Siddharth Kumar

We have all seen the images of the infant macaque in a Japanese zoo, wandering hesitantly toward the others, only to be pushed away again and again.

It approaches with the hope that this attempt will be the final one, that it will find someone who will love it, and with the fear that it may never be found or accepted. Each time, the answer is refusal, indifference, or a small act of violence. The name ‘Punch’ seems to land with the weight of a reality it is still grappling with.

Scientists caution us against anthropomorphism, against the projection of human feeling onto animal behaviour. But as humans, we will always project our innate desire, in every living being, to be loved and chosen.

In recent years, we have trained ourselves to use a vocabulary that advocates self-sufficiency as a moral aspiration. It suggests that we should be whole within ourselves, not seek validation, and let go of the desire to be chosen. The contemporary self-help archive is full of this promise that a sufficiently integrated interior life will make the desire for selection unnecessary.

But we are wired to be desired, and our nervous system is not persuaded by external affirmations. When we choose someone, we place them in our world and adjust our patterns of existence to make space for them in ours. To be chosen is to be granted a temporary amnesty from contingency, to imagine a future in which we are not perpetually negotiating for affection.

Being chosen makes the world feel more hospitable, and not being chosen strikes at the core of our being. Thus, the insistence that we should not want to be chosen always feels slightly dishonest. Friendship, love, even the most casual forms of preference carry the same underlying gesture: I see you, and I am altering my world to include you. To be someone’s friend, lover, or confidant is not about filling a deficit of self-esteem. But the language of modern self-help, choose yourself, validate yourself, be complete within yourself, often carries an unspoken fantasy that we can become self-originating beings.

Then there’s pain and grief that comes from not being chosen. The grief that never fully disappears. It becomes a quiet layer in the self, a sensitivity to absence, a heightened awareness of the small violences of indifference.

Punch is not an object of pity but a source of courage. What moves us is not only its loneliness but its orientation toward others, the fact that it has not yet reorganised its being around withdrawal. To remain capable of moving toward others after one has learned what exclusion feels like may be the most fragile and the most profound form of courage available to us.

Perhaps being human is to live with the knowledge that one cannot be chosen but still have the courage to walk toward the possibility of it somewhere, and, just as importantly, to become someone who chooses.

For a long time, you believed closure was an intellectual destination. You treated it as something that could be reached through enough inquiry, enough emotional labour, enough willingness to look at yourself with ruthless honesty. You read everything that promised understanding, translated feelings into language, returned to conversations that exhausted you, and kept asking for explanations as though meaning could be arrived at if you just stayed long enough.

You believed that pain becomes bearable when it is acknowledged by the person who caused it. That there is a certain order to the emotional universe, if someone sees the depth of your wound, if they understand what their choice did to your sense of safety, if they recognise the fracture they introduced into your life, then somewhere within that recognition lies the beginning of closure.

You were really searching for coherence and not closure. Coherence in a version of reality in which love, trust, hurt, accountability and justice could all exist together without cancelling one another out.

But what if the person who caused the hurt did say that you did not deserve it and that they were not indifferent to your suffering? And yet they also believed, with absolute clarity, that what they had done was right for them, that they did not regret the choice, and that in the same circumstances they would make it again.

Your pain is real. You did not deserve it. But their decision remains valid.

Such conflict creates a form of grief for which there is very little language, because everyone is taught that if someone truly cares, they will not be able to live peacefully with the knowledge that they hurt you.

This is where the search for closure begins to collapse, because everyone is taught that acknowledgement and regret are inseparable. It is assumed that if someone truly understands the magnitude of your hurt, they must also revise their judgment of the act that caused it. When that does not happen, you are left facing a much more destabilising truth: two realities can coexist, and love does not guarantee their alignment.

Later, you begin, slowly and unconsciously, turning their certainty about their decisions and acts into a commentary on your inadequacy and self-worth. If they could see your pain and still stand by their decision, then perhaps you had failed in some essential way. You were not a person who deserved to be chosen. For someone who thought you didn’t deserve such pain, wouldn’t give it to you. Maybe you weren’t worth it. It felt easier to believe that you were insufficient in multiple ways and unworthy of being chosen than to accept that you could be left behind for something that felt more right to them.

There is a peculiar violence in this kind of self-interrogation. You were trying to construct a version of yourself that would make their choice rational and therefore less unbearable for you. But the truth is that someone else’s choice does not need to be morally wrong for your pain to be real, and your pain does not need to invalidate their experience of love for your dignity to remain intact.

Everyone is taught to understand betrayal as something that happens in the absence of compassion. Yet it is entirely possible for someone to hold compassion for the wound they caused and still believe that following their own emotional truth was the most honest act available to them. Maybe that makes the experience more devastating, because it removes the simplicity of blame.

You kept returning to them with questions, trying to restore a shared moral language. You wanted them to see the event not just as a personal decision, but as something that carried ethical weight between you. They, however, experienced it as an authentic movement toward what felt true in their life. Between those two interpretations lies a space where closure cannot be achieved, because closure requires a shared understanding of what has been lost. But their consistency is the answer. They have already given you closure, not in the form you wanted, but in the form of a final and unchanging truth.

You were searching for closure in the form of an agreement. You wanted your interpretations of the past to converge so you wouldn’t have to carry a reality you experienced only that way. But closure is not agreement. It is the acceptance of irreconcilable perspectives without translating that irreconcilability into a judgment about your own worth.

