Lakshmi Iyer's Blog, page 62

Grief And Regrets

I sit up wide awake from what must have been a light sleep. The clock reads 4:00 AM. I pick my phone as is habit. The first status on my newsfeed is a cryptic message mourning the loss of someone who was once dear to me. A childhood friend, a friend from my teenage, a […]

This Little Girl Of Mine

“You are making sad choice!” “Because it is very cold outside?” “I enjoyed The Nutcracker.” She speaks in sentences. Her eyes sparkle as they meet her sisters coming down the stairs. Her hair cascading in waves frame her tiny face. She holds a rag doll and is ready for school. On our drive she remarks […]

They Will Be Okay

It is raining, a miserable grey day punctuated with bouts of soggy wet rain, the kind that does not let up and instead drips all day filling the air with the indescribable smell of things disintegrating and returning to its elemental forms. The alarm goes off and I hit the pause button on the episodes […]

Ten Years Of Grief

I pause at the doorway, my eyes lingering on the monthly planner. The kids have been crossing out days religiously since the beginning of the month to Thanksgiving. My eyes however, have been on a different date. The funk has been closing in on me like an ominous bubble. Sometimes they are visceral, sometimes they […]

A Cake For Those Humdrum Days

A long while back, I tried my hand at noting down recipes on a different blog. I did it sporadically and eventually gave up. Now that I stay home and cook many meals a week, a lot of my life revolves around food and the making of it. Instead of compartmentalizing parts of my life […]

Gratitude List

I woke up this morning feeling incredibly rested. The clock showed 5:00 AM, far too early to be up on a holiday. I lay in bed, eyes closed but awake trying to put in words the things I am grateful for today. Instead of words, I got a series of visuals akin to watching a […]

Book Review: With Malice By Eileen Cook

At the beginning of the year I told myself I would try and read at least two books a month and signed up for the Goodreads Book Challenge for 25 books. I am currently close to 80 books and we have a month left in the year. The other thing I told myself was that […]

Love In The In-Between Spaces

I sat across my friend at the local Indian restaurant. Our plates full and the tables too close together. I tried hard to not notice our neighbor giving us a little too much attention. We sat, her and I, talking about our daughters and exchanging notes on the local elementary school. This lunch would have […]

3 Quote Challenge: 2

The first time I heard this quote in the movie, it stuck with me. Pithy, profound and applicable to almost everything in my life, I have quoted it to myself more often than I can count. On the first day home with Ammu and Pattu, I lay on the carpet, the twins crawling around me. […]

Of Struggling With Labels

“I don’t like my fake name” muttered Ammu, my first daughter. I was bent over the stove tossing rice noodles in a base of lemon and sesame oil. The heady aroma of tempered mustard and curry leaves almost made me miss the statement. A part of me always attuned to disturbances in the air peaked […]