Sometimes, I find books I liked so much I want to shout and proclaim how good they were and want to thank the authors for writing something that meant something to me.

I found such books this year and wrote short reviews for books on Goodreads and on Reedsy as a way to remember I liked them and what I liked about them. I’m leaving some reviews here and will update this page, as I finish my 21(or more)books for the year. I’ve been dnf-ing books that are frustrating, but I refrain from writing a bad review because enjoying a book is wholly subjective. So every review is a book I could get through. I also didn’t write reviews for some classic or popular books that I knew are amazing before I read them. Most of my reviews are from ebooks or audiobooks since they are all I could salvage from the library which was of course shut for most of this year. Some are also new, recently published books that I picked up on Reedsy discovery.

No spoilers, I promise; only evaluations and recommendations. I am moving away from the 5-star rating system on Goodreads to a 10 point system of my own. The rating is only a measure of how much I enjoyed the book and not a measure of how well the book is written.

Exercises in Style

by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright

Conceptually, this is a one-of-kind book. Reading it is like being caught in a dream loop you can’t get out of — you’re stuck on a bus with a longnecked, plait-hatted chap who argues with a fellow passenger, takes an empty seat, and you spot him later with his friend who gives him advice about a button on his coat — and then you turn the page and return to the beginning of the dream, only this time you’re watching the scene unfold from a new literary angle written in a different style and they keep getting more and more absurd.

The style could be just from a different person’s perspective, or it could be rhyming, there’s even one in pig Latin. Not all the literary styles make sense as standalone stories, some are quite unintelligible until you read them aloud or decipher them structurally. Some are anachronistic (the feminine voice, yeesh!), but considering the original was written over 70 years ago, the out-datedness can be overlooked.

I enjoyed most of them with the caveat that each chapter is really short and I could get through the stranger ones without getting frustrated. There’s 99 of them with additional ones that didn’t make the first print and about a dozen others written by other writers in homage to Queneau and the Oulipo Movement.

I read the English translation of this book by Barbara Wright with a side-along rudimentary reading of the french version Exercices de Style to compare nuances of the styles in both languages. Largely the English translation is a separate Exercises in Style in itself, but the more lyrical ones are beautiful in both languages.

An unexpected plus are the delightful illustrations by Stefan Themerson of human figures exercising in style, that pop out in each chapter title.

I give this 8 points and a must-read for anyone looking to read absurd and experimental writing and not for a plot. Looking to see if there’s a more contemporary take on this book.

Slices of Life

by Richa Gupta

This is a collection of short stories that delves into the many facets of contemporary society in an insightful and candid narrative. The collection is a mixed bag of genres, but the stories are an ode to women, their relationships, and the spaces they hold in society.

While some stories deal with heavier themes of adultery, addiction, thievery, or poverty, the author weaves emotional value in even the most quotidian of circumstances like hiring domestic help or choosing wedding clothes. We are privy to the inner workings of women (and men) navigating their different worlds and relationships; some in a domestic setting, some in corporate spaces, some trying to build careers or romances, and others just striving to get by.

The author paints vivid, detailed pictures and it is easy to immerse oneself in the many worlds as the stories unfold, but there is an abruptness to the stories. Remember, we only get a slice of the character’s life. This works well for most of the stories, pushing one to ponder further about the larger situations that the characters face — the dilemma of choices, the pull of money, the tangle of family, and the unfairness of circumstances.

A story that stands out is Bridal Wear which takes place almost entirely in a bridal shop and delves into the nuances of the ritual of selecting wedding clothes. It’s a humorous story of two women and their behavior when being evaluated against the traditional feminine standard that weddings set on them. Another favorite is Watershed which is a beautiful story celebrating female friendships. Knots is a truly gripping and satisfying whodunnit of the murder of a man and is the only story told in a first-person narrative. A couple of stories seem a bit vague (Future Love Story and Disclosure) but they are all enjoyable reads nonetheless. The beauty of this book lies not in the shock value of each plot but in the author’s ability to portray people as multidimensional characters, in grey; virtues, flaws, and all.

