# Worship, Domesticity, and Punctuation There are mornings when the house itself seems to breathe a prayer. Not in the grand, cathedral sense—no incense, no bells tolling across the city. Rather, in the small ceremony of things: the way light falls across the kitchen table, how the kettle's steam rises like an offering, the order we impose on dust. I have come to think that worship is not always a matter of temples. Sometimes it hides in the domestic, in those moments when we pause before washing the dishes, when we arrange flowers with a kind of reverence, when we fold clothes as if each garment holds the memory of someone we love. These are the rituals no one watches. No priest sanctions them. Yet in them lives a devotion—quiet, unadorned, utterly ordinary. Consider the comma. It too is a small act of pause, a breath taken in the middle of speech. Without it, sentences sprawl and lose their music. With it, we mark the cadence of thought itself. The comma is domestic punctuation—it keeps the sentence from flying apart; it brings order to the tumble of words. And perhaps this is what all worship does: it punctuates our days. It marks where we stop, where we gather ourselves, where we acknowledge that something matters. The house teaches this without words. A kitchen is a small temple. The table where we sit is an altar. The act of repetition—cooking, cleaning, mending—is liturgy. We do not do these things because they are grand; we do them because they are necessary, and in necessity, something sacred dwells. This is not mysticism. It is only attention. The turning of a doorknob. The settling of dust in afternoon light. The way silence has weight, presence, the density of prayer.

 
There are many people in this world for whom no one ever waits. If there is someone in your life who waits for you, then you are far more fortunate than them. They have only a house; they have no one to fill it. You have both a house and the people who make it home.


I will speak some difficult truths now. Don't mind some of them.


Suppose you love only one person in this world besides your parents. That person understands, precisely, the depth of your love. With great joy, she tells others how much you love her—she shares stories of your little mad follies, the things you do for her—and she also makes it clear to everyone that your love is one-sided. She explains to all that when someone loves so deeply, they cannot be entirely ignored, and so she responds to you sometimes, whenever she finds a moment. But truly, no emotion or affection moves her in this. Of course, it causes her no distress that you love her this way; she knows it and accepts it all. After knowing and understanding all this, regarding her—
1. How will your feelings be?
2. At what position do you see yourself in this relationship?
3. What do you think your next decision regarding her should be?


Where any relationship, be it more or less, requires some role from both people, a relationship cannot be moved forward by the consistent effort of only one, nor should it be. Because then one party reaches a certain point and begins to take the relationship for granted. The notion of taking something for granted in any relationship causes much harm. In such a relationship, ultimately nothing truly remains. Any relationship—whether it be love, friendship, kinship, or anything else—requires some love along with sincerity. A relationship born merely from necessity becomes oddly calculating once that necessity is exhausted. Then, sometimes, old resentments, unmet hopes, neglect—these pile up one after another, cluttering the heart. When a relationship becomes mere necessity like this, it is better not to carry it forward; at least it prevents bad situations from arising in the future. Every relationship does contain some need and necessity. Essentially, no relationship is built or sustained without need, yet the needs in a relationship must come from both sides. Both must give something. Just as love cannot be received without giving love, neither can love be received without giving some love in return. And again, if one wishes to receive love, one must first have the capacity to accept and hold love.


Those under whom we live, those for whom we work, those for whom we earn our bread or sustain our living—we must serve them in some way. Had we not, we could not have lived. When we give something to a beggar and often do so without telling others, we still give it in our hearts for the Creator's pleasure. Perhaps that person has no need of us, yet we sit waiting for something in return from the Creator. It may be merely the Creator's grace, or perhaps nothing at all, and yet there persists the purpose of our own mental ease. And many times we help for the sake of pure mental satisfaction, yet there too we give because some expectation of gain lingers within us.

That achievement can only be peace of mind. If even that were absent, we would do nothing for anyone. And what should a person do in that moment when no one loves them? Should they go from door to door seeking love from others, or should they love themselves so deeply that they no longer need anyone else’s love?