The real wound was that you could not fit their compassion for you and their choice to leave into the same emotional framework. You thought one had to cancel the other. You thought that if they had truly cared about you, the decision would have been impossible. But human beings are capable of multiple, conflicting truths, and love does not always conform to the moral symmetry everyone expects of it.

Closure does not come from the moment when their explanation finally satisfies you. It is the moment when you stop asking for their explanation and take on the responsibility of restoring your sense of self. Closure begins, perhaps, at the point where you allow both things to be true at the same time: that you were deeply hurt in ways that altered your sense of self, and that their decision was not an act designed to destroy you but an act designed to move toward what they believed was their truth.

In that space, the need to interrogate yourself begins to loosen. The need to revisit every conversation, every memory, every perceived flaw, starts to fade. Not because you finally understand them, but because you no longer need their understanding to repair your own existence.

And perhaps the beginning of closure lies not in understanding them, but in allowing yourself to stop trying to make your moral language and theirs translate into each other. They will continue to live in a reality where their decision was right. And you must learn to live in a reality where your pain is meaningful even without their regret.

You were not wrong to seek meaning. You were only seeking it in a place where your meanings had already diverged.

To love in whole or in parts, what is love at all.

Perhaps it is the most enduring philosophical question, one that resists every attempt at definition. Love appears in many forms. It is the tenderness of a parent, the instinctive protection of a sibling, the quiet loyalty of a friend, the fleeting compassion we feel for a stranger whose name we never learn. Yet all these seem, in some measure, explained by duty, by memory, by biology, by the soft coercion of shared histories. It is in loving a partner that love becomes an act of radical choice. Out of an immeasurable multitude, we turn toward one person and say, here. Here I will place the weight of my inner life. Here I will deposit my unguarded thoughts, my unfinished ambitions, my humiliations, my fears. We strip language of its performance and stand, emotionally unclothed, waiting to see whether the other will stay.

In that exposure, there is both creation and risk. The beloved becomes the sole witness to a self that even we do not fully know. To be loved, then, is to be interpreted. To love is to accept the responsibility of that interpretation. Yet we rarely receive another in their entirety. We edit, we curate, we negotiate. We embrace the luminous fragments and attempt to domesticate the shadows. The ethical dilemma of intimacy lies here. Do we consent to the other as a whole being, irreducible and often inconvenient, or do we assemble a tolerable version of them in our minds and call it love?

No other relationship demands this level of scrutiny. We endure our families with a patience that borders on indifference. We allow friendships to fade without philosophical crisis. Their failures do not threaten the architecture of our being. But a partner stands too close. They function as mirrors that not only reflect but also reveal. In their gaze, we encounter both our grandeur and our inadequacy. What unsettles us in them is often what we refuse to recognise in ourselves. The analysis of the partner is therefore never only about them. It is an endless reading of the self.

Love becomes entangled with aspiration. We do not merely seek companionship. We seek a life that appears more meaningful because it is shared with this particular person. We want them to understand the sentences we never finish, to respond to the moods we cannot name, to find significance in the trivial details that populate our days. We want their presence to transform the ordinary into something charged with possibility. Hidden within this desire is a silent demand that they conform to an image we have been nurturing long before we met them.

And so the question returns, persistent and unresolved. Is this the person I had imagined, or is the imagination itself the obstacle? Do we love the person before us, or the coherence they bring to our private narrative about the future? When the initial astonishment of recognition fades, what remains? Is love the acceptance of the whole, including the parts that resist us, or is it the quiet, ongoing labour of reconciliation between what is and what we hoped for?

Perhaps love is not an answerable question at all. Perhaps it is a condition in which two incomplete beings agree to witness each other without the guarantee of satisfaction, without the certainty of permanence, and without the illusion that either can ever be fully known. In that fragile, unfinished recognition, we continue to ask what love is, and the asking itself becomes the only form in which love endures.

It’s already 6 a.m. Another of many sleepless nights that have quietly dissolved into early mornings. The city doesn’t care much for my insomnia. Motorcycles tear through the stillness with practised impatience, cars follow with muted indifference, and together they drown out the crows and pigeons trying to make their way into the cauldron of noise. Somewhere between night and day, the sun hasn’t risen yet, but the reddish tint has already begun to leak into everything, walls, trees, my thoughts, adding weight to a gloom that was already swelling.

I get up and step out to walk the less crowded street again. I know this route too well now. My feet don’t need instructions. However, every few metres, memory interrupts movement. That stall where I grabbed a quick bite before rushing to work. That small eatery where conversations stretched longer than meals. Maybe places don’t forget us like people do, because they cannot physically move. They just stand there, unchanged, holding versions of us we’ve already outgrown.

I pause near the chai outlet, the one I never went to for their average chai but to sit and be invisible. Some days, I sat scrolling my phone endlessly, trying to distract myself. Other days, I came here after something heavy, pretending that routine could lighten the weight I was feeling.

It’s been a year since I’ve been in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram, for purists). A year is long enough for a city to stop being new, but not long enough to become home. This is a city that teaches you how slow life can be when it has nowhere urgent to go. Everything here runs like well-rehearsed clockwork.

