Stories that demand to be told | #31
"To stay lush, you needed roots below and above the ground and a community that stood with you."
This is the 31st edition of Stories that demand to be told, a curated spread of the most evocative, resonant, real stories. Welcome to Ochre Sky Stories, a home for writers from the Ochre Sky Workshops, facilitated by
and .
1. An Abandoned Cat Was Waiting on the Kerb. I Couldn't Leave Her Behind by
Feeling lost and helpless, I started spending more time with her, finding solace in her company. She'd nap beside me after her meal while I scrolled through my phone. Friends who missed me knew where to find me—on the pavement with Genie.
That's when I made her a promise. If I couldn't bring Genie home, I'd bring home to Genie.
The realization jolted me. As a lifelong Indian expat, I've never had a "permanent" home. Three generations of my family have lived in the Gulf. I have always been a fan of dark wooden furniture but never purchased any—not because I couldn't afford it, but because that's how most transient families live here. We live in our dreams. We live from boxes to boxes, moving from apartment to apartment.
Imagine coming home daily to a place you know will always be temporary. How do you decide where to plant your roots when you just don't know when you'd be uprooted?
2. Kathlekan by
Why had the universe sent us to this ‘relic forest’ at the close of the year when we had neither planned nor known of this site until a week before our trip?
Was it to tell us that learning to live is a million-year project?
Was it to remind us that the ‘relics’ in our environment are the most alive, alert, and connected to life?
The Myristica had spent thousands of years responding, resisting, and recasting its relationship with the ground on which it stood. Why, then, were we giving up on the soil that had shaped us?
Instructions for 2025
Lush.
Kathlekan had stayed lush by building a creative life force. To stay lush, you needed roots below and above the ground and a community that stood with you.
3. Clutterbug by
Over and above organisation and hygiene, however, the greatest weapon a child possesses to derail an adult is ‘sudden interruption’. And because the inability to hear yourself think rules out the possibility of having a meaningful inner conversation, the greatest casualty of the ‘sudden interruption’ is a parent’s quality time with oneself.
I will sometimes start to voice a thought to myself and before I finish, a child will barge into the room, or drop something made of steel that will clank violently against the floor, or scream from the other end of the house out of joy or despair or simply on a whim, and by the time I return to my original thought, it has passed.
The problem is not the interruption, so much as its unpredictable nature. What sound will come, when, from where, and how long it will persist, are things I do not know. So a distraction is expected at any moment, even when none is on its way.
We hesitate to admit that we lose something deep and personal when we become parents - as if this would amount to betraying our children in some way - but while parenthood makes you grow in immeasurable ways, there is no running away from the fact that it also makes your old, original self disappear.
4. “Life is a movie, death is a photograph” — Susan Sontag by Shivam Rastogi
Eleven years ago today, my dadi left us. It was 6:10 AM. I had been asleep and couldn’t — or didn’t — see her go. Grief-stricken, the voices around me began to fade and blur. A part of me didn’t want to hear anyone else; I just wanted to hold on to her voice and the way she called me. What is love, if not sensory? I kept replaying memories in my mind — everything I remembered — but it felt like walking into a party after everyone had left. It played like an irrational fear, something I was desperately trying to hold on to. I didn’t want our memories to be erased by time. This is what it’s all about. The realization, “I can’t,” hadn’t hit me yet. It was still waiting to wake me up.
Lately, I’ve been sleeping through the early hours, tucked under two layers of blankets. The last two days have been gloomy, with rain and no sign of the sun, so I kept sleeping through this morning as well. Over time, the memories have faded, intertwined, and scattered.
“Life is a movie, death is a photograph,” a quote by Susan Sontag. She also happens to have passed on the same date as my grandmother. Two women who have had a huge impact on my life, connected by death in uncanny ways.
5. Kiss by
I can’t give N those delicious, slurpy, cheek biting kisses anymore. He thrusts his still soft teenage cheeks at me occasionally (after much grovelling from my part) and scrunches up his eyes tightly while I give him a kiss, only one kiss allowed per cheek. I accept the quota, soon even this offer may be rescinded.
