dear darling

Not everyone who wears grey is you.

I have walked past grey walls,

grey skies, grey strangers —

and felt nothing.

dear body

Dear body

You are what I got

You have done a lot

Taken care of me

Bear with me

I am learning to 

love you back

Doddappa

 Doddappa

Wincing in pain
from a cancer that had eaten his innards,
Doddappa noticed I had no watch.

I haven't given you anything, he said —
forgetting the vow he took
to raise my father,
a child born posthumously.

A commitment to devote to a family
he inherited at sixteen.
From poverty to two PhDs,
a bachelor running a family —
you gave your all.

We sat in silence,
me holding his hand,
him struggling to sit,
comforting words locked in me.

He was soon gone

Poem Writing Prompt of the day - Write about something you almost said - but didn't.

Mine

 Mine

No matter what happens,
I still love you.
I still respect you.

What happened?
I needed your help —
I couldn't do without it —
and that placed weight in your hands,
pressed pressure into friendship,
and now you hate me.

No matter what,
I love you.
I am grateful for you.
This is my truth.

Believe what you need to.
My truth is mine.
My love is mine —
all mine.

Nothing in the world belongs to me
but my love.

Dear Darling, Like a whirlpool

 Like a whirlpool

in a peaceful river —
people's stories, their whispers
can churn any still connection.

And through this
I found the transient nature of love.

You can love someone
from the depths of your heart.
But if their glasses are clouded,
they will see only
what they want to see.

Dear Darling, what the eyes hold...

 What the Eyes Hold

The sun shone bright —
I closed my eyes.
There you were,
resplendent
in the dark.

dear darling, if I look...

If I look, I will find someone —
no doubt about it.

But how will anyone
love me
like you have loved me?
How will anyone love me
Like you have loved me?

Someone will look at you
with loving eyes —
Someone, surely, will.

But alas —
you will never know
how you appear
in mine.

Only almost rich!

You have everything — a loving family, admirers who orbit you, 

a kind heart, a handsome face, 

people who look up to you like you are something worth becoming.

You have everything. You are rich. Well, almost.

There is one thing you don't have.

You will never know how you appear to my eyes —

 and that, that is mine to keep. 

A gem I tuck into the soft of my heart, into the quiet of my eyes, 

held where no one can ask for it and nothing can take it.

There —

in all your richness, surrounded by everything a life can hold —

alas, you are only almost rich.

- Dee

 I cannot say when I fell in love with you —

was it that first time, from the big window near the steps,

the light falling just so,

and you, standing there,

not knowing you were being seen?

When our eyes met,

did you feel it too —

that small arrested moment,

the world pausing

mid-breath,

something unnamed

passing between us

like weather?

Or was it the slow accumulation of days — 

the passing, the passing, the passing by, 

until you were no longer 

someone I saw but someone I carried?

You are in my essence now. 

Every other man feels paraya to me — foreign, elsewhere, not-you — and you are mine, I know it, the way the body knows its own wound,

but you are far. So far that mine is just a word I hold in an empty hand.

The Year of Spinning

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't announce itself. It settles in quietly, and by the time you name it, it has already been living in your bones for months.

Last year was that kind of year for me.

I knew I was spinning. That's the strange thing about it — I wasn't unaware. I could see myself from a slight distance, watching the days blur, feeling the creative aliveness drain out of me in slow, steady increments. I just couldn't stop it.

I am a drama teacher — eighteen years at MAIS in Bangalore — and the theatre has always been where I feel most myself. But last year, even that felt far away. I had a play to write, and the blankness was real. I would sit with a story, feel the edges of something, and then watch it dissolve. I bought books. I read them. I genuinely believed I could do it. And still the writing stumped me in ways it never had before. I drew blank after blank.

And yet, somehow, the work got done. I wrote Urubhangam — fusing the Sanskrit classic with the Trojan Women, Gandhari walking into that grief-soaked stage — and then I wrote The Math Curse, and four other plays on mathematics. The ideas were real. The work was real. But the internal experience of making it felt like wading through something thick and resistive the entire time.

I also volunteer at Choe Khor Sum Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist study and practice centre here in Bengaluru, and that kept going too — courses, communications, fundraising, all of it. From the outside, I imagine it looked fine. From the inside, I barely recognised myself.