A conversation with myself. Where is such strength in me! Where shall I find such patience, such courage! To be that generous—one needs such a vast heart, the purest of hearts. How fortunate one must be to possess such a heart! If I speak so often of love, is love really something so simple? How much can a person bear—to love without return, for a lifetime? Does that love still carry the intensity of the first touch, the trust, the reverence of those early days? Does love consciously make us weep? The most fierce love—does it have any language at all? Can all the feelings of love be captured in words, in the alphabet’s frame? The affection I nurture day after day in silence—this awakened tenderness gradually becomes love, a debt, a burden I carry, burrowing deeper and deeper into the soft place in my chest, tunneling into profound depths. That affection becomes chained, bound, circling round and round in a silent, anguished cry, turning and turning… yet it finds no language worthy of expression anywhere! What will become of that love… will such feelings simply remain locked behind closed doors, suffocating, until one day they just die with a thud? Who says the world has been emptied of love? Do they not know how many countless loves this world holds in the depths of its breast across millions and millions of years? Even when the world ends, those loves will not. How much of our own mind do we truly know? Perhaps dust settles on our memories and new loves pile up in layers, but does that mean we can shake away all the old ones? Humans go to their graves carrying the dust of love. How I wish—how I wish those accumulated loves could be washed away one day, swept far away… Those who give beautiful moments—those who constantly, on the flimsiest pretexts, bestow such golden moments of countless love—do they know how rich they are? If I could burn this life itself and forge such a radiant mind…

You call me Lakshmi, but I am not Lakshmi, not at all Lakshmi, I am the very opposite. I torment you, I force you to call me, I force you to talk to me, and when I see you with someone else I grow jealous, when I hurt over you I speak harsh words to hurt you back, I behave strangely with you… I don’t speak tenderly at all… instead I cause you pain! I am nothing like Lakshmi, so why do you call me Lakshmi, dear one? Until I do something like Lakshmi would, you should never call me that. This is my punishment. It is what I deserve for what I have done. I am going to sleep now. And listen—I will torment you, I will torment you. Why don’t you message me? Why don’t you ask about me? You must give me my share of time… you must. Give me your time. You see, today I will wrap myself around you and sleep. All night I will hold you close.

Go on then, go where you want to go. My heart isn’t quite right today. Next month Mother and Father are going for the pilgrimage. I’ve never been left like this before, completely alone without them. And you’re not here beside me either…you’re so far away, besides which you’re always busy…well, of course that’s fine, however things are…you’re still there, aren’t you? I wait for you, it makes me happy. Is there anything else we can do beyond this? You tell me! And one more thing. Don’t send me anything written in English. When you write to me in English, I feel like you’re angry with me, like you’re scolding me.

Do I trouble you too much then? But I’m bound to make trouble. Didn’t you say you’d call me every day? And what date is it in the month today? Didn’t you say you’d come see me this month?…I haven’t been doing much lately. These past two days I haven’t read a thing, haven’t written either. I’ve been going through pictures all day, making a thesis out of them. Give me a scolding, won’t you—quick about it! Sorry, I misspoke…I was reading about your pictures all day. And listen here, my dear, you played tricks on me yesterday too, I didn’t understand it then, I was in some kind of daze, but I understand now. Here’s what happened: you did call me yesterday, that’s true, but you didn’t talk about us, you only talked about other work and matters. You shouldn’t do that. Why don’t you scold me? Why don’t you scold me when I don’t study? If you love someone, you have to scold them—don’t you know that? Why are you such a fool? All right then, what do you actually know? I miss you terribly, and that’s why I can’t keep my mind on my studies. What should I do, you tell me? Where should I go? And here’s what I’ve decided: I’m going to message you and pester you, and I will pester you! I know I sometimes misunderstand you. But I’ll still say what I want to say, I’ll keep on saying it.

Moni, something’s happened to me lately, do you know? Though I can’t even say when it started, exactly. Everything inside me has become somehow…different. I’ve changed completely, I’ve fallen to pieces. Sometimes I feel as though I’m floating in emptiness, as if my body doesn’t exist at all. I’m drifting along with the air. I’m not here, I’m not there—I’m nowhere at all! Why is this happening, tell me? Will you let me drift away like this forever…will I only ever drift with the wind? Didn’t you once ask me whether I could feel love from a distance, whether I could feel you? For me, love means only you. In this small corner of my world, until now I have felt only you—no one has ever been able to separate you from me. No, I’ve never been able to speak these things aloud to you. Even now I can’t make you understand what you are in my life, what your love means to me…the finest feelings in all the world can never be expressed in any language. I haven’t been able to tell you anything about what I feel, I can’t even write it—I don’t have that richness in me.

