Express, on children's literature for Mint again, on reading the childhood memoirs of your favourite authors for Open, on why myth-lit is so popular for Deccan Chronicle. This plus several columns made my year one of heavy reading.

I also had a new book (The One Who Swam With The Fishes) out last summer, and read a lot more about the Mahabharata than I ever expected I would, and now I can rattle off back stories and sub-plots and literary analyses like a pro.

This year in little luxuries: My favourite money spend this year was hiring someone to do our garden for us. It was a bit expensive setting up, all the pots and soil and what not, but Ram Lal is a genius and I love that we barely ever buy veg anymore, since we have a steady crop of things to eat around the year. It has really changed the way I live my life, just the simple fact that we're growing FOOD. I now know the colours of the aubergine flower (purple, like the fruit), how pretty the lauki flower is in the hot sunshine, and how everything tastes so much better when you can just reach out and pluck it.

This year in habits: Getting K a compost bin for his birthday was changing the way we process trash in this house. We still put out a lot of paper and plastic (I blame Amazon and their easy next-day deliveries), but no wet waste at all, it all goes into our bin. He liked it so much, he bought a second one, and while I still find it somewhat icky, it doesn't smell, and the gardener uses it in our plants so it's all very circle of life.

This year in life lessons: A project that seemed super definite and like it was going to be a Thing, did not, finally wind up happening the way I expected it to, so I have learned to, um, curb my enthusiasm, so to speak. This is the year my optimism started to fade, just a little bit, and become tempered with realism. I think I'll always be a rose tinted glasses kind of person, but every now and then you have to take your glasses off and really look at the world.

And that's my report card! Let me know how the year worked out for you in the comments at the bottom of this. Happy New Year, and I'll see you all on the other side.

Newsletter: Resolutions, resolutions

Four days into thirty six, and I am filled with good resolutions. None of your humdrum ones either, no, these are little lifestyle changes that, if done properly, should reclaim all the parts of me that are scattered everywhere. The first one is to not check my phone the first thing when I wake up. It's harder than it sounds, so I've taken to putting my phone on charge in the dining room, which means I have to leave the coziness of bed to get it. It means that my mornings belong to me again, the outside world does not interfere until I allow it to, and I wake up slowly, eyelids fluttering, echoes of sleep still everywhere. I lie in bed then, sometimes I think about my dreams: when you look at a phone as soon as you get up, you don't remember your dreams anymore. Sometimes I talk to K, sometimes I think about the day ahead and what I'd like to do. It's become sort of precious, this just-this-house-just-this-bed time. Of course, since social media is a hard habit to break, I felt a bit fidgety this morning, but my brain learned to deal with the fidgets, it produced a train of thought for me to go down, a cat appeared to walk across my chest and meow for her breakfast. If you think of waking up each day as a rebirth, then every morning is the day you are born, you do a little accounting with yourself: how do I feel today? Are all my limbs intact? I feel in a better mood than I have on several mornings, I feel bright and alive.

The other thing I have done, and maybe I shouldn't mention it until it takes is started a reading journal. A "Book of Books" which is an idea I got from this article, earlier this year, but never thought to take up. However, starting to diarise again, no matter how small and specific, has been good for me. Because while the pages of my notebook are filling up with what I'm reading, and what I'd like to read, and books on my to-be-read pile and so on, there's also insights into my state of mind, which I wouldn't have thought of had I not been writing all my bookish thoughts down. Pamela Paul, the author of that article, felt the same way, she loved opening her "Bob" to see how her tastes had changed, how one genre influenced another and so on. I have gotten out of the habit of hand writing anything, but slowly--and with the help of a beautiful pen--I'm hoping to reclaim it.

This week in books and reading: The book that inspired me to begin this in the first place was Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark, a book it felt like the whole world had read except for me. I came home from Goa and found a copy waiting for me, part of Bloomsbury's new editions of some of their more popular books. In many ways, the cover of my copy is what drew me in, it was so beautiful, this mysterious woman done in shades of flame orange and burnt sienna, the satisfying heft of it, even the font, never say that new editions are a waste of time, because they can draw in the most unlikely of readers. Having tried to read this book several times in the past, especially when it first came out and everyone was reading it, and having abandoned it, I only picked it up because I wanted something fat and solid and maybe a little fantastic. To my joy, I realised it was the book that Jane Austen would write if she wrote books about magicians. I loved it, despite, or perhaps because of the fusty language, the "shewed" for "showed," the "surprize", the descriptions of history laced with magic, the hundred footnotes at the bottom of the pages. It's been so long since a book has felt like serendipity, look, here I was all along, and here you are, come to discover me. I think that's a sort of falling in love as well, of all the libraries in all the world, and here you are, in mine.