Add to this my brother's wedding, a sister's milestone birthday...

Meanwhile, life kept arriving in its unscheduled way. Pappa's health. Hospital visits. The particular weight of watching a parent need more care than before, and carrying that worry mostly alone. I was cooking for myself on days when cooking felt like climbing a hill. I had stopped exercising. My weight climbed sixteen kilograms. Medications were missed. Therapy was on hold. I had, without quite meaning to, removed all the scaffolding that helps me function — and then wondered why I felt like I was falling. Even though I was in denial

I used to think of that kind of year as failure. I said that word to myself, quietly, many times - I had failed. I said it from the beginning of the year, the middle and before the end even came, even though outwardly i was rendering an avatar of confidence.

But sitting here now, I'm not sure that's the right word for what happened. I think the more honest word is: I was overwhelmed, creatively drained, and I was doing it without enough support, and eventually the body and mind find ways to show you what you have been ignoring.

The turning came slowly, as these things do. Back to therapy. Back to medication. A small but deliberate shift in how I eat — more protein at breakfast, which sounds unremarkable but felt, in practice, like the first act of genuine self-care in a long time. Pappa now has round-the-clock nursing support, which has lifted a background anxiety I didn't fully realise I was carrying every single day.

I am not at the end of this. But I am somewhere different from where I was.

I am writing this because I think it matters to say it plainly: you can produce real, substantial work and still be unwell. You can show up for everyone else and be quietly disappearing. The scaffolding — therapy, medication, sleep, food, movement, the people who hold you — it isn't optional. It is the ground you stand on.

Getting back to it is not a failure. It is just the work of being human, which is never quite finished.

— Dee

I am still here

There are wounds that don't bleed where people can see them. Mine lives in my throat, in my hands, in the way I hesitate before I walk into a room now, wondering who has already decided what I am.

Last year broke something in me. Not because I failed - though there were days I felt like I did - but because I was broken deliberately, by someone who had the power to build me up and chose instead to take me apart.

It started quietly, the way these things do. A difficult year. It was not my best year, it was a year where i was primarily, tired. I was struggling, and I knew it. I said so. And every time I said so, I was mocked. Oh, you're complaining again. As if naming pain is weakness. As if asking for help is an accusation.

Instead, someone decided my struggle was an opportunity. Complaints were collected about me - gathered quietly, from peers, like evidence being built for a case that had already reached its verdict. I was tried without knowing I was on trial. My name was used as a punchline, a piñata. 

My competence was questioned, loudly, in ways designed to make others doubt me too. Does she even know what she's doing? Is she even good? 

When people are vitriolic and uncouth repeatedly, it sinks into your heart. You don't notice it happening. You just wake up one day and find that their voice has moved in, and it speaks in the first person now.

I lost people I thought were safe. I lost the ear of people I trusted. I lost - for a while - my own voice, because everywhere I turned, my expression was taken and twisted. Even my private spaces stopped feeling private. Even grief became gossip.

And then I lost something harder to name: the easy, unselfconscious faith I used to have in myself as a teacher.

I raised my voice at the children last year. I am not proud of that. But I understand it now for what it was - not cruelty, not incompetence, but a person running on empty who had been refused every form of refuelling - by this person and leadership.

I realized soon that this person wanted what I was doing. This person wanted to cut me off. 

An apology came, eventually. Partial. Official. Enough to close a file, not enough to name what was actually done. No apology for the peers turned. No apology for the confidence stolen. No apology for almost making people believe the story she told about me.

I am still angry. I want to say that clearly, without shame. Anger is the appropriate response to injustice. What this person did was a violation, underhanded, bullying, and very uncouth. It means I know what happened was wrong. It means I haven't accepted the verdict. I just accepted the partial apology... on paper.

And I am still here.

That is my protest. That I showed up. That I am showing up again. That somewhere underneath the fear and the exhaustion and the doubt she seeded about me, I know who I am. I know what my best work looks like. I have seen it in students' faces. I have heard it said aloud by people with no reason to lie.

She didn't apologize for nearly ruining my life. Maybe she never will.

But my life is not ruined. It is dented, and grieving, and learning to trust itself again.

And that, in the end, is more than she bargained for.