The city wakes up early to sunrises that bring light to every despairing soul. Shops open when they’re supposed to and shut without guilt. Offices don’t make you stay till 9 p.m., chasing some abstract idea of growth that will materialise. There is discipline and structure, but not the cruelty that cities generally have. Sunsets feel like permission to stop trying for the day.

There’s so much to do if you’re willing to move at the city’s pace, cultural programmes tucked into auditoriums, literary events where people listen earnestly, and historical remnants that refuse to be flashy. And then there’s the sea, constantly present, reminding you that vastness doesn’t only mean calm and serenity, but unknown depths and danger as well.

Among all this, there’s an ubiquitous truth that nothing radically new is ever going to happen here. There’s no feeling that something is about to break open. The city knows what it is and is quite comfortable in it. It doesn’t want to become Bangalore or Mumbai, and definitely not Gurgaon. For someone from another part of the country, it can start to feel like being stuck in a vacation town forever, pleasant and scenic, but ultimately static.

You explore every place worth exploring. You attend enough cultural and literary events that you can. You watch countless sunrises and sunsets by the beach until they stop feeling profound and become scheduled. You try most of the local cuisine, pick up bits of the language, and learn when to nod and when to stay silent. Slowly, you even start to feel at home in the place.

But then what?

Do I want to live here forever? On paper, it makes sense. The weather is bearable, the sky is blue, and the air is clean enough that it doesn’t make you choke while breathing. Streets are functional, basic civic sense exists without being enforced vigorously, and the food is comforting. Life here doesn’t constantly ask you to prove yourself.

I keep asking myself whether I belong here or whether I’ve just adapted well. Will this city ever stop feeling like a long pause between chapters? I always wanted to be a faceless person in a rooster-coop apartment in a metropolis. I didn’t want to be seen. Maybe then nobody could peek inside what I am feeling or who I am. Trivandrum doesn’t demand much from me, and maybe that’s the problem. In its calm, my own restlessness feels louder, forcing me to face myself.

I find myself wanting to get out of Trivandrum badly. It’s a place that has been kind to me. But kindness alone doesn’t mean compatibility. Some cities are meant to heal you, and then you pack your stuff and move on to make the next place your temporary home.

And maybe that’s what Trivandrum has been all along, a beautifully written chapter. Slow, reflective, necessary, but not the end of the story. Trivandrum made me realise that just because a place works, it doesn’t mean it works for you. Cities have a specific time in your life when they attract you and make you feel wanted, then you outgrow them and feel like an overstayed guest. Years later, you go there to relive some memories, but you can’t live there.

How much of what I wrote is actually about Trivandrum, I have no clue.

The last couple of months stripped me in ways I didn’t see coming. I lost my self-esteem. I felt like I was falling to the bottom of an endless pit of pain. I questioned my self-worth and, at times, whether I was worthy of love at all. There were moments when believing what I felt seemed like betrayal.

These two months taught me more about life than the rest of my years combined, not because something dramatic happened all at once, but because everything I had been avoiding showed up together. I realised I didn’t actually know what love was. Or maybe I knew parts of it, just not the part that requires you to be whole enough to give without quietly bleeding yourself dry. What I thought was love was also tangled up with attachment and familiarity, and when the trust broke, it shook something much deeper than the relationship itself.

I’ve had to accept something uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for my own life. No one else can fix it for me, no one else can carry my weight forever. People stay as long as it’s bearable, and when it isn’t, they do what they need to do to survive. Everyone has their own version of the story, and that’s the only version that matters to them. I wish some people had believed in me a little more or stayed a little longer, but wanting that doesn’t change the reality. Maybe expecting it was me asking for something I couldn’t have offered in return anyway.

For years, I kept plugging my pain with denial, distraction, and attachment. Whenever the emptiness showed up, I found something to chase. Goals, work, plans, responsibility. Real problems kept coming up that needed immediate attention, problems that threatened survival in very real ways, so I learned to push everything else aside. Somewhere along the way, not dealing with the void inside me became a coping mechanism. I convinced myself that if I just kept fixing things and moving forward, the hollowness and depression would stay buried.

It didn’t.

When I finally reached for love, I think I hoped it would save me from facing myself. Not consciously, but in the way exhausted people hope. I tried to offer love when I didn’t really have it to give. I had intention, care, and effort, but my cup was empty. I was pouring from a place of need, not fullness, and that’s not sustainable for anyone. When trust broke, it didn’t just hurt because of what was lost between us; it hurt because it confirmed a fear I already had about not being enough.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

One silver lining in all this was the friends who showed up for me when things got really bad. Some listened without trying to fix me. Some stayed on calls longer than they needed to. Some helped in practical ways when I was overwhelmed and barely holding it together. That support mattered more than I probably ever said out loud, and I’m deeply grateful for it. At the same time, I can see now that even that kind of care can’t replace the work I was avoiding. No amount of support from others can do your inner healing for you.

Losing what I thought was love hurt because it exposed everything at once. It took away the last distraction and left me face-to-face with the emptiness I’d been managing instead of healing. It also left me carrying the weight of broken trust, trying to understand how something that felt safe could suddenly feel so unstable. It forced me to admit that making my material life better didn’t mean my heart was okay. I forgot that my heart too needed attention.

I don’t think I lost love as much as I lost an illusion. The illusion that someone else could fill the gap I refused to look at. The illusion that effort and attachment were the same as love. Now I’m left with the part I can’t escape anymore. Learning how to sit with myself, take responsibility without self-blame, rebuild trust slowly, and actually start filling my own cup before trying to pour into anyone else.

