What are words worth?

The slices pop up from the toaster with a ding! My tentative fingers pick them up, one at a time, and drop them on the plate before the heat signal can travel from my skin to my brain. They need to cool, just a bit, just enough to acquire a hardness that won't give when the butter is spread over the surface. Golden, salty butter. Kept out of the fridge just long enough for the knife to cut through the smooth yet firm rectangle. I move the knife horizontally across the fat brick of butter, gathering a thin layer that curls over the finely serrated blade to form a small ribbed cylinder, like the ones in the silver dishes in fancy hotels. Impressed by my unexpected artistry, I place it carefully on a slice and watch as it yields to the warmth, its butteriness oozing slowly over the golden brown surface, sinking into the pores. I quickly spread the rest, realizing that I haven't waited long enough and that the butter will soon disappear into the bread, visible only as a dull shi...

Last year when I met a dear school mate after close to three decades, she remarked that just before she reached the café of our assignment, she encountered two instances that seemed to strongly resonate—in a prescient way—with our long association. “I was browsing the CD rack at the book store next door, and I spotted a collection of Tamil songs!” This was surprising why? Because this was a tiny store in the preppy part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I am one of the few Tamil-speaking friends. “And then a little while later my eye fell on this mathematics book, in the popular non-fiction section.” The reason for remarking on this? My father was a mathematics professor, and this was a subject she had always connected with me (although I have little to do with it and even less affinity for it!). “Everything seemed to be telling me I was going to meet you!” … We all get these earworm infestations from time to time, right? A song worms its way into our head and refuses to f...

Call it the market, call it the Hallmark effect, but there's no denying that every year around this time something gets into the air. No amount of cynicism--or realism--has been able to take away that sense of specialness brought on by images of snow-laden fir trees and green-and-red ribbons and gingerbread and rich plum cake. No matter that I live in a climate where there is neither snow nor fir tree and nicely laced eggnog is hard to come by. And no matter what my postcolonial consciousness knows about the constructed nature of history and the mediated nature of contemporary culture. Come December, the strains of The Nutcracker and Jim Reeves' Christmas carols courtesy YouTube mingle in my home with the evening telecasts of the Marghazhi kutcheris  from Chennai. It's been a few years since we pulled down our little artificial tree and the handmade ornaments made when the kids were in preschool and kindergarten, sit with it in the loft, packed away in tissue paper, al...

I woke this morning filled with a sense of un-rightness. My alarm had gone off, as it has been obsessively programmed to do, at 5:15 a.m., and, by some lapse of habit, I had hit the snooze button and fallen back to sleep, to awake at the distinctly un-virtuous hour of 7! The sun was already pretty high over the horizon, my husband had done the laundry (line-drying and all), my daughter had made the coffee (authentic South-Indian filter) and left for her practice session, and I…, well I had let a good part of the morning slip-slide away (soundtrack: S&;G song here )! And the un-rightness also stemmed from this persistent sense that I had “stuff to do”, and that time was running out. But when I think about it, I realize that it’s a sense that dogs me pretty much all the time. I suspect it is a burden that pretty much all professionals carry unless you are in one of those fields where it is literally impossible to carry your work home or in your head—such as a bricklayer or...

It is the morning after several nights in a row. Nine nights, to be precise. The gods are carefully divested of their crowns and garlands, their long black tresses tied back with wispy cotton threads, packed into recycled plastic bags and put away in the big black trunk that holds the history of inter-continental crossings and multiple house-movings. The living room reclaims its position as marginal to the life of the household--so maybe it is more correctly named the "(with)drawing room" (we don't really live there, do we?)--after having served these ten days as a site of communing with friends and family from a variety of circles, many of whom we see only once or twice a year. But there's a temporary void beneath the window where the steps stood, making space for the descent of the gods from the storage area off our terrace to the level of our everyday. It will take a couple of days before the mundane reasserts itself and the memory of green and blue-tinged bodie...