some warm thoughts on a frigid day

So far this year, the kid from Chicago has visited once and the college kid has spent two weekends at home. I squeezed them every chance I got. Not only did they squeeze me back, they're prone to special things like doing my chores for me when I'm not paying attention and bringing me treats when I'm working. They're consistently the best.

It's painful doing video calls with my dad and sis... because from my side of things, my mom's absence is so plain. It's difficult also because my mom was the chatty one on that side, the one with whom I shared books and shows, and now it's just the three of us being sad. 

My mom was so very chatty. I always laugh when I think of that one time At was on a phone call with my mom (maybe when At was 9/10 years old). At had been silent on the call for a while, so I whispered encouragement to say something, and At shot back, "I'm still waiting for Ammama to stop talking." Haha. Good times. 
______________________
Pic: A glimpse of The Maple River. Cold. It's going to stay in the single digits all week.

endings

1) Jeanie said something in the comments last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She noted that 2025 had been a year of leaving for me. My mom died, Nu went away to college, and At moved to Chicago. Not all of it is as sad as the first thing on the list--I'm happy for Nu and At; this is the right thing for them. (And it helps that Big A and I are having a wonderful time by ourselves.) The way Jeanie framed this actually helped me, because after At's ex and my mom died within months of each other, I kept thinking some third calamity would befall us. Now here's a list of three, and I feel like I can exhale. 

2) It has been four months. On the family WhatsApp chat, which we'd continued to use since the avatar was a group photo with my mom, I guess the system has noticed there haven't been any messages from my mom in a while, so it posted that she had "left the conversation." My sister and I were very rattled by this. I keep sneaking looks at that screen and it's a gut punch every time. 

3) Engie marveled yesterday that we start school so early. Yes, but I take heart in knowing that in 15 weeks, this semester will end and bring me face-to-face with summer break.* I feel-hope-trust that sunshine will heal me.

* I usually end this sentence with "bitches!" in my head.

Pic: Grey, sleeting, and foggy--a terrible trifecta all day. (Not a B&W photo.)

Onward!

Yes, it's snowing, but you know what--Max loves the snow! And the way he lifts his head in wonder to look at the sky and then races around in jubilation... it makes me want to catch him and squeeze him tight and thank the world for all its wonders.  

Also wonderful--realizing with relief that what I took to be two spots of fungal infection on my arm are just the marks from my Covid and flu shots from last week. 

Here's to entering 2026 with good health, good cheer, peace, and success, everyone! 💗

Pic: Our holiday card, sans the sappy message I had printed on the back.

the unwrapping/unraveling

I'm so grateful for your kindnesses. 

Sorry for being such a whiny ass B yesterday. In my defense, it was a lot at once. A reset is in order.

In the great Christmas unwrapping, my favorites were the book plates so I can really pretend (ha) to be a librarian, and a rainbow maker (it was a "nostalgia present" because I'd given At one when she was a kid and ended up enjoying it more than At had).

At, Nu, and I opened up Amma's suitcase before our Christmas afternoon nap. I'd brought that suitcase back from Bangalore in September and left it in the garage.When we brought it in this week... I realized it was locked... and I had no idea where I had put the key. I remember threading it through the ring of a purse but that was many moons ago, and I don't remember which purse that was. We ended up breaking the (tiny) lock with a hammer. I have saris for a lifetime. The kids didn't want a thing. 

Another thing to unwrap arrived right before Christmas, but I didn't have time until after... Final proofs of the book! The previous proofs looked like a Word document. This one looks like a book! I dedicated the book to Amma.

Pic: I've been giving myself lots of extra time for things since September, and have not been too tough on myself. But I plan to reset starting Monday so I can go into the new year with a fresh mindset. I"m not sure this resolution generator here is it :), but I have a few ideas. 

Post Christmas Crash: "stop crying your heart out"

We used to listen to this Oasis song when At was a toddler and then it popped up on the playlist today when we were ferrying stuff At was taking to donate to the thrift store/ put into storage in our basement preparatory to moving to Chicago TOMORROW. I knew she meant to move at the end of the month, but I didn't know it was going to be so soon. (Only two or three days sooner than I expected, but it seemed to make a big difference today.) 