Those who move out of love often claim it never existed. Those who remain trapped in the crippling weight of separation believe their love is eternal. I don’t know which one is true. I don’t even know what love is.

Is love an intense desire, a constant longing for another person? Is it the act of showing up when they need you? Is it simply being present with them and feeling lighter in their presence? Is it adjustment, compromise, or sacrifice? Is it the hollow, orphaned feeling when someone leaves? Or is it nothing more than the projection of our own emotions onto someone we think we are in love with?

Maybe it is all of it. Maybe it is none of it. I don’t know.

When you are in love, the person you love becomes flawless. Their imperfections soften into quirks. Incompatibilities look temporary, solvable, and almost irrelevant. You convince yourself that effort will bridge gaps, that time will smooth rough edges, that love will eventually do the work reality refuses to.

But when you fall out of love, everything reverses. The same traits now look like red flags you were deliberately ignoring. Things you once defended now feel inexcusable. When love ends, or when you finally realise it may never have existed, and you only convinced yourself it did, what remains is assessment. Cold, unavoidable assessment.

Assessment of yourself. Assessment of how you felt. Assessment of what you gave and what you received.

Slowly, you conclude that it wasn’t worth it. It begins to feel like years of life invested in something that never had the capacity to grow. You gather the fragments of yourself and walk away from a person you once believed you loved, only to confront the unsettling possibility that you never actually did. Self-preservation takes over. It overrides sentiment, nostalgia, even guilt. Things you once thought you could never do suddenly feel natural. Your body stops responding to potential and starts responding to reality.

Many of us don’t fall in love with who a person is. We fall in love with who they could be. With their potential. But loving someone for their potential comes with expectations, and those expectations are almost always unmet. The cruel part is that the other person often has no idea that they are being loved not for who they are, but for who you imagine they might become.

You try to communicate it. You hope they will understand. You wait for internalisation, for passive change. You tell yourself that if they truly loved you, they would evolve. Sometimes they try. Sometimes they make a genuine effort. But old patterns resurface. Behaviour slips back into familiar grooves. Real change rarely comes from comfort. It comes from extremes.

Eventually, you wake up to a hard truth. The potential was never matched. And by then, something irreversible has already happened. One person enters self-preservation mode. The other enters transformation mode. The one being left behind finally tries to be the person they should have been. They try to preserve love by doing all the things they should have done earlier.

But it is always too late.

Once someone enters self-preservation, their body and emotions rewire themselves. They stop caring about potential. They arrive at this state only after a long internal war, questioning their feelings, doubting their memories, replaying moments over and over. The first step of self-preservation is a devastating realisation. Maybe they never loved the person at all. Maybe they only loved the what-ifs.

When objectivity finally cuts through and it becomes clear that the imagined future never materialised, the mind begins to rationalise everything. Every doubt becomes evidence. Every discomfort becomes proof. Without rationalisation, self-preservation cannot survive. It is a brutal mental tug-of-war between slipping back into familiarity and accepting that there is no return.

Meanwhile, the person trying to live up to the potential is already far behind. They cannot catch up. The distance is no longer temporal. It is emotional. Self-preservation hardens. It shields the person who has accepted that love never existed from any external stimulus that might challenge this conclusion. At that stage, only one thing matters. The self. Everything else is noise.

Perhaps love can only be judged in retrospect. Post facto. Only when it ends do we begin to understand whether it was love at all, or simply attachment, hope, fear, or projection wearing love’s name.

And for the person who cannot move on, the final sacrifice is letting go and convincing themselves that their love was never love to begin with, otherwise they would have made it work.

Sundays are days when Dhruv likes life the most. He gets to meet his father, who returns home after work. His father works in some fancy job, at least that’s what Dhruv thinks. He never actually figured out what his father does, but he finds it impressive. Impressive enough to brag about it to his friends. It’s mostly sitting at a computer and pressing the keyboard quickly. Dhruv also likes computers and wants to have one. But Mom says he can’t have it until he clears his tenth boards. That is four years far ahead in his life. Mom is usually the one who worries the most. She asks too many questions and checks the time often. To Dhruv, that feels like a killjoy. Father is the one Dhruv loves to hang out with. He brings the kind of chocolates that you don’t get in town. When he is at home, the TV curfew is relaxed, and cricket time is unlimited.

Cricket is one thing that Dhruv loves as much as computers, maybe slightly less since he started hearing about new games that his friends are always talking about. Unlike Dhruv, all of Dhruv’s friends have computers at home. Except for Suraj, maybe. Suraj is the quiet kid in Dhruv’s class who doesn’t talk to anyone apart from Dhruv. Suraj is also often late to school. That’s how Dhruv became friends with him while undergoing punishment for being late. But since then, Suraj has been late many more times. He regularly has to stand outside the class for being late or not having a proper uniform. Suraj is a weird kid, at least that’s what Dhruv thinks. Suraj is very good at Maths but below average in English. Dhruv often avoids Suraj when other friends are around, maybe because Suraj has no idea which game was just released.

During lunch break, Dhruv hangs out with his cricket friends. He shares lunch with them. Dhruv has asked Suraj many times to join, but Suraj always says he has to go to the Principal’s office. Dhruv finds it strange. What kind of work can someone have there every day? Still, Dhruv does not ask further. He is more interested in talking about the match he played yesterday and deciding video game meet-ups at his friend’s house.