The author has chronicled snippets from the lives of a gamut of (mostly Indian) society. There’s a story here of everyone and for everyone. Recommended if you’re looking for a compelling, grounded, very-real read.

(I received a copy of this book to review on Discovery by Reedsy)

Ghachar Ghochar

by Vivek Shanbag, translated by Srinath Perur

This is a short and deceptively simple read about the inner workings of a family whose lifestyles and family dynamics have changed with a turn in their fortunes. There are some delightful moments of family bonding and nuanced squabbles amidst the unease creeping steadily into the narrative. It takes till the end to really unravel the extent of the ghachar-ghochar (a made-up term that means what it sounds like) the family is involved in, which makes this a great psychological drama.

10 points for the reading experience. Refreshing to read a Bangalore based book, with friendly Kannada words and nostalgia everywhere! I will try to read or listen to the original Kannada version sometime, but this English translation masterfully captures quotidian Indian attitudes to money, social standing, and family hierarchies.

The Art of Noticing

131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration and Discover Joy in the Everyday

by Rob Walker

This book does exactly what it says it does without being a traditional self-help book that would use a similar tagline. This is a book full of prompts to exercise some pent-up detective skills in quotidian life and trigger creative thought. I think of the prompts as “distracted mindfulness” and they’re fun to employ on walks around the city or employ while productive procrastinating. They’re gentle nudges into creative habit-forming with the focus on the assignments and process and not on behavior change.

The book is also a useful inventory of artists and writers who’ve used focused thought experiments in their work, and I’ve added some delightful books to my to-read list from here.

Recommended for someone looking to get out of a creative funk, or fall into quirky obsessions. I would also recommend Rob Walker’s bimonthly newsletter.

10 points. Definitely one to peruse time and again; this one is a keeper.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

by Abbi Waxman, narrated by Emily Rankin

This is a fun novel for a bit of light reading, about the life of a bookish introvert. Nina has a cat, is very organized, works in a book store, is a trivia buff, and likes to be alone until a rain of upheavals in her romantic, family, and professional life threaten to push her out of her bubble of contentment.
The writing is dotted with millennial pop-culture references from the likes of Harry Potter, Pokemon, Friends which are delightful to encounter and I laughed aloud for a lot of these.

The characters are humorous and sarcastic and cute at the same time; and the book does a great job of portraying mental health conditions as not being shortcomings or personal failings. Nina’s self-awareness and self-care habits are charming. The plot does have some weaknesses. It is too cute and convenient at times. The nerd girl tropes that make her relatable to a large section of women seem played out. It’s a fun, life-affirming book with no real takeaways.

8 points for this witty, nerdy chick-lit. I heard the audiobook narrated by Emily Rankin which definitely upped the experience and I would highly recommend it.

The Palace of Illusions

by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni

During my middle and high school years, I unfailingly did an annual re-reading of my prized 12 volume ACK’s Mahabharata book set. I picked up the Palace of Illusions, to appease this inner Mahabharata nerd that’s been dormant for years. This book is much talked about and has been on my to-read list for many years. But I’ve been tentative about mythological fiction and it’s not a genre I fully enjoy.

It’s an interesting exercise — to think of the epic from the perspective of Panchali (calling her Draupadi is a no-no) whose husbands are usually the lead characters and get to speak for her. This book stresses the effect that the actions of all the women; Kunti, Panchali, Kripi, Gandhari have on the men and thus on the outcome of the war. Panchali’s relationships with her family, with Krishna, with each of her husbands, with Kunti, and surprisingly with Karna give a fresh viewpoint to an old story ie she’s as flawed as the others in the tale.