You have no idea—you couldn’t even imagine—how completely you scramble me, in every single moment.

How much of me you occupy, I don’t know, I can’t fathom it…I only know that I am no longer inside myself, I am truly no longer me. I have transformed entirely, become nothing but you. You ask me to be steady, but how am I to steady myself? How am I to master myself? The key to my control lies in your hands! If you will it, I can do anything, if you speak it, everything happens within me, your desire blooms inside me, I feel it. Beyond this, I know nothing else. You sit in contemplation, then tell me—do this, do that…and I do it all, I become everything, I can do anything for you, as if you’ve found a magic wand and I am a wooden puppet…I dance, I am made to dance, I cannot help but dance! Why do I become this way? Perhaps it is what I wish to be. How much further will I drift away? And yet I must eventually wash ashore on your banks! The truth is, I don’t want to know what love is, how it holds us, what that priceless feeling truly amounts to! I only know that I love, that I am myself a living piece of love! Whether you will it or not, I love you. Whether you see me or not, I love you. When you look, I love; when you don’t, the love remains exactly as it was. You are the substance of my well-being, you alone are the substance of my suffering too. The words I could never speak, or for which I still have no language, they burn me from within, constantly. I writhe and struggle. What is all this, really?

I think perhaps I shall die, or else why would this be? Such joy, such tenderness, such anguish running through my body and soul…What am I to do with all this if I cannot reach you? Love—it is the finest feeling in the world! That feeling is granted and held only if you are born blessed with it. It enters the veins slowly, drop by drop, shaking the entire body. You know, these days when I look at you, I stare without blinking, and nothing else enters my mind, time simply passes…and keeps passing and passing, and it seems as though my entire life has been meant only to be spent gazing at you, I have no urgency, nowhere else to go. If ever you gain the power to truly feel me, lay your head upon my breast and see how much of me is yours and how much is still my own…It cannot be said that way—that feeling, that warmth, only those who carry it know it…Its sting is its strength! Its intensity, its bitterness—it does not merely take, it brings an entire life into my cupped hands! Sometimes I am seized by the fierce desire to trace my touch across your whole body. I long to slowly drink you in entirely. I long to surrender myself completely to you and be purified. My heart craves you, my body craves you, my soul writhes for you in hope of liberation…Will I ever be free? Will I ever possess myself again? I am losing myself by degrees…Beyond this love, is there another love whose nature I know nothing of? Does love have other forms, other faces?

# What Could Possibly Stand Above Love?

Don’t leave me, never abandon me on that open road alone. I’ll lose my way, I’ll die scattered somewhere. Let my end be where my beginning was. Let me crumble. Let me fade. Let me slowly dim in this obsession. Love never diminishes, you know that, don’t you? It never diminishes at all. Perhaps the languages of expression change, but love—love only ever grows. Countless forms of love are born every day. A person whom someone truly loves, genuinely loves—that person’s memory can never be forgotten. Thoughts of them peek into the heart, they intoxicate it—with reason or without, in season and out of season. Something has happened to me. Nothing feels good, nothing feels bad, nothing matters anymore. What’s happened to me? Listen, you haven’t written a single love poem in so long. Please, write me a love poem. Even if it’s for me!

O my bird of the heart, yes, I know I constantly misunderstand you in words, I pull you toward complaints in a thousand ways. But do you know what I’m doing? I treat you that way so I can extract a little more tenderness from you. If I can draw affection from you, why won’t you give it? Tell me! It’s my right, isn’t it? Whether through anger, through wounded pride, through your pain—however it comes, I’ve claimed it! So why won’t you give it? What is this stinginess of yours? I know you’re physically so far from me, but mentally I will keep you close to me. Yes, I will. And if I can do that, why won’t you stay with me? Fine, if you want to go, don’t even stay that much. I don’t need you to have you anymore! Listen, reading what you’ve written these past few days, it seems you’ve already said everything I had to say. So what’s left for me to say? Nothing remains for me. I would have written these very things, but I could never have expressed them so clearly. I won’t write anything more. I’m happier seeing all my words reflected in your eyes.