Suraj usually walks away before lunch boxes are opened. Some days, he does not bring lunch at all. On those days, he keeps his bag closed and leaves early. His mother is often ill. Some mornings, she cannot stand long enough in the kitchen. Sitting with others means questions, and Suraj does not like questions. He comes to school from almost nine kilometres away by public bus. If the bus is late, he is late. If it is too crowded, he is late. His uniform is sometimes not proper. It looks washed too many times. Dhruv does not know these things. He only sees Suraj standing outside the class again.

One day, Dhruv’s class has a special science project. They are supposed to make a truss model of a building using wooden ice cream sticks. The student whose model sustains the highest load wins. Dhruv is least interested in such activities. He prefers cricket in the scorching sun any day over such lame activities, as his posse of friends describes it, barring Suraj. After lunch, students gather in the auditorium. Dhruv spots Suraj and asks him how the meeting with the Principal was. Suraj nods. Dhruv complains about how these activities waste everyone’s time. Suraj listens and nods.

Dhruv asks Suraj how he plans to make the model. Suraj does not seem to have brought any supplies. He says his mother was ill and he couldn’t go out to buy them. Dhruv tells him not to bother and splits his own supplies in half. Suraj’s eyes light up. He says nothing, but he feels noticed. At the same time, he feels like he does not belong among all these people. He feels like a nobody. No one really knows him apart from the class teacher and Dhruv.

After the activities, Suraj takes Dhruv for ice cream. He spends the ten rupees he had kept for the bus ride home. He does not mention it. He invites Dhruv to his house for lunch and says it is nearby, so they can walk. As they leave school, Dhruv suggests taking a shared auto. Suraj says they can walk. Dhruv agrees, but after walking for two kilometres, he gives up and insists. By now, Dhruv understands. He offers to pay. Suraj hesitates, then agrees.

They get off the auto and walk again. Dhruv asks how far the house is. Suraj says it is just a walkable distance. Dhruv cannot help noticing the open drains, garbage, cows sitting on the street, and a smell he is not used to. Suraj’s locality feels very different from Dhruv’s. After walking through narrow lanes, stepping around cow dung and open drains, they reach Suraj’s house. There is one narrow entrance with an iron door that creaks loudly. There is no balcony and no boundary wall. Inside, the rooms are arranged in a straight line, like train coaches. There is a damp smell. The paint looks tired, as if it has given up in places.

Dhruv eats lunch and leaves. Suraj’s mother presses twenty rupees into his hand for the auto. When Dhruv reaches home, his mother is upset. She asks where he was and checks the time again. Her voice is sharp, but her eyes look worried. She says his father will not like this. Dhruv feels hurt. He tries to explain, but she is not really listening. Later, he thinks that if his mother had known about the woman in the city, she would not have been so strict with him. Maybe Suraj’s father does not have a woman friend. Maybe that is why Suraj’s mother loves him more.

The next day, Dhruv waits for Suraj at school. He wants to tell him how he almost got scolded. Suraj does not turn up. Three days pass and Suraj does not come to school. Dhruv thinks he might be sick or maybe his father has come from town and they have gone somewhere. But Suraj has never talked about his father. It feels odd. Dhruv gets busy again during lunch breaks with video game discussions, but he still misses Suraj.

One afternoon, Dhruv decides to visit Suraj’s house. The heat is harsh. When he reaches the lane, the door is locked. He asks a passerby if they know Suraj. The man asks who Suraj is and walks away. Dhruv then asks a woman standing outside her house if she knows where the people living there have gone. She says Anita and her son left town last week and went back to their village in Rajasthan. Dhruv thinks Suraj must have gone to meet his nana-nani and will return soon. He walks back home.

That evening, Dhruv’s father returns from town. Dhruv reaches home excited, but the house feels different. His mother is in the kitchen, crying, though she is trying not to. His father stands near the door, angry and silent. When he sees Dhruv, his mother quickly wipes her face and asks him to wash his hands. She says lunch will be ready. His father does not say anything. This is not the first time this has happened. Dhruv feels scared when the house goes quiet like this. He looks down and sees broken bangles on the kitchen floor and a few drops of blood near the sink. He understands what has happened. His heart starts beating fast. He wants to say something, but does not know what.

He stands beside his mother and gives her a glass of water. She drinks slowly, then hugs him tightly. She straightens her sari and tells him to eat in his room. She says they will go shopping in the evening, as if it is an ordinary day. Dhruv does not understand why shopping matters today. He says he does not want to buy anything. His mother says his father is leaving again tomorrow, and they need to buy a few things. She says he cannot stay home alone. Her voice is steady now. Dhruv agrees.

They leave in the brand-new car his father has bought. Maybe typing fast on computers pays really well. Dhruv sits in the back seat and keeps looking outside the window. He cannot look at his mother’s red face beside him. The car stops at a signal. Dhruv is lost in thought when he notices a boy of his age on the other side of the road, carrying balloons and walking between cars. His heart skips. For a moment, he thinks it is Suraj. Another vehicle moves in front and blocks the view. The signal turns green, and his father presses the throttle. Dhruv tries to look again, but the boy is gone. Maybe it was not Suraj.