My chief peeve with the book is how Panchali has virtually no growth as a character in 50+ years of life. She gets to be headstrong and a rebel and a misfit, but all the story seems to do is to rationalize how she’s a victim. She’s bitter and regretful of everything throughout the book. I suppose it’s hard to really give her full control of her fate given the confines of the original epic, but some plot points are off. The saving grace is the development of her relationship with Krishna.
The author isn’t rewriting the Mahabharata so there’s a lot of foreshadowing in the book which I quite enjoyed, but this narrative style might be cumbersome to someone who doesn’t know all of the original stories

7 points for this satisfactory one-time read.

A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman, narrated by George Newbern

This is a story about a straightforward man with black-and-white opinions about everything around him and of himself who finds it very hard to navigate life without his wife (who is basically sunshine). He discovers, with the help of a motley crew of neighbors, reporters, cats et al, that he can in fact, like other people and warms up to the niceness/craziness of his community.

While the story itself isn’t unheard of, the narrative in its grumpy old man voice is fresh and funny and handles heavier themes of loneliness, grief, aging, and even suicide with ease.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by George Newbern. An extra star for the audio experience.

Excuse Me

by Liana Finck

I’ve had this book (that I got from the library) with me for almost t̶w̶o̶ ̶ now six months and at first, I’d bookmarked specific pages that I loved. Now the book is so full of bookmarks, I’m gonna have to buy one for myself. This book is a keeper, to peruse and ponder at your leisure. The Notes to Self and the Strangeness, Shyness, Sadness sections are esp insightful. Cheers to Liana Finck for working out observations and questions and anxieties of life into this wonderful collection. 10 points for this witty, funny, quirky graphic novel

Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir

by Liana Finck

I picked up Passing from Human as I enjoy Liana Finck’s pithy, observational cartoons, and her knack of working out her life through drawings and that is just what she does in this book. It’s an artist’s search for her lost shadow. What that shadow represents isn’t always clear — Anxieties? Inspiration? Regret?

It’s a memoir of sorts, heavy with magical realism and biblical tales. It starts and restarts, assisting the artist’s search, riddling the book with self-doubt. It becomes at once both poignant and frustrating.

It’s an illustrated diary of a creative misfit Leola, of her childhood, of her parents, of inherited otherness, of truly terrible romances and of loss and discovery of the self. But as relatable as the character is, the overall vagueness of the narrative is a challenge to get through.

8 points for this. Looking forward to Liana Finck’s new(ish) collection of comics titled Excuse Me, and her other works.

In 1993, just as I turned three, my parents got our house repainted. That was also the year I discovered crayons.

The living rooms walls, devoid of all the picture frames and paintings that previously hung from them, gleamed white, stark and enticing.

My coloring adventures, which until then had been restricted to paper and my coloring books suddenly had a big, clean canvas, and as my parents took the neighbors around for a tour of the house, I grabbed my coloring set and zoomed around the room leaving a straight blue line on the wall, three feet from the ground.

II

One of the oldest pieces of furniture in the house was a simple, galvanized steel, storage box with copper rivets. It contained things we didn’t need regularly around the house — excess cutlery, wrapping paper, and ribbons, fruit baskets and clocks that could be gifted, unused diaries, old gadgets and broken toys. My mum called it Pandora’s box, because my sister and I would unleash something evil and break something from it every time it was opened, so it was mostly kept shut.

By age six, when I could no longer draw boats and planes on walls without getting into trouble for it, this box became my new blank canvas to write on. Hidden in plain sight in a corner of the playroom, topped high with mattresses, my pencil-on-steel, palimpsest-like writing on the front and side surface of the box was visible only when you looked from up close. It started as something to play with and became a record of my early years. I would sit on the floor in front of it and write, draw and erase as I pleased.

My name written, again and again, over ten years, in various stages of handwritings and styles, quotes from favorite books, more boat and plane drawings, random words spelled correctly or incorrectly, lists of names of my friends, complaints about squabbles with my sister over her keeping our bedroom lights on while she read, dates and events meant to be remembered forever that I can’t make sense of anymore.