What meaning does it have—poisoning your lives together while being forced to make a home with someone, and then offering your child as an excuse? You can’t separate because of him, isn’t that right? What are you trying to say? Your marriage endures for your child’s future? You’re deciding to stay together for a lifetime through such sacrifice, through such renunciation? Two people pulling in opposite directions, two people who create nothing but discord when together—are you really not separating for your child’s future, or is it the fear of society around you? Or fear of insecurity? Women, mostly, are afraid of insecurity. Where will I go after this? How will I survive the rest of my life? And you—you place the burden of this relationship on your child! When your ugly fights don’t remain between just the two of you, when they don’t stay within those four walls—don’t you feel ashamed then? Do you still offer your child as an excuse then? Tell me, don’t you! Can’t you look into your child’s face and surrender your ego, stop the quarreling, and silently endure?

Do you not think that the daily discord of household life leaves an ugly mark on the child—on the various relations that make up their world? You quarrel in front of them, and meanwhile their psychological growth becomes grievously twisted. You bear a child only to kill them, bit by bit, in this manner? Oh, but that is your right, isn’t it? Your own child, therefore you can do as you please with them! Know this: every living being in this world has a claim to freedom.

A child suffers from insecurity in their own home from the very beginning. Why? Nothing stops you from speaking your mind in front of them—why should it? Or have you saved all those restraints for when you need to put on a show of propriety? Or do you believe yourselves to be angels, and count the preservation of the household in this way as some noble deed? Is the child yours alone, or theirs alone? And then, in the presence of the child, you conduct yourselves badly toward one another. Toward whom? Whoever it is—who are they truly to you? If you speak ill of the child’s mother in front of your child, will they respect you at all when their mind comes of age? A husband and wife—is their relation only one of love and living together? Who said that? Who told you such things? The relation between husband and wife means concealing each other’s faults from the world. Didn’t your elders teach you this? Didn’t hers teach her? Why didn’t they? Or did they conduct themselves this way too? Why didn’t you learn it of your own accord? Why didn’t she? Why didn’t you clarify these things before marriage? Were you not an adult when you married? Was she not? And yet, for all that, the burden of your living together falls entirely on that small child—why? What fault is theirs? They are growing; why must you quarrel before them? Why must you conduct yourselves in such a way that the child comes to believe there is no love, no respect, no trust between their mother and father—not even the bare minimum of regard for one another? You raise them in such an environment, and then you expect something good from them… is this some kind of jest?

Why don’t you sit down and divide your needs, your responsibilities, between yourselves? In truth, what do you each think you are in your own place? She is not worthy of you, you are not worthy of him—this is it, isn’t it? You didn’t know before marriage that marriage is not for yourself alone? What did you expect? In what ways were you disappointed? Write it down on a piece of paper! You will see that where disillusionment looms large, there looms something far larger still in your hearts—mere unwillingness, mere disgust. You will see it, truly! People don’t want to be with their companions, fine… but they themselves don’t even know why! Or the excuses they make up are mostly quite trivial! Very well, let’s leave all that. Let me speak to you. You pursue your own happiness with yourself, they pursue theirs with something else—and in all this, why did you bring a new person into being between you? Did they come here of their own will, I mean between the two of you? Why did you bring them? To care for you in your old age? Or to listen to this daily dirge of yours? Because you have become mother and father, do you think you own everything about the child? Is causing disturbance every day, every moment you are home, what this means? And then you say being a mother and father is not easy… what is easy, then? This—your constant quarrelling, at some point coming to blows, or destruction of things—this is what you will do!

# On the Mind of a Child, and the Duty of Parents

Do you understand that a child has an inner life—a mental and emotional landscape of his own? If he grows up in such an atmosphere, he will not become a good person, will not give anything good to the world. Do not then expect too much from him.