Dhruv lets the thought pass. Just like he never wanted to know if his father slapped his mother or if he really had a woman friend in the city. Some truths are best left undiscovered.

If there is one truth I am certain of in all my years of living, it is that hope kills you inside. It rots you, shreds you into bits, deprives you of dignity, and ensures there is no end to the torment you are facing.

If there is another truth I have learned in all my years of living, it is that hope prevents you from dying. It brings you to the precipice of being over, but does not let you fall into the pits of burning hell. It is the last weak strand that holds you barely above the ninth circle of hell. You wish the strand would break so you could meet your destined fate.

But hope is the most cruel satan that exists. It kills you but does not want you to die yet. It wants you to live through your sins every second of your existence. It makes you wish for death so you can attain finality. But hope believes finality does not come from being over. It comes from suffering without dying, no matter how badly you have been killed. Being killed and dying are two different acts.

Hope is both benevolent and malevolent. It wants you to question yourself, marinate in self-doubt, and be whipped by guilt. Once you are broken enough, you can no longer feel anything, and you beg death for mercy. That is when hope starts pulling you through the last weak strand. It wants to test whether there is anything left in you. It wants to check your perseverance. It wants to see whether, after begging for death, you have anything left to be considered worthy of living.

Most of us give up at this stage. We want an end to pain so desperately that we let the malevolent hope win. We let go of the last strand to meet our fate. But hope merely wants to see if we deserve another chance. It asks whether we are willing to endure eight levels of hell while climbing out of the ninth, and come out alive.

At this point, we have no self-worth left and wish to become one with death. For some, despite all they have been through, they gather enough courage, even while feeling they are not worth living, and finally see the benevolent side of hope. It slowly pulls them up.

But we must remember that the strand is too weak to support us. We have to be careful. We have to be cautious and prepared to go through the eight levels of hell again on the upward journey, to endure the torture we thought was over.

Because there is sunshine outside the exit. A sunshine that awaits a different version of you than the one that was thrown into the pits of hell.

We spend far too much time justifying ourselves, our personality traits, our ambitions, the kind of people we claim to be, and the ways our past has shaped us. Every choice demands an explanation, and every change requires a rationale. Slowly, we begin to narrate our lives as if they must make perfect sense, as if coherence is proof of growth. In the process, we try to fit the world and the people in it into neatly constructed frameworks that we assume our lives must follow.

We become architects of rigid meanings. We decide what aligns with us and what does not, what serves us and what must be discarded. Things we once held dear, relationships, dreams, habits, even versions of ourselves, are let go. Not always because they lost their value, but because they no longer fit the story we are telling ourselves about who we should be. We call it maturity, clarity, or self-respect, rarely pausing to ask whether it is also fear in disguise.

Gradually, we reduce ourselves to definitions. This is my boundary. This is my goal. This is my truth. We measure life through self-imposed parameters and private yardsticks, mistaking control for understanding. Ambiguity begins to feel threatening. Contradictions feel like flaws. We forget that we are not meant to be consistent, efficient, or fully explainable.

But what is all this in service of, and at what cost? In our attempt to protect ourselves, do we shrink the very space where life is meant to unfold? Do we lose the peculiar, the irrational, the unexpected moments that cannot be justified but often mean the most? Do we trade wonder for certainty and curiosity for comfort?

Perhaps not everything needs to fit. Not every desire needs a long-term vision, and not every attachment needs to be defended or abandoned with logic.

Maybe self-growth is not about refining life into a perfect structure, but about learning when to loosen our grip on it, about allowing ourselves to be surprised, even unsettled. About accepting that meaning can emerge from chaos, and authenticity can exist without explanation.

And the real question is not who we are trying to become, but what parts of life we are quietly refusing to experience because they do not fit the shape we have decided our life should take.

In the end, we keep telling ourselves a futile story, one for which the only audience is our fearful selves.

Hustle is a powerful capitalist tool designed to lure the proletariat into believing they can achieve greatness if they push hard enough. In reality, all it does is keep the hamster running in pursuit of an elusive goal until it exhausts itself and dies-only to be replaced by another hamster, convinced that the previous one failed because it was weak.

The truth is that the hamster can only save its life on the wheel by running slower. The faster it runs, the sooner it dies. This cycle of burnout ensures a steady supply of replacements, just before the hamster’s demand for sustenance increases. A new hamster, naively buying into the hustle myth, believes it needs less to survive and can earn a bigger reward if it just runs faster. Yet, the finish line is always just out of reach, perpetually one step behind.

However, there are hamsters that don’t run to reach the finish line; they run to avoid seeing what’s behind.

I have won none of the battles fought in my head
Against the demons that crawl on my bed
When I sought solace from those I hold dear
I was reminded that I’m the one they fear
A benevolent spirit whispered one ghastly night:
‘All your wars are your own to fight’

The shrill wail of sirens echoed through the narrow street, cutting through the dense evening air. Fire engines and ambulances struggled to inch forward as street vendors frantically pushed their carts aside. From her seat at the café across the intersection, she watched, transfixed, as firefighters wrestled to free bodies from the crushed wreckage of a car. The sight made her stomach churn, but she forced herself to focus on the reason she was there.

Her phone buzzed in her hand, breaking the silence she had been trying to find in the chaos.

“Hello? Yeah, I’m at the corner café. You’ll see the emergency vehicles here… Oh, I see you,” she said, spotting him in the distance. He walked toward her, looking unusually polished; like a man nervously preparing for a first date.