III

I outgrew the box in high school since my scribbles now needed better organization and I had more ergonomic tools like a bulletin board and journals at my disposal. In architecture school, I had a tendency to include some sort of large chalkboard wall or dry erase wall as a free-play design element whenever I could.

Over the years, I also seem to have developed a penchant for all graffiti. Not just for the intended artsy kind, but also the public property defacing kind, like doodles on classroom desks or on the back seats of buses or movie posters, stuck on top of each other on walls that are typical in Indian cities.

For now, I’m down to dry erase boards doodles and post-it note collages and chalkboard wallpaper, but I often think back to my Pandora’s box and glance it from time to time trying to decipher the seemingly random writings and the kid who wrote them. That is my way of thinking with things.

I have always been secretly envious of people who can think in black and white. Cats or dogs?Mountains or the beach? Summer or winter? When facing a decision, whether simple or lifechanging, pat comes the reply — and they have the pet they need or booked the vacation of choice. I, on the other hand, am a grey thinker, the kind who looks for a loophole, the kind that wants it all, or sometimes wants neither.

Flighty behavior like this is particularly cumbersome in an Indian household. It is customary to be asked a beverage choice when you enter one. Your answer depends on a number of factors, the time of day, how hot it is outside, and how long you intend to stay. It’s easy if it’s a particularly hot afternoon — you can pick between water, juice, buttermilk, or a “cold drink”. But on a regular day in Bangalore, when the weather is perfect, the sticky dilemma is to choose between a bitter-sweet filter coffee or a soothing cup of sweet milk Masala Tea.

My parents caught my beverage bewilderment early and somehow stuck me into their personal coffee-in-the-morning, tea-in-the-evening routine for a few years. And out of this grew my own personal ritual while in college, and at work.

Indian filter coffee has it’s unique method of preparation. The device made of stainless steel, uses two cylindrical compartments, one placed on top of the other, and a separate disc with a stem handle, and a lid. The desired amount of coffee powder is poured into the upper compartment, which has tiny holes on the bottom, the disc is placed on top of this, and hot water is poured ontop of this. It takes about twenty minutes for this potent decoction to drip into the lower compartment, which is then mixed with milk and sugar. My mother would take extra care to make sure my cup had extra sugar in it. It was this divine fragrance that my family would wake up to every morning, with the everyone’s daily news, conversations, and plans. My evening ritual however, became a more personal one. I’d pull out my grandfather's ancient cloth easy chair, play old Hindi songs, and watch the sunset over the city from our twelfth-floor balcony, while the breeze cooled down my blue mug of Lipton’s finest honey lemon tea.

Morning coffee and evening tea. Monochrome events in a day full of grey choices. Rituals that can be performed anywhere in the world. Or so i thought

New York and new choices. I spent my first few weeks deciphering the types of coffee you get at Starbucks and Joe’s, trying to find my personal favorites. Mocha. Espresso. Cappuccino. I’ve tried and rejected them all. New Yorkers are grumpy without their morning cuppa, but I was definitely extra grumpy with mine. Tea was all wrong too. The single large window in my tiny 16th-floor room gave me a perfect view of the rising sun but was no use to my evening ritual.

Nothing was right, or perhaps nothing can be right when you’re a little homesick.

I had to find a loophole, and I ordered a perfect, little, steel, coffee filter for my caffeine fix. It sat there for a few days before I allowed myself to use it. Maybe you make a choice, by...making the choice. I wake up, lovingly make myself a hot cup of perfection, pull up the blinds, and welcome the sun for a new day.

In a reversal of sorts, I find my evening ritual turned into a more public affair. My heart is drenched in Maharaja-and-Samurai blended tea from Teavana with a dash of ginger, steeped to perfection. Not by myself on a breezy balcony, but in the stuffy basement communal area, of my dorm building, with about 30 other students doing their work, chattering away, or simply plonked on the couch in front of the TV, general merriment in the air et al.