Now I've finished it, however, and my own Bob is teeming with ideas about what I should read next, and since a friend kindly gave me an Amazon gift voucher for my birthday, I bought four books off that and am reading one right now: Still Life by Louise Penny (that I am currently reading) (the first in a series of detective novels about a Canadian inspector called Gamache, and I have heard nothing but good things.) (I don't normally buy crime novels, but it's a genre I enjoy SO MUCH that I'm just going to own to it, guilt-free). I also bought Deep South by Paul Theroux (review), The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story: From PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (review) and The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier (review.)

This week in parties: My own birthday party last week was excellent, and here is a photo of me and K dressed as Mario and Princess Peach respectively.

 Our cook made a feast, and everyone drank and ate and talked, and it was all very civilised.

And because it's December in Delhi, literally my favourite time of the year, everyone's so social! And in such a good mood! We have become very Adult about our socialising and have created a shared Google calendar, just so you know we're that couple now. I'm not sure what use it is, because I keep diligently marking down all the parties we've been invited to, and K, just as diligently, asks me "what do we have on Wednesday?" But hey! At least the CONCEPT is grown up.

This week in food and drink: Kofuku for my birthday dinner with just the two of us. Lovely. Perhaps the best Japanese food I've had and the sushi was soooo good. And it's in the weird dystopian Ansal Plaza which makes it even more exciting.

Town Hall with my friend Nayantara, where because of MCD something or the other, they've stopped their terrace seating, which is too bad, because it was a very pretty terrace, however, we sat downstairs, she gave me a gorgeous box of Ruskin Bond inspired hand painted stationary and we drank copious amounts of wine.

Then Indian Accent, the new one at the Lodi, with my friend Shrayana, and we drank MORE wine and ate: panko crusted chillis stuffed with goat cheese, baked fish, bacon kulchas, mushroom kulchas, daulat ki chaat and a surprise birthday cake! Mmmm.

Then my friend Samit's birthday party last night, where he served up this insane haleem and nihari from some place called Purani Dilli? Sadly, I was too full from all the fried fish he waved in front of us for starters to do much justice to the meal, but out of greed, I tasted everything.

It's been a good week.

This week in stuff I wrote: A response to the Cat Person short story in the New Yorker for Scroll. ** I've also started to put a lot more of my archives on my blog, so please look at it also.

Sunday link list
 

 

It’s true that the bulk of these seventeen—seventeen!—stories sound like Tom Hanks movies. Or rather, they are stories that could have been written by an alien whose only exposure to the planet earth is through Tom Hanks movies … This book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper was never going to be a book exactly. It is a gift, something that parents give to their college-bound children as revenge for making themselves difficult to understand … in four hundred pages, there’s hardly even a hint of conflict or a suggestion that American life is anything less than a holiday where everyone rides Schwinn bikes, leaves the immigration office to go bowling, and has a dog named Biscuit.

- Lit Hub's most savage reviews of the year.

And that’s where memory—whether direct, or received from elders or pop culture—can be most subjective. As bad as the present may seem, the people who actually lived in those “simpler times” had less education, less health care, less equality, and less ability for economic and social advancement than today. It’s a little like the fallacy of past-life regression: no one ever thinks they were once a lowly peasant, or died of disease at birth. But we couldn’t have all been princes or kings. Now is still the greatest time to be alive, in other words, for the vast majority of humankind.

-Quartz has a great series on the nostalgia economy

 

You’re exceptionally hairy. A shock of bristly setae covers your body and face to help you keep warm, collect pollen, and even detect movement. Your straw-like tongue stretches far beyond the end of your jaw, but has no taste buds on it. Instead, you “taste” with other, specialized hairs, called sensillae, that you use to sense the chemicals that brush against particular parts of your body.

- What's it like to be a bee?

 

Jen: But the prime minister is the second-worst plot in a movie with 855 plots (number approximate). Can someone tell me what the meeting when PM Grant and President Billy Bob Thornton was *actually* about? Anyone? Anyone at all?
Tanya: It was about creating more tension between Hugh and Natalie. She was "his" in his mind because he had a crush on her and her chocolate biscuits and tea.
Jen: Which is *ridiculous.* Would the prime minister of Great Britain really take a stand against ... whatever he was discussing with the president ... just to declare his secret love for an aide? Please say the answer to this is no, please say the answer to this is no ...
Tanya: Well, um ... huh? I think someone's calling me.