I still remember the soft kiss my mother gave me each night after my bedtime story, but that stopped after I turned 9 or 10. I am sure my parents did their fair share of kissing me when I was a baby (and each other-BTS!) but being a typical Indian anti PDA family, love was always in the air, not on the lips!
I never, ever thought of kissing anyone on campus, ok, correction, I may have thought of it, but the hot and passionate imaginary kiss was always immediately replaced with the image of my father, sitting on the back of my uncle’s scooter after dropping me off at the hostel, wagging his finger at me and saying “Supri, no emotional entanglements. You have come here to study so do only that.” So Supri did only that and waited patiently for her parents to find her a suitable boy. The only rebellious thing Supri did was kissing the suitable boy after her engagement and *gasp* before her wedding.
6. Manifesto on recovering from burnout by
This experience was about more than just education and career for an elder daughter from a middle-class Indian family who was studying on a student loan. Simultaneously, relocating to a new country and adjusting to a hyper independent life took its own toll. It was fulfilling for the most part and I even surprised myself with my metamorphosis.
But, when a parched self experiences a deluge, it can be both gratifying and overwhelming. The burnout was fast catching up and no matter how intense my hustle was, the hamster wheel had to stop soon. It particularly got to me by the time December began. For the external world I appeared to be thriving but internally my drowning self struggled to keep up. When others thought that I had it all together, my inner self was crumbling down.
Standing in the shower one day, I blurted out to myself - “Never have I ever experienced a fatigue this all-encompassing. I am fully spent. I have nothing more to give!”
7. The real difference between my husband and me by
“Look, I will book you a really fancy room somewhere else,” I said, now feeling rash and willing to do what I would otherwise have argued was a waste of money.
“This woman needs to meet people like me,” he said. “Trust me, I have studied in TD College in Jaunpur. Tilak Dhari Singh Chhatri Inter College was a senior school for upper-caste Hindu boys. I was the only Muslim in my batch. Boys would come looking for me by name just to see what I looked like. The son of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader in the city became my best friend. He took me under his wing protectively. Eventually I was the favourite of the teachers.”
“So you think this lady will see your beautiful face and twinkling eyes and feel better about the world?”
“Exactly,” he said. “I’m sure she has a beautiful, antique porcelain tea-set. I want to have tea with this couple. It will be charming.”
The difference between Afzal and me is that while I spend a lot of time worrying about the state of the world, this man always has a good cup of tea on his mind.
8. A Tale of Two Writing Workshops by
Doubtfuley Kaku, as I call her, is a middle-aged Marathi auntie. She is always chattering loudly in her balcony. Always taming her long hair into an oily plait. Possessive of her Tupperware dabbas, she loves peeping into other windows of my mind, eager to report dangerous activities. A good citizen, she speaks in Marathi, except when she asks her favourite question in English, “How Dare You?”, dragging the day-arrr with a Marathi accent and auntie judgement.
My bio reads this — Raju Tai is a friend, writer, teacher, and a friendly writing teacher. Mrs. Doubtfuley disapproves. “Friend? After so many break-ups? How dare you?,” she evaluates. “Writer? I didn’t know you wrote a book. I toh didn’t see any...,” she taunts. “Teacher? Vhery goood! Ejjucation is good only, but how dare you think you can teach writing?,” she challenges.
Most days I ignore her, the way we ignore desi aunties at family functions. But an internalised auntie lives in the mind. She is harder to ignore. Yet, I continue to write and teach. Even if Doubtfuley Kaku is right, I don’t know much else. Since I conducted my first writing workshop in 2017, I haven’t searched for my “purpose”. There is nothing more fulfilling for me than teaching writing, except writing.
Discover the creative fire and hidden poetry in our everyday lives with
and at The Rhythm of our Stories workshop.
Discover the transformative power of personal writing with Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai at Ochre Sky Stories Memoir Workshop
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Always such a delight to be a part of this list, in the reassuring company of beautiful writers ✨
This gives me such an Awwww wali vibe! Thank you!