Morning coffee and evening tea. Monochrome events in a day full of grey choices.

Perhaps the key to settling into a new place is just concocting new rituals.

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Found a new book in the shelf today. Well, it’s not brand new, but it’s new because it is previously unseen, unopened and unread by me. It’s a paperback version of RK Narayan’s ‘The Financial Expert’. The cover and publications page are missing, so I cannot ascertain the exact year of printing, but there is a marking from a reading room in Vijayanagar Colony registered in 1962, I’m assuming it is at least that old.

I asked Pa about the book. He and Ma and Padma have all read it. I like to think it belonged to Appa, and it went from him to his son, his daughter in law, daughter, his grandson (my elder cousin K is a reader), and now to a granddaughter, and each time, every one of them leaves something in it, something intangible, that the book absorbs and passes on to me as collective memory of some sort.

Mangayya’s story is beyond mere words in these yellow pages, there is an added experience, a remembrance that no other copy of The Financial Expert can give me.

A new book though, has the lure of being a canvas to start afresh, and leave my thought to the next reader. But I’m also hugely apprehensive of giving books to people who many not appreciate it, almost as if their indifference depreciates the mana it has soaked in.

One flighty life goal is to be old and be some sort of keeper of books (librarian?) with mind-reading powers to screen people coming to the chamber of books (library?) and chase away the non-readers and suggest books to bright little reader kids.

This will be a good occupation, a book suggester. I will add it to my list right alongside custom date idea suggester, and ink pen tester, but I daydream and I digress.

I will resume reading my book now.

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I’d borrowed N’s binoculars for the workshop a few weeks ago, and I still have them. They’re slightly off; the left and right don’t focus on the same object and I have to squint to see clearly. But they were better than G’s pair which seem to have inherited his languishing eyesight and so I took those, and woah, I can make mean jokes.

The haziness seems to go away if close one eye, effectively downgrading it to a unicular? ocular?

It’s amazing what they show me though! People-watching in Blore city is pretty entertaining, and most of all when the watching is being done from twelve stories up, while the people are grounded. Invading someone else’s personal space without having anyone even close to yours. Win!

I can see exactly who is buying what clothes from the makeshift road side stall. And there’s a man quarreling with an auto-guy directly opposite a building where a single fellow is working late hours in the reliance office on the ground floor. They don’t see each other, they don’t see me, I see them. I can the white Maruti van which is responsible for causing the traffic congestion that extends for miles down the main road. I know it takes the Ajja to walk half the distance around the park in the time it takes the running girl to finish a full lap. I see the L board maruti 800 trying to make a reverse in front of the rubble that was the house belonging to Nilekani’s family. It’s time for Namaz and a guy has come out onto a tiny cutout terrace space to pray, while the muezzin calls play in the distance. I can see these ladies walking towards the vegetable vendors, whoops they’re looking right at me binocular-ing at them. Should I slither back in? Nope. I’m a writer today. I make observations, and the people are extraordinary, with their everydayness. I possess my spirit and the spirit of these strangers, and I will remain eager and watch on. And there, my curiosity has been of use today, I spotted a new xerox shop!

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I’m in the midst of a technological crisis. I have the Electronic Jinx.

It all started with us discussing plans of acquiring a gaadi. We’d zeroed in on the item, a thing of beauty, a yellow vespa which would whisk me away from main roads into gallis cutting down my stuckintraffic-ness and reliance on baralla-autos and jaagailla-buses; daydreams cut in short when my other gadgets caught wind of these plans, and collectively decided to hamper the arrival of a new item in my life.

I should have seen the signs when the printer refused to print. I attributed the misalignment to a moving mishap, or maybe it was echoing my own oldhome-sickness and was just missing its old spot on my old desk in the old house and the printing error was a not-so-silent protest to move back.

