Naatil Evideya?

Is there a wrong answer to the mandatory question 'Naatil evideya?' (where in Kerala are you from) that one Malayali asks another Malayali when they run into each for the first time, in another part of the country? If you're from Trivandrum or born and brought up there, like I am, you may know what I'm...

How to wash dirty linen in public

Getting over with the disclaimer/Previously on the blog...: Pushparajyam Synoptics has been dead since 2016. 2016 was also the year I got married. But no, you nosey fucker. That's not why I stopped writing. 2016 was also the year I started writing at work which made me want to save up all my remaining brain...

Music and Memory Wormholes

Over the past few years, my fondness for the absence of music grew quite deeper than I anticipated. I do listen to most things that fall behind, between, and beyond Bohemian Rhapsody and My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard. But it's mostly a background process even when there is nothing running in the foreground. Somehow,...

Conversations in the Car

When you belong to a family that keeps road-tripping together all the time (even if it is to the nearby Jockey store), some of the insightful conversations that bring us closer happen in the car. And sometimes, the silent breaks are just as unifying. The Naked Ape The other day, while navigating through Karamana, I...

GOaT

I like goats. I like clicking pictures. I like clicking pictures of goats. Okay. A tale of 2 goats on the ghats of Ganges

Good Old Days

Do you remember the good old days when young(er) adults used to roll their eyes at unsolicited advice? Like when adult-er adults used to remind them that they’re in their twenties or even worse, late twenties, and that they should probably get married, and then went on to give well-intended career tips and pointers. Apparently not,...

Window Creeps, John Pereira, and Gingi

I’ve always been the kind of creep who would stand silently and patiently outside your window, until you look up from the novel you’ve been reading, the dishes you’ve been doing or the horror movie you’ve been watching, so that I can stare blankly at you; an expression I practised and mastered on long evenings when...

If You’re Appi and You Know It…

There comes a time in almost every Trivandrum kid’s childhood when we do a double take mentally, physically and spiritually as we get adorably addressed as ‘Appi’ for the very first time in our lives. For most of us it will be our first tryst with the concept of duality and the sheer force with...

28

My 28 year old self wants to thwack my 26 year old self for not paying attention when her wiser friends were exchanging bhindi recipes because when you’re far away from home, there are only so many days you can survive by sniffing scraped-clean beef pickle jars or on Kurkure Corn Puffs. On other days,...

Hospitals, Fossils and Meals

Amma is quite the social beetle. Her students love her. Local cats come to visit her with their kittens or cronies when she returns home after long trips. Random babies at railway stations leap at her with their outstretched flabby baby arms. The other day we found an extra Parippu Vada in a takeaway parcel...