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The Last Keeper

By Sadhika
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Of late, there has been a feeling settling in my chest like dust in an empty room—soft, silent, and certain. It is the quiet realization that my memories are not permanent things. Not chiseled into stone or sealed up in iron-bound books, but written in pencil, the graphite growing faint with each passing season. I am aware, now more than ever, that what I remember will not be remembered for long. I think of my parents often. I remember my mother in her early sarees —floral, soft, like the curtains of a spring house. As the years passed, her colours dulled. Maybe they matched her age better, or maybe they just matched her mood. I see her now in my mind, young, barefoot and newly married, in a kitchen not yet hers, lifting a spoon to her mother’s lips and asking if the peas were soft enough. What was her scent like?  Turmeric?   Talcum powder? Or those white rajnigandha flowