Creations@08

This one is about loss, grief, and what it quietly teaches you. I lost my nani around four months ago, the first close and deeply personal loss I have ever experienced. People often say that no amount of preparedness can make loss easier. In my case, there wasn’t even the illusion of preparation. One day everything was fine and flourishing, and the next day it just… wasn’t. Grief knocked on my door absolutely unannounced. Perhaps it came when I was already at my lowest, silently grieving and fighting battles I had already lost count of. Loss has a strange way of choosing its moments… rarely when you are ready, almost always when you are already tired. But even before this grief could fully reach me, something else was waiting to surprise me. For her cremation and the prayer meet, I saw people arrive from different places, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of my mother, my aunts, and even my father. People who had known her through fragments of life, through occasional visits or co...

I had always heard that when you lose weight, the world treats you differently… suddenly you are seen, you exist, as if your body had finally earned the right to occupy space. I thought it was exaggerated - one of those dramatic before–after narratives people love telling. Lose weight and the world rearranges itself around you. Doors open easier. Smiles arrive faster. Conversations linger longer. I never believed it. Until it happened to me. I have always been overweight. An outlier by every social metric - in school classrooms, college corridors, group photographs where everyone else fit neatly into what beauty was supposed to look like. I was never the stereotypically beautiful structure. Neither slim nor tall. Not the aesthetic society rewards with effortless validation. Just visibly different. So I did what many of us do when we are told, silently and repeatedly, that we are “too much” in the wrong ways - I compensated. I ensured I was good at everything else - Anchoring. Dancing. ...

There is something strangely heavy about the sentence - Table for one, please! It sounds simple, almost ordinary, yet each time I walk into a restaurant or a bar and speak those words, it feels like revealing something small and personal about myself to a stranger. A gentle confession disguised as a request. Each time, I notice it - that almost imperceptible pause, the flicker of surprise crossing their face, the brief rearrangement of expression that hovers somewhere between curiosity and concern, sometimes something that resembles sympathy. It is as if the person standing across wonders - Alone? No friends, no partner, no family, no laughter waiting to fill the space? The question is never spoken, yet it settles in the space between us and lingers like an unfinished sentence. Perhaps they are accustomed to tables crowded with conversation : friends leaning toward each other mid-story, couples lost in soft exchanges, families negotiating menus and memories, laughter spilling loudly en...