Next was my phone Rex, the only loyal one that lasted me 2 and half years unlike the other kamchors who gave up within a year. Rex promptly went into an inactive sim state, right after I got off the phone telling a friend about my vespa. Et tu, Rex?

The others have followed in quick succession. The brand-new-microwave doesn’t brand new microwave and my earphones went kaput.

How do I finish writing this now. My computer is acting up.

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The first time I took the train to Metropolitan Avenue to get to the studio, it was raining. It was mid-afternoon, and I was already running late, and Mike hadn’t called, which made it worse that I was late. I had just stepped out of the G and opened my umbrella (the yellow one not the black, so as to cut through the clouds floating above my head that day.) I looked around to orient myself and was pulling my phone out of my jacket pocket to navigate this unfamiliar part of Brooklyn when I realized where I was.

One evening in December 2004, Pa brought an old white Maruti to take us to visit Ajja (a month before Ajja would die,) for our maroon car was still in Mumbai. Ma was disapproving of the thing, and sure enough, the car broke down before we could get to Isro. There we were, in the rain, stuck in the middle of Kadirenahalli Cross with all the trucks and the overpass and the very narrow dusty sidewalks, a place I know like the back of my hand, a time stuck in my memory, and where that afternoon, the G train had brought me.

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Homecoming.

A thing happened last Wednesday, one of those things that have left me convinced that time/life isn’t linear. A lot of things happened to me last Wednesday; I will tell you all of them.
I was waiting all day for it to be 5.15 so I could attend a talk. But come 5.15, I was so engrossed with work I was late again.
I was thinking about my black cap while I put it on in the house. It’s been everywhere with me the last two winters, and I’m always surprised I haven’t lost it.

I lost it later that day. It was windy, and I only realized it was gone when I needed it on the walk back home from the place. I‘m sorry I lost it. I was distracted by a new friend, a journalist with messy, wavy hair and we had to exchange numbers before we parted. I like girls with messy, wavy hair. They remind me of me, and maybe that’s comfortable. I did look for it, though, my black cap, but instead, I found a nostalgia store. I like anything I find in Brooklyn a lot more than the city nowadays. It’s true, but it seems like a betrayal. I was saying this about the LES not long ago.

He announced that the store would close in five minutes just as I walked in. I walked around quickly taking in the old furniture, beautiful mirrors, the one-dollar jewelry, doorknobs, stacks of records I was aching to go through, and decided that I like the heap of silver spoons from everywhere the best. There was a table full of photographs of people I don’t know, and it was awkward to look at them. Making memories, catching memories. I took a photo of the photos as best as my haunted phone would let me. I made and caught a memory of me invading other people’s forgotten memories. Isn’t that what we’re all doing anyway.

I have a green metro card and I think it’s pretty cool because everyone else usually has the yellow card and I always feel a rush of affection combined with a wave of possessive anger toward anyone I see on the train with a green one because I imagine they have a story for how they got it, but I also really hate that they have it.

I have one green metro card and two stories.

My first acquisition of the card occurred months ago when the machine swallowed my regular yellow card. After much anger and tears and incoherent complaints to the guy at the counter, I got an envelope to send to the authorities for a refund. I had it for months because where I come from, giving up on authorities is second nature. I eventually posted it and promptly got a new one in the mail. Not only was this my refund, but this card was also green, the first of its kind I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t find the card on Wednesday when I was leaving the house thinking about my cap. I hadn’t seen it since that frightful morning with C.

On my walk back home, from the place where I met the wavy-haired journalist and the junk store, I turned the corner onto Franklin and there, in the middle of the sidewalk, late in the night, a week after I’d lost it, three blocks from home, was my green metro card.

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I find myself becoming the lies I project. Is this how people find purpose?

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Where have we crossed to, what have we seen?

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Sunlight is a ghost cause baby, it’s cold outside.

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Hands.