And then tears were rolling down my face and I was trying to brush them away as I was driving and At was ruefully petting my arm and saying, "Mama, you're not doing what the song is telling you to do" (i.e., "stop crying my heart out.") That made me smile a bit. Then she helpfully noted that we've never lived this far apart before upon which I started crying again. 

And some stuff going into storage were picket signs for a cause At had poured years of work into and had come to naught and some stuff going to the thrift store was stuff I had agonized over and spent a way too much money getting for her. Plus our Flu and Covid shots hurt and made me bleed. And I haven't heard this song in years, and "all of the stars are fading away" made me think of my mom, and every thing has the potential to make me sad today. 

[I know this is the right move for At, and that Chicago is not that far away, and we'll talk, chat, and FaceTime, and all that... But this feels huge and uncharted. Plus there are all sorts of other risks in Chicago now for a brown person like At.]

Pic: The nonchalant snowperson from earlier this week, whom I termed my patronus, is a melty, deflated mess. They feel like today's patronus.

Back... with some secrets

We made it back ok! We even enjoyed our surprise road trip. Things could have gone wrong, but they didn't. StephLove recently asked how Big A's health was, and I actually had to stop and think about it. While my mom was in the ICU, Big A was making trips to the E.R. as a patient with unexplained FUOs and then... we just stopped going as the fevers faded. No diagnosis or explanation, but I'm grateful things didn't go wrong-er. 

We returned to a full house. Nu was back from the week they'd spent volunteering with St. Jude's in Memphis, At had spent the weekend at home taking care of the puppy sibs, and homecoming was loud and loving. The kids brought the tree up from the basement, and we're officially in holiday mode now.

Secrets: I didn't buy a single thing in New York. (Like not a single keepsake or souvenir or even any presents for the kids.) 

Big A and I did our usual thing at the beginning of our weekend where we seriously contemplated moving to NYC after retirement and then scrapping it as we realized afresh that we'd have to give up too much to be able to live even half as well.

I think we're going to do tinsel wigs for the holiday card this year. 

And in the laziest hack ever, our tree goes into storage completely dressed, so all we do at holiday time is unzip the tree cover and plug in the light cord. 

Pics: Nu's photo of At, Max, and me with our freshly decorated  uncovered Christmas tree.

the reckoning

A lovely last day in the city where we met and fell in love two decades ago.

Es Devlin's Congregation at the Perlman Center (poetic) , the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA (brilliantly wintery) and a leisurely linner at a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant where my curry had all the coconut milk I craved and my papaya salad was liberally laced with chillies. 

Presumably because of the tiny snow storm, our flight home kept getting delayed... from 7 to 9 to 10 to 11. And went through a similar number of gate changes. I guess we can't say we were taken by surprise when our flight got canceled. 

There are no other direct flights until tomorrow, and Big A has to work Monday night, so we're going to rent a car and drive through the night to make it home. 

Pic: A glimpse of Congregation.

mild disappointments

Today was series of mild disappointments, the kind that happen when you're too hyped up for something. 

The show that was critically acclaimed and came so highly recommended was... alright. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't terrific. Liberation takes place in Ohio in the 1970s around a group of feminists, and Big A who grew up in Ohio in the 1970s surrounded by his mom and other feminists found it rather underwhelming. Same (despite my differing biography). I really loved the mini series Mrs. America (Hulu, I think) and expected something with that level of punch.

The friend I was so looking forward to meeting... I couldn't wait to get away from them. I seemed to get on their nerves no matter what I said. There's a lot of love between us, but they seemed to be able to see secret agendas in a lot of what I said and did. And that was exhausting. (I didn't have any secret agendas.)

Dinner was at an upscale Thai place (Chalong), and it was good, but I love regular Thai food just fine, I guess? Big A told me that the Thai government actively promotes Thai restaurants worldwide as part of their "gastrodiplomacy" program. Wild.