Child, child—how many times must we speak of children? Does one have to die to go to hell? If you have already turned your own home into one, what is death but something familiar? Is it not more urgent to be an ideal companion before aspiring to be an ideal mother or father? We become husbands, we become wives—but how rarely do we become true friends to each other! The secret of a happy marriage lies in the friendship between man and woman. Remember this: your child needs both of you. If the two of you cannot become one person, living under the same roof, then please—do not burden your child with the excuse of your failure. And listen: your child has a mind of his own. If you cannot be united, do not force him to believe that no one in this world is truly happy. If a child learns early that he has come into the world only to suffer, then the unfolding of his intellect and imagination becomes impossible. So, at least for his sake, sit together and talk things through. Make whatever compromises you must, give whatever ground you can—just do it. And yes—I could not do it, they could not do it—but does that mean you cannot? Each life is its own. One person’s life can never truly align with another’s. I was, in truth, a careless and indifferent sort of girl, and so I could not. I did not honor the bond, and so I failed. I had countless mistakes, countless faults, and so I could not. Hate me. Hate my helplessness—but do not become hateful yourselves.

And hear me: I understood that I could not do it. I came to know that I could not give my child a healthy family life. This is why I left everything behind. Do you think I abandoned him before I had even tried to endure? Very well—you do not abandon. You persevere. You show him goodness. If you cannot, then never come to me saying I did not even attempt it. In a life I never truly lived, much can be said. Say what you will! I attempted; that much I did. If you make the effort and you endure, if you flourish and can show me happiness, then I will salute you all my life and freely admit my failure to you without shame. But if not—never, ever come telling me that you stayed together for your child. That is not sacrifice. You are doing this to shield yourselves from the cruel words and bitter looks of others, for your own sakes alone, certainly not for your child’s. When is it truly for the child? When two people, even apart, spend their whole lives watching over that child and entangle themselves in no other bond, clinging to that child alone to survive, making every compromise if need be—or, whatever else they do, ensure that their separation leaves not a scratch upon the child’s life, attending to the child’s every need with meticulous care. Do you know what it means to diminish oneself grain by grain? To surrender all your small and great joys, to dedicate your entire life to the family? Do you understand such things? When you say, “for the child’s sake, this; for the child’s sake, that”—then speak with knowledge. Truly for the child. Only for the child. If it is not thus, then do not speak those words at all.

# A Matter of Pieces

Some for me, some for you, some for the family, some for society—can any of it ever truly belong to the child? Whatever belongs to everyone belongs, in the end, to no one. Can you stand before your child and lay bare everything between you? Can you expose yourselves to one another without reserve? There is so much you keep hidden—as everyone does—and much of it you do not even know yourselves, or you are afraid to bring it into the light of day and think about it. Such transparency is not possible; no one can achieve it, and neither can you. Can you? Perhaps there is no such transparency left anywhere these days. When you are first busy with your own happiness, why then invoke the child as an excuse? Learn to keep honesty in your words and in your thoughts. I know that reading this, you think ill of me. My words do not sit well with you. But I must speak; I will speak!

There is a dignity in breaking what was built grain by grain, and only the one who knows how to build can truly break. One who builds can build again. Yes, I was the one who built it; I understood that I could not go further, and so I came away and broke it myself. One who knows only how to break, once something shatters in their hands, never recovers it. Do you know why I broke it? So that someone else could build anew according to their own desire. A relationship that has not yet broken but exists in a state worse than if it had—such a relationship deserves to break. Once broken, it can be rebuilt afresh, and that serves both. Life does not pause for anyone. I stepped aside and made room for another. I did not wish to continue; that is why I did not sustain the bond. I have not deceived myself, nor have I deceived another. What I could not bear, I set down. I did not cheat myself, nor did I allow another to be cheated. I understood that the bond between husband and wife is sacred, a relation of mutual compromise, of walking together with give from both sides. But that does not mean that marriage is the death of one’s personal life. Every person is first a person, only then a husband or wife, a father or mother. What is a person who has no self at all? I understood then that this logic held no ground there.

When you think of marriage not as a new relation but as a bond—that is when all this trouble begins, is it not? Is marriage a bond or a need? Is it a need of one or of both? You will not give ground yourself, yet you will fight endlessly for concessions! What freedom do you seek? What do you truly want from marriage? Marriage is not a new chapter, nor is there anything new to begin. Marriage is taking something new and drawing it into the familiar path you have already walked. Sometimes you walk that path to its end together; sometimes you find yourself alone again, suddenly, midway. Yet the path itself remains the same, nothing is lost except some time and some memories. Whether a child exists or not on that same curve of the road should make no difference to whether the two walk together or apart. And you who make the child the very means of sustaining a bond—I truly pity you.