“How was your day?” she asked as he sat down.

“As good as any workday can be,” he replied, running a hand through his hair. “Sorry I’m late. Work piled up, you know how it is.”

“Don’t I just,” she quipped, though there was no warmth in her voice.

Their marriage had always been marked by friction and things they never quite said out loud. They’d known each other for years, married after what felt like a lifetime together, but still, they never seemed to settle into the rhythm of it. There were good days, yes, but those were few and far between now.

“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly soft. “I’ll never forget how your eyes lit up. The way you blushed when we made eye contact.”

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah. I fell for you the moment I shook your hand.”

She let out a hollow laugh. “Come on.”

“I’m serious,” he insisted, the smile fading.

“I miss that,” she admitted, her words trembling.

There was a long pause. “Yeah,” he finally said, his eyes flickering away from hers.

After dinner, the weight of what she needed to say pressed down on her chest. She could feel the words forming in her throat, suffocating her. She had to say it, now or never.

“I love you,” she said, but the words felt brittle, like they might break apart if she spoke any louder.

“I know, babe. I love you too,” he replied, flashing her a grin, oblivious to the storm brewing in her heart.

She steeled herself, looking directly into his eyes. “I need to talk to you.”

His smile faltered as he set down his glass. “About what?”

“Do you think this is working?” she asked, her voice eerily calm.

A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “What do you mean?”

“Us. This… marriage.” She hesitated, feeling the ache in her chest grow. “Is love enough to keep it together?”

He shrugged, trying to keep things light. “I mean, isn’t 95% of the job done if we’re in love?”

Her frustration boiled over, her voice rising. “This is what you don’t get! I have dreams, things I want to do with you. I want to spend time together; travel, cook, share a life. But you’re never there. You’re always somewhere else.”

“I know,” he muttered, staring past her, his focus distant. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“I don’t think this is working anymore,” she said, the words finally spilling out. “Maybe we need to take a step back. Reevaluate. Or maybe…” she hesitated, her throat tightening. “Maybe we need to go our separate ways.”

He blinked, his face unreadable. “Separate ways?”

“Yes. If we can’t make this work… maybe it’s time to live our lives apart,” she whispered, the enormity of the statement hanging between them.

He said nothing, the silence stretching painfully long. She averted her gaze, the weight of the moment settling like a stone in her chest.

“Let’s head home,” she said at last, her voice hollow.

“I can’t. I need to pick something up from a colleague’s house. He’s leaving town tomorrow,” he replied, as if nothing had just happened.

“Fine,” she snapped, biting back her frustration. “I’ll get an Uber.”

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he offered weakly.

“What if you don’t come back?” she asked coldly, not meeting his eyes. “It’s your choice.”

They stood up, the tension between them palpable. The street, once a chaotic mess of sirens and flashing lights, had begun to clear. She got into the car and handed the Uber driver her OTP.

“Ma’am, it was a bad accident back there,” the driver said, glancing at her through the rearview mirror.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice dull, as if she were numb to everything around her.

“A woman. Looked like she was in her thirties,” he said solemnly. “Didn’t make it.”

Her heart sank as the car began to roll forward. She glanced back through the window, catching a glimpse of her husband still standing by the diner. He suddenly broke into a frantic sprint toward the accident site, his face contorted in terror.

Her breath caught in her throat as she watched him fall to his knees beside the ambulance, his sobs cutting through the night air.

She could barely make out what was happening, but then she saw him clutching something; someone against his chest.

It was her.

It had been four months since we last met, and our relationship was going through a rough patch. Despite being together for four years, we had rarely lived in the same city, let alone together. Essentially, we were two people who fell in love and then spent years trying to iron out our differences. Typically, you fall in love with someone when your personalities align, but love is strange that way.

I had a flight to catch to Hyderabad, where I met my girlfriend on my birthday. She came to pick me up at the airport but was an hour late. We checked into a hotel and spent the night there. I slept like a baby, which was rare in my otherwise restless life.

People say you feel drowsy around the person you love because they make you feel safe, like a baby dozing off in its mother’s lap. Meeting my girlfriend was my own version of sleep therapy. Of course, this often made me a rather dull person to live with. I don’t, mostly can’t, watch movies because they require a level of patience I no longer possess, given my mental state and the weight of everything on my plate. It felt like everything was slipping through my fingers. And to top it off, I always fell asleep beside my girlfriend whenever we tried to watch anything.

But I’m nothing if not determined. After sleeping nearly the entire day and night, I finally managed to stay awake (mostly) while we watched Jab We Met. I also wanted to make our three-day stay enjoyable, something that, according to her, was a rare occurrence. We decided to take a stroll around Hussain Sagar Lake, but not without first having a fight in the cab. As usual, halfway through our walk, my lazy legs started aching, and she wasn’t thrilled about that. I rarely saw her, and when I did, either I was glued to my laptop finishing endless work or dealing with a slew of health issues, or what some would call tantrums. In the end, we decided to “stroll” in a cab and booked a ride to a restaurant on the outskirts of the city.

The moonlit 40-minute drive passed mostly in silence, broken only by failed attempts to discuss marriage plans. As usual, the conversation ended quickly when we disagreed on the timeline. Turns out, Google Maps wasn’t accurate. We found the restaurant five kilometers before the marked location. The driver wasn’t thrilled when we ended the ride early.