- Tis the season to rewatch Love, Actually and have arguments about it

I'm Harry Potter! The Dark Arts better be worried, oh boy.

- What happens when a bot rewrites Harry Potter? HILARITY, THAT'S WHAT.

At my Delhi school one day, a seven-year-old in my class found out that my middle initial “A” stood for “Abdul.” He declared it was something to be ashamed about—rather viciously for his young age and in the unrelenting manner that children do when they pounce on an embarrassing secret. I realised at that early age that my Muslim surname was unlikely to ever be an asset and was best kept to oneself when it could be helped.

- On being Muslim in India

Engraving can make anything—even the most humble of junk store finds—feel a little more precious. Adding a personal message quickly and easily transforms a tchotchke into something meaningful. For instance, last year I found a WWII-era brass compass for my fiancé. I polished it up, took it to my local jewelry store, and had them etch in a phrase that—I swear to god—came to me in a dream.

- I love this DIY gift guide by Atlas Obscura most of all the gift guides.

Living in Bandra East (not THAT Bandra)

(Wrote this for a city newspaper)

I still remember where I was when I decided to move to Mumbai. It was a cold winter's evening, we were in a friend's flat in East Delhi and I was grumbling about how everything was the same-- much of a muchness. Sure, I was due to start a new job with a magazine very soon, but I had grown weary of Delhi, the city I had grown up in, and continued, it seemed, to grow old in.

This party was a combination birthday/farewell do for our friend, who was moving to Mumbai with a new job. “How lucky,” I sighed, and he said, “Come with me.” I might have laughed disbelievingly—one didn't just give up house and job and life and move so easily on suggestion—but the idea turned in my mind from a ragged broken piece of bottle to smooth-edged sea glass, and by the next morning, I called him and said, “Okay. Okay, if you're serious, I will come.”

I'm not going to get into all the minutiae of moving, but suffice it to say, when I joined him, suitcase in hand three months later, I had not only a room, but also a neighbourhood. All brand new and ready to call my own. This was Bandra East, a firmly middle-class residential colony, a seeming hold-out from the already rapidly gentrifying West, a stroll across the train station, a neighbourhood where Bal Thackeray was our “down the road neighbour” and the only food delivery option was a Mangalorean sea food restaurant down the road. Our flat was part of a set of buildings called “MIG Colony” or “Middle Income Group” and apart from our landlord, who had moved to South Bombay ages ago, everyone else there owned their property.

These were conservative people who kept to themselves—my friend had told the landlord we were a married couple to save appearances, and this we laughed about later when once he came to visit and asked why we didn't just move both twin beds into one room for our convenience. (Later when my friend moved out—another city, another job—and I moved two girls from my old college into his old room, we told the landlord we were having marital problems, something he probably already guessed by our lack of shared bedroom.)

In the beginning, Bandra (E) (even the bracket pulling me away from the lure of the West and its fanciness) didn't mean much to me in terms of where it was located. I was still Bandra, wasn't I, still in the thick of things, still trendy and cool with a posh address. (Nowhere but in Mumbai—and maybe certain pockets of South Delhi—does your address so quickly become a shorthand for whether or not you can be friends with someone. Live close enough, and there's an instant relationship, but live two or three unfashionable suburbs away, and even if you get along like a house on fire, it's unlikely you'll hang out all that much.) It took me a while to cotton on to the full extent of exactly how residential we were, how tucked away from everything else. For those not in the know, Bandra (E) began with a long tree-lined road, with the flats tucked away in side lanes. So quiet, you couldn't even hear traffic, so quiet that even getting a rickshaw at 9 pm was impossible, unless you walked all the way to the main road. As a result, our rents were at least 30 per cent cheaper than our neighbours in the West, but the price we paid was living in provincialism, so to speak, while all around us, Mumbai exploded with the cosmopolitan lifestyle I had moved to the city for.

Eventually, I moved to the West after all—and it was everything that it promised to be. From a morning woken up by crows in the coconut trees outside my window, I'd be jolted awake in the middle of the night by kids in their daddy's cars, racing down the drag of a sea facing road. In just five minutes, I could walk to any cuisine I desired, and my friend were suddenly accessible, next door, I didn't even have to plan my evenings to set out at a time when public transport would be available. It was ideal—and yet, and yet, when I think about Mumbai, I think about MIG, and being ensconced in that world, a slow world that rocked me into the idea of living somewhere else. If my friend had taken a different decision when he picked our shared real estate, I might have been a different person today, but as it was, there we were, and now on my visits back to Mumbai, I feel a stab of fondness for that street when I pass it. Once, it was home.