# On Love, Home, and the Weight of Time

The need for a third person in the love between two—child, parent, sibling, relative, friend—means nothing less than an *ending*. Because then those two cease to remain for each other. They stay together, yes, their bodies side by side, but their minds drift into separate rooms. A child-centered household has both parents as its roof, but how long can you force-prop a roof like that and keep it standing? Can you truly merge, wholly remain, in anything without love?

—

Forgive me. Perhaps I am overstepping, but I must speak. These things wound me. I cannot accept them. This is why I speak. I sit to read and cannot read. I sit to write and nothing comes. I sit to eat and cannot eat. I say: why should the turmoil of the mind seep into the home? At day’s end, home is where a person finds their deepest rest. If that home becomes foreign, where else is there to go? A family needs its environment to be, at least somewhat, sane for a person to remain mentally whole. Whoever has no peace at home has no peace anywhere in the world. And do not tell me again that peace comes from within. I know that already. It is not as though all external troubles must be dragged into one’s own house—two plus two does not always equal four, does it? Everyone manages, I see it all around. Every family survives through some give and take. Nothing happens alone.

—

I do not know what is becoming of me lately. I have grown so withdrawn. My entire day passes within these walls. Sangita is the only person I speak with—and you, really only you. I do not go out unless necessary. I do not even shop anymore. I am nothing like I was before. I seem to have no need for anything now. Friends, all those social ornaments—they feel unbearable to me, so false. There is real happiness in solitude, genuine peace. Whether my career happens or not hardly matters; that I am content—this is my greatest gain. To torment oneself over career is only to waste the present. What will career add when it comes? The ability to live better, that is all. Is it not far better to live modestly and live in peace? My career will come, and it will be good—but late, after everything else. It will be the finest of all things I might have become. Lateness is actually better. Once I enter working life, my taste, my habits, my entire existence will transform—whether I wish it or not. We may not even remain as we are now. Now I wait for you like a thirsty bird. Then that waiting will be gone. I will not make your breakfast with these hands anymore. Instead, I will perhaps buy expensive ready-made foods, bring them when I come to see you.

—

Waiting itself is the purest form of love and goodness. I want to drink deeply of this time. The days ahead are uncertain. The present alone feels alive to me, beautiful. It could happen that you too grow weary, and I grow weary. Exhaustion in any relationship is a terrible thing—it is the spiritual death of that bond. You can stand side by side yet never truly touch again. I have seen this happen often. A good career is not good for the health of a relationship. This may well be what lies ahead—nothing left for us to do. I speak truly. These moments, this time, will seem to us then the most honeyed days of our lives together.

As long as I remain without work, rest assured—those will be the finest days of our lives. One afternoon, you’ll discover that I’m far busier than you ever were. A new office, new colleagues, a new world, new faces, new responsibilities…and you’ll see how, drowning in all this newness, I can hardly carve out time for an old person like you. It happens in almost every relationship. I grow afraid thinking of the days ahead. The longer they stay away, the better.

Now I may have nothing at all, and yet there is one person—someone I wait for. One day I might have my own car, my own house, my own bank balance, but I won’t have the time to wait for anyone, nor will I have that person. It could be that we both, driven by life’s demands and the tyranny of hours, walk down two roads that diverge further and further apart. And then, in some deep and solitary night, I’ll realize…we’re standing at opposite poles now. I’ll remember we once had afternoons worth waiting for, evenings thick with playful banter and tenderness. Someone would return home with exhaustion and longing written across their body, eyes heavy and half-shut. And so another would stand at the window grille, making inedible things in the kitchen—things they never learned to cook—just to hear praise for the meal, counting the moments, the seconds, wondering: how much longer before he comes home?

Thank you for giving me this chance. Someone who has a person worth waiting for holds the sole dominion over an entire heaven. Let our time change, let it transform into some other time filled with busyness—so be it. Let new seasons come and occupy us—let them come. Even after everything, even accepting everything…whenever, wherever…if life itself were the wager, I would stake it all with you.