The restaurant looked new, bright lights, a big parking lot, and the typical “indie” live music scene. It seemed like a decent place to eat. The crowd was quiet, with minimal chatter, and the inside was dimly lit, so much so that I couldn’t even see people’s faces. The music had an oddly eerie tone. We took a table on the open rooftop, where the wind was chilly and soothing. In the distance, we could see Hyderabad flickering, surrounded by vast, empty land. The sound of wind sweeping over the paddy fields drowned out the music.

After spending ten minutes deciding what to eat, we ordered drinks first, two Piña Coladas, and then debated what food to get. Strangely, the waiter wore a face mask, two years after Covid had subsided. I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the view, but the moon had disappeared behind the clouds. My girlfriend excused herself to the bathroom, and I started scrolling through reels on my phone. The drinks arrived quickly, but ten minutes passed, and she hadn’t returned. I called her, but there was no answer.

I went downstairs and wandered around the parking lot, feeling uneasy. Something wasn’t right, all the cars had the same license plate number. My heart raced. I looked up and saw the waiter standing at our table, staring at me. He waved, signaling that our food had arrived. But we hadn’t ordered any food. I could see the moon now, right above him. My nerves were on edge, but I decided to return to the table and wait for my girlfriend. As I climbed the stairs, I noticed the other tables were empty, everyone had finished eating and left. Yet, the music continued, and I could still hear the clattering of dishes from the kitchen.

Back at the table, I asked the waiter to check on my girlfriend. “Also, we haven’t ordered any food,” I said. “It’s complimentary, sir. You’ll love it,” he replied. Ignoring him, I asked again for my girlfriend. “Your wait is over, sir. She’s here,” he said, lifting the lid off a large bowl. I gasped, unable to breathe, and suddenly woke up.

My girlfriend was lying beside me, holding my hand. “What happened?” she asked. I smiled, hugging her tightly. “I love you,” she whispered. An hour later, we finally set off to see the lake.

The last few days have been very difficult. More difficult than others. We, as human beings, have immense strength to persevere against external challenges. Not quite so when it involves people we once loved, looked towards, and admired. The objective sense of being on the side of justice causes a churning of the heart at night. Justice requires doing things that one would ideally let slide because it doesn’t matter anymore. Life is bigger. People move ahead. But does that mean anyone can trample over someone’s life and ruin it forever without repercussion? Every act has a consequence, and every wrong deserves punishment.

I have had a very complicated relationship with my father. As a child, I was scared of him. In my early teens, I began to see him more objectively. Despite his flaws, I saw him as a man of conviction and courage; a man who could do anything. Almost a fanatic. He had a fierce, often daunting energy about him.

In my twenties, that admiration slowly turned into affection. I started to see him as a vulnerable human being, burdened with repressed emotions and unfulfilled desires. A man with dreams, with a vision of how he wanted his life to be. But the harsh realities of household responsibilities never allowed him to become the aspirational vagabond he longed to be.

It took me 28 years to realize that my judgment of him had been clouded by a child’s innate desire to look past a father’s flaws. In truth, I was merely justifying and rationalizing his abhorrent and disgusting behavior.

Meritocracy is a convenient way of covering up the scarcity problem. India as a country runs on a scarcity of resources. Any ecosystem with scarce resources requires that the population compete for a limited piece of the pie.

When the grasslands are not abundant enough, the deer that dies of starvation doesn’t die due to lack of merit. It dies due to lack of grass.

A system that by design has a limited intake and is guaranteed to exclude almost ninety per cent of the applicants is by no means meritorious but only an exclusionary scheme.

It serves those with better access to monetary resources and social capital to term this entire grand scheme of scarcity as a competitive endeavour. It allows them to put the blame and point fingers at those who are placed worse than them in the echelons of caste hierarchy and turn it into a question of competition and merit. It helps to avoid asking the uncomfortable question of why there is scarcity as it involves holding rulers accountable and demanding answers from them.

All this is harder than blaming Dalits and Backward Classes for eating the limited pie despite being non-deserving of it. Some deer should die instead of searching for better pastures.

Women in Iran are risking getting raped, molested, publicly humiliated and murdered for their right to not wear a hijab.

When women in democratic and liberal countries enjoying civil freedoms say that they wear hijab because of choice, they are doing a great insult and disservice to the women fighting for basic rights elsewhere. It provides an ideological cushion for fundamentalists to justify imposing restrictions on women’s autonomy.

Wear whatever you want but don’t cloak it under the umbrella of freedom when those who are oppressed are fighting against what has been a historical symbol of repression and control over women’s bodies.

Nevertheless, the state should have no say in deciding the outfits people wear. If women in India want to wear a burqa to schools and colleges, the state cannot dictate otherwise. Freedom from state intervention in matters of personal preference of dressing is non-negotiable.

But women in India wearing a burqa thinking that they are doing it out of free will are mistaken. They are trapped in the illusion of choice which has been hegemonized by centuries of patriarchal normative standards of what dress is apt and what is not.

Freedom from state interference and the assumption of being free are two different things. The state cannot dictate, that’s where the debate ends.

When the conversation had dried up
And there was nothing left to talk
When silence paced back and forth between the walls
We gazed into each other’s eyes and realized
None of us knew each other at all