Tripti Nagar > Recent Status Updates

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.

His India was neither rich nor poor. There were no huge homes and elaborate weddings, nor were there slums and water shortages and child laborers. The middle ground was too confusing to explain to an outsider. It was neither exotic enough nor familiar enough.

Did I understand, then, what freedom would mean? What it would cost, whom it would hurt, how we would fail a million times over? No. But I knew that we could overcome any tribulations, because an Indian woman with a dead rebel father and a hanged rebel heart could stand in this building and know her land now belonged to her.

I wondered whether Bashar and Omar had had the right idea, clinging to whatever love they could give each other because this brutal life could end more quickly than any of us thought

But righteous rage alone could not save India, or we would have been free long ago. If loss or sacrifice or passion were enough to stop the British, the whole world would be rid of them.

That people whose skins held the shades of the earth could have self-determination.

“Listen to me, Kalki. You can do so much more than just this. You must not get caught up in the romance of rebellion and gamble with your life.”

I did not wish to bring a daughter into this world of men, into a world that would silence her thoughts before she could even speak them. I wondered how many women had felt this same fear, deep in their bones.

Perhaps we were kin, they and I, yearning for something unnameable, a place where we could stretch our wings and belong.

This is such a beautiful evening. But life doesn’t always glitter like this. People don’t always glitter like this, either. It can be hard to realize that. To really be with someone and see all the parts that don't shine and glow, as well as the parts that do. It can be even harder to let the person you love see your own dark shadows.

Obsession wasn’t pretty. It was an ugly, all-consuming thing. The drive to create a world that only held two people, to escape reality, to blot out the rest of life.

I’ve always prided myself on being the best...I had to win. I collected prizes and awards because I saw them as a reflection of my self-worth, and I thought nothing tasted better than victory. Then I met you. And everything else…faded. We’ve been through some dark times, but you were always the brightest part of my life. Even when we broke up... Just knowing you existed somewhere in this world was enough.

I'd never fallen in love before her. Once I did, I did it the way I did everything else. Completely. Totally. Irrevocably.

Because seeing her smile is like watching the sun rise, and being with her is the only time I feel alive.

His body heat was a living, breathing thing, clouding my mind and stealing my focus until my world consisted of nothing except dark eyes, soft wool, and the clean, expensive scent of citrus and wood.

But when I climbed into bed that night and fell into a fitful sleep, my dreams had nothing to do with work and everything to do with dark hair and stolen touches.