In a Barcelona hotel room, I suffered a nervous breakdown. Almost. Why was I roaming the far reaches of the planet, I wondered, where many Indian women dared not go? Jet lagged and exhausted, I located the bus station and bought myself a ticket, then woke up at 3 a.m....
As part of a grieving global community I mourn equally the loss of the seven astronauts. But as a mother of three girls, I somehow feel as though in Kalpana Chawla, the ill-fated Columbia’s space scientist, I have lost an unknown daughter. The term that most closely...
At the outset, I must confess one thing; I love mysteries. Many of my literary friends consider mystery a genre deserving the label of trash. But I love a good whodunit. I love the suspense, the passion gone awry, the unearthing of clues, and the final resolution, in...
It was when I was helping my older son with his middle-school homework that I first came across a tome titled A Message of Ancient Days. So I read about Mesopotamia and the birth of agriculture, about Iceman, about the Ming and Hang dynasties. Frankly, I was getting...
I said to a friend the other day, “I wish I were a really nice person!” “But you are nice!” she replied. I didn’t know quite how to explain what I meant. As far back as I can remember, I never wanted to be a “nice” girl. Because the nice girls I knew never got...
My childhood memories of Nagpur are marked only by festivals. The onset of monsoon rains heralded Bhulabai, or little Goddess. It was the first festival to dawn on my consciousness, perhaps because it was the one reserved exclusively for girls. Every household with a...