Pic: Our Liberation  playbills and the beginning of a baby snow storm.

in NYC

Left home at 3:30 am this morning for a weekend trip to NYC with Big A. 

I tend to give away a lot of our extra cash to GoFundMes and buying groceries for internet strangers, and Big A who makes way more than I do lets me do what I want, so when he wants to live large once in a while, I play along. 

Here we are at Le Benardin, eating plates of perfectly arranged art, having possibly the best meal of our lives... (and definitely the most expensive). 

There was a bisque with tarragon foam that I will dream about forever. And it's time for me to wonder again why I don't use things like parsnips and tarragon more frequently in my cooking. (I only seem to use parsnips at Thanksgiving and tarragon on summer rolls.)

Intersecting at Stoppard

Tom Stoppard died this week. I've been in awe of his work since I was an undergraduate, maybe even before I actually ever read his work, simply from the sheer audacity of the premise of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The more I knew, the more there was to love. Later, he fed my theory that writers who come to a language late as foreigners (like Conrad, Rushdie, Nabokov, Brodsky, Stoppard) write so precisely, because they have some additional intuitive insight into language. Much later, I learned of his deep connections to India as it played out in Arcadia and Indian Ink.  (In the linked article here, I was charmed to see a reference to Hermione Lee a much beloved English professor and the president of my college at Oxford.)

And it turns out that theater is life. 

In a literal sense. 

In a letter to the Times of London, in response to Stoppard's obituary, Michael Baum, a Professor emeritus of surgery, wrote: "In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of adjuvant systemic chemotherapy and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia."

[As it turns out, I wrote a letter to the editor myself this week trying to reach David Shulman. I actually met David in the late 1990s at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was with a group of people at IAS and heard someone say "Tamil Pessalama?" (Shall we speak Tamil?). I turned around expecting to see a Tamil person (the intonation and accent were so perfect), but here was this genial white guy. David is a genius (a MacArthur Genius even!) and works on poets I revere. But more recently and importantly, he's been a lifeline for me with his tireless work and compassionate voice for Palestine. I wrote a note thanking him and sent it to him at his university email address, but it was deemed undeliverable. So I then sent it to the letters editor at NYRB where he has written most recently with an earnest request to forward it... and they must have! Because this morning, I received a lovely email from David that brought tears to my eyes. (I wonder how much of my letter writing is due to reading The Correspondent!)]

Pic: Michael Baum's Letter in The Times. All the deaths since mom's seem extra poignant--Andrea Gibson, Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Alice Wong, Dharmendra, Jimmy Cliff--I'm seeing them all through her connections to them too.

post Friendsgiving post

While I was puttering around, putting things away after dinner, I found these three (At, Huck, and Max) all cozied up...

At told me she's moving to Chicago at the end of year. 

"At the end of the year," so there's some time, I thought. Before realizing that it's already the end of November. 

I'm happy for her as she's outgrown Lansing. And she was supposed to move to Seattle this year before all the tragedies happened. And Chicago is much closer. But it will mean that our impromptu trips and hangs are numbered.

Nu who was napping elsewhere when I took this pic watched the Lilith Fair documentary with me. I watched it earlier this month and LOVED IT SO MUCH. I laughed, I cried, I goosebumped up, I texted people about it, I was inspired... When I say something is feminist, this is what I want it to mean--not merely that it's women-centered, but that it is anti-patriarchal. That it is about people who support each other, that they offer opportunities to groups who are typically shut out, that they make childcare and family healthcare available, that they listen to critique (for instance, that black women artists are underrepresented) without getting defensive and work to fix it, that there is confidence being in such a space that racists and homophobes are unwelcome. 

Nu and I were looking at each other all starry-eyed, wishing we could go to one...

scary (probably toxic)

Now that a winter storm is approaching, I am regretting my choices to mope my way through the four days in Puerto Rico with no trips to the beach or the old city... Could I not even have opened the balcony door and spent a few hours soaking in the sun?

Why the heck was I so determined to be as miserable as possible?

Also, why do I keep listening to my mom's old voicemails. My sister asked me if I found it comforting or sad... And it hits differently at different times...

