Category: Essay
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What the Lens Sees
Two hundred and twenty-four professional photos arrive at eleven at night. I pick twenty. None of them, finally, for the woman walking between rooms, mid-thought.
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The Archive Remembers
A question to an AI about Generative Engine Optimization became a week of restructuring seventeen years of my archive, and a night of meeting the selves I used to be.
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Whose Tongues Come First
A ParentSquare notification arrives in Tamil and the dropdown to switch is buried four screens down. An essay on mother tongue, colonial inheritance, and the joy of learning Korean in my fifties.
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Three Different Mothers
Three daughters posted Mother’s Day tributes online — a scrapbook, a photo grid, a music video. Each one a different mother. An essay on being seen.
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No Footnote Required
Nobody I know is redefining anything. They’re wearing what they’ve always wanted to wear. The kurta at the grocery store isn’t a statement. It’s Tuesday.
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The Cheapest Infrastructure
I sat down to fix a broken connection. Two hours later I was three clicks away from buying a $10 domain I did not need. On the difference between solving a problem and solving the problem the solution created.
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The Dropdown
The intake form asks me to select “Asian.” Tamil is a language, not a continent. A coastline. The smell of filter kaapi at five in the morning. None of that fits in a dropdown.
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It’s Here. My Book.
Some of you have been waiting for this. Some of you didn’t know it was coming. Either way, I’m glad you’re here to read this. For a long time, the essays that make up this book lived in different corners of the internet — on Women’s Web, on Mutha Magazine, on Adoptive Families, and mostly…
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Mother. Daughter. Mother.
“Skipping time” Amma calls out to my prepubescent youngest child who is upstairs talking to a friend over Facetime. I am in the kitchen doing dishes, amused by the interaction. I hear the sound of jumping upstairs as Laddu counts and jumps a hundred times. She is out of breath but rushes proudly to her…
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Essay: Arranged Marriage
This essay appeared in Centered: The magazine of personal stories in 2019. It is an excerpt from my work in progress memoir. Standing in the living room where I rented a room in Jeevan Bima Nagar in Bangalore, I tried to process what was happening. My father declared, “We are coming this weekend.” What is the hurry? I wanted…