Tripti Nagar > Recent Status Updates

“He said, ‘Be careful; she’s your type,’” he murmurs through his exhale, and I forget to breathe.

It feels like a cruel trick that the last child I ever had is the first one where the love came easily.

Your mother lies to you, and then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you are an old woman, looking back at your own life, lying to yourself

Would a headline like that ruin a nascent political career? Assuredly not. America didn’t care one iota about morality when it came to politicians. If anything, we expected them to be a little sleazy. It might improve the odds for my coddle husband in the heartland. Might even give me a boost in followers, too.

And she had Gordon—the child she’d struggled to bond with, the young man she’d once found so unknowable—to thank for this liberation.

As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.

...illuminating their toothbrushes. Bear’s is already stiffening with lack of use. She rinses it, wanting to bring it back to life. But it immediately feels like she’s washed away the thing that made it worth keeping...

It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body clasped between his hands. Maia nods toward it and says quietly, “Does it make you think of Dad?” ...Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, c. 1820–23. His stomach drops. It sandpapers a rawness he hadn’t known was inside him, and it feels too much to carry on looking.

His expression morphs each time she pictures it. Sometimes he is benign, sometimes stern, almost maleficent. A word so close to magnificent, she thinks, sent off-course by maleness.

Would you lay down your life for your child? the world silently asks. Yes, she’s done this. But she hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring.

Cora had felt a scooped-out hollow at her core with the realization that, however much she might have imagined she could exist in isolation, just Mum—warm, supportive, encouraging—in her daughter’s mind, she and Gordon were packaged together, two inseparable halves...Cora was an equal impediment—something to be protected and worried over. Just as Gordon was a presence to be minded and feared.

For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.

But I do not like the hole in her heart. She only has one, not three, like me. Tova’s heart. I will do everything I can to help her fill it.

And you know what they say. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a heterosexual woman entering her thirties coming off two disappointing relationships and a series of casual flings will eventually consider every man she knows as a potential long-term partner.

I went out with Gabe when I was so young, I’d always assumed that my dating experience would continue in an upward arc of one glorious love affair after the next, like a rocket into space, instead of a turbulent commercial-airline descent with a few good snacks and one okay in-flight movie on the way down.

There was a queasy unease to treading new waters, building the compass as you sailed, every choice a guess. Except it was worse now. Because it was expected at eighteen, or even twenty-five, but at thirty, it was embarrassing.

Right before turning thirty, I’d felt acutely aware that I’d reach the end of some thing. Not just my twenties, but also that feeling that life was completely fresh, newly unfolding. Experience and routine were settling in. Gabe‘s death had made me a novice again. Now that I’ve returned to the state, I saw that I had romanticized being a beginner. Space.

‘You think you can leave your native land because so many people have done it, so why shouldn’t you? After all, the world is full of immigrants, runaways, exiles … Encouraged, you break free and travel as far as you can, then one day you look back and realize it was coming with you all along, like a shadow. Everywhere we go, it’ll follow us, this city, this island.’

As much as I dislike carobs and their rivalry, I therefore have to include them in our tale. Just as all trees perennially communicate, compete and cooperate, both above and below the ground, so too do stories germinate, grow and come into bloom upon each other’s invisible roots.

‘I’m not in love!’ ‘Fine, but when you are, just remember, foam love is interested in foam beauty. Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love, the strong and profound and enchanting type.’

They talked incessantly, making the most of what language could offer, as if they didn’t trust words would still be available come tomorrow.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

They know, deep within, that when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.

First-generation immigrants talk to their trees all the time – when there are no other people nearby, that is. They confide in us, describing their dreams and aspirations, including those they have left behind, like wisps of wool caught on barbed wire during fence crossings…especially those they have brought along with them from lost motherlands.

First-generation immigrants are a species all their own…They move with a slight ungainliness, not quite at ease in their surroundings. Both eternally grateful for the chances life has given them and scarred by what it has snatched away, always out of place, separated from others by some unspoken experience, like survivors of a car accident.

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

They laughed with the slum children and pretended not to mind touching their filthy hands. Of course they didn’t mind. It would be easy to touch those children if you knew you were leaving and next week you would be back at home, drinking tea in your nice big kitchen telling people how those children laugh and smile even though their lives are so difficult.

Of course, more and more Americans were coming to India for holidays, but within a few months, once they had done yoga and tried halfheartedly to teach English to prostitutes’ children, they got on planes back to their homes in Michigan or Texas. Mrs. Jha saw these young white people in Connaught Place and Janpath with their Fabindia kurtas, looking like they were the latest Mother Teresa.

On the radio, a Bon Jovi song played. “It’s been raining since you left me,” the lyrics said. How funny, Mr. Jha thought. An Indian song would have to say, “It hasn’t rained since you left me.” Unless, of course, you were happy that they left you.

Maybe it hadn’t all been just a result of hard work and good luck; maybe it had been because of his wife’s prayers.