Possibly the worst thing I'm doing to myself is lurking on my mom's sibling group chat. I got added for updates when my mom was in the hospital, and people have forgotten I'm in there. Now when her four remaining sibs are making plans and carrying on about their lives without her, I feel so bad/sad/mad... I should just leave, but feel like that's another connection I'll lose.

Pic: The island-flavored picture I took of Puerto Rico IN THE AIRPORT.

a quarter of a century...

between this conference presentation (MLA, 2000)

and my most recent (NWSA, 2025)

* Feroza, who is beaming at me in the first picture, is one of the editors of the poetry anthology that came out last year.

** I believe Amma took the first photo... I found it in her stash anyway.

I'm sure Puerto Rico is more beautiful

...but all I've seen of it is the convention center where the conference is and the view of the bay (and the convention center) from my hotel window.

NWSA is usually my happy place, where I'm wildly social--partying every night, making appointments to meet different groups for every meal--but I had absolutely no energy this year. I could fake short spurts and then I'd go veg at a talk or by myself in my room. 

I got elected Caucus chair last evening and then texted Big A that I was having the worst time ever and went to sleep. Apparently he texted me near midnight and then a couple of times after that. Then he proceeded to get worried when I didn't respond and called me around 3 am... I know I have a reputation for bad sleep habits, but surely I'm allowed to deviate once in a while?

Can't wait to head home today.

Pic: Sunrise from my hotel room window.

cap-ability

Despite how melancholy I've been at NWSA this year, I managed to take our annual "Madras Madcap" photos with dear SR. 

  

We were just acquaintances when we started, but we're super close now.

(Her mother had been ailing for years and we both lost our mothers within weeks of each other--I didn't expect us to twin in this.)

Here we are through the years!

what I'm actually here for

Haven't ventured outside of the hotel+convention center yet...

But I managed to deliver my paper "Tell Me Where It Hurts: Dis-ease, (Dis)Embodiment, and the Body Politic in Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories" well to a packed room (and got an offer to have it anthologized after Q&A) so that part was good.

Pic: Nevermind what's going on with my hair.
 

here, I guess

This is the only travel I'd anticipated and planned for this semester--my annual trip to the NWSA. All the other trips happened because of tragedy or unexpected success. Anyway.

Big A was working last night, and my direct flight to Puerto Rico from Detroit took off early, so I walked to the airport shuttle (Lansing to Detroit) at 4 am with my luggage (just a backpack, no worries).

Pic: "Home" for the next three nights... I guess that Paris hotel room spoiled me, because I texted "where is the hammock?" to the family chat.

lookez-vous*

Happy to be greeted by this crepuscular sunshine on my way home.

And happy to be back home, reunited with Big A, Max, and Huckie... and At and Nu on the phone.

Now to check on the backlog of work.

*I saw this bit of franglais on a billboard and it made me chuckle. I couldn't wait to use it myself... take that, Duolingo.

all treats

Our team won SILVER at the iGEM !! (We won bronze last year, so we're goin' up, up, up!) 

I took off by myself for the first time this week, and visited St. Michel, St. Germain, La Sorbonne (where E.M and I presented a paper virtually earlier this year), and meandered all over the left bank.

Then I saw an old friend on the Paris metro and took a picture with him.

I can't wait to be back with family tomorrow. It has been so difficult this week. I guess I've been here too long--at dinner today, the waiter said he was sure he'd met me before, making people at my table laugh.

lightness

 J is a francophile, so while we were texting about something else, I mentioned being in Paris and she suggested I light a candle for my mom. 

I could kick myself for not thinking of it myself. I wish I had done it at Notre Dame where we visited on Monday. I've talked before about how much she loved when I translated Anatole France's short story "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame" from my high school french textbook for her.

But of course, the story doesn't take place at the cathedral, it takes place at a some abbey in rural France, so I went to the church down the street to light a candle. And then later we happened to head to Montmartre for dinner and climbed up to the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, where I got to light another candle for my mom. 

I feel all lit up myself and the most present I've felt on this trip. Thanks for the idea, J <3.

Pic: View from the steps of the basilica.