My grandma passed away last year, and I wasn’t there. She was my last surviving grandparent and the only one to see me into adulthood. I knew the last time I was seeing her would be the last time I was seeing her; she’d been frail for very long. The last I remember is her looking at me from the living room, a mirror, while I put my shoes on, my hand on the low wall in Babu mama’s porch and hers holding a chair for support — Our gazes fixed on each other, unsmiling, observing, knowing that this is where we would part.
She was a voice after that. Calls I could make to her were few and far between for and useless, for a real conversation with her was difficult. She couldn’t hear me on her mobilo, and I’m guilty of not being an enthusiastic phone person, cause I have inherited part of her deafness. The occasional sound of her voice saying happy birthday, happy Diwali, or happy Ugadi, was all I needed and all I got.

I have a hard time dealing with death.

I’m sure everyone does, but I’m the one likely to bring it up. I always point out the absence of people who should have been in the room, ghosts of people of the past who could just be fiction now.

I haven’t come to terms with any deaths in my family, most of all that of my kid cousin, Nitin, who in an unexpected twist is the one who gets to live the fantasy of never growing up. My dreams often involve watching cartoons with a happy, curly-haired, big dimpled, and very alive boy of ten. (He’s ten in my head cause that’s how I remember him best but is 17 as a ghost.) I’m mad at him, and at Manasa Akka cause they made the grown-ups cry.
When I was younger, I would think of every person in the family (and my favorite friends) while falling asleep and place a protective bubble around them in my mind, and that would keep them safe.

This habit stopped as I grew older, and my dreams and nightly thoughts were riddled with stresses, and I was turning into a cynic, and didn’t remember to show I cared.

I blame myself for forgetting to protect everyone every single day. The rational side of me knows that all people die, but my shield weakened when I didn’t think of them, and my heart hurts with the guilt of having forgotten to love, of being unable to show affection, and of not showing enough when I should have.
But I’m still that way.

I watched the movie, The Time Machine thinking it was the remake of the HG Wells novel. It wasn’t a great movie overall but the first few minutes made me cry. I keep convincing myself that perhaps in an alternate universe, things are different. Tin is around forever, and we have a happy close cousin-y relationship sharing music and books and movies and games and life advice, and watching everyone else get married until it’s probably my turn.

This movie is my undoing and I despise it thoroughly.

The protagonist is a scientist whose fiancee is killed shortly after he gives her a ring in a park. He builds a time machine and after a few hard years is successful. He goes back to the day she died, and she’s just as beautiful and happy and she’s alive, and he doesn’t take her to the park to propose, and she’s still alive and I’m crying because he’s so happy, and then a carriage runs her over. Repeated attempts to alter the timeline have the same results, and he’s left more heartbroken than the beginning.

I’m selfish enough to admit to myself that I was lucky to have been away from home last year, while my family witnessed not only my grandma’s passing but also that of my favorite uncle. I was devastated being away but would have weirded out there if I had to face reality and also be around everyone else. From where I am, this story is fiction. I haven’t been to Bangalore since it happened, I think I’m avoiding going there. In the most conscious parts of my memory, he’s alive, tending to his garden, making cat noises, remembering to bring out sweets when I come to visit; kind, funny, patient Subhanu mama, one of maybe three grown-ups other than my parents I‘m willing to have a real conversation with.

My parents came to see me, in the depths of the darkness that swallowed me in this strange land. They told me stories of togetherness, and family, and warmth, and love, and kindness, and I listened curiously, trying to remember what it felt like to live these stories.

I have to relearn.

I have inherited more than my Grandma’s deafness. My mum brought me two pairs of her gloves, one plain brown and one gray with red embroidery. I have no real memory of her wearing either, but the gray one has a tear between the thumb and index and seems friendlier, so I wore it this winter.
I remember her hands when I put them on. And I try to remember to care.

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Muddling through life and its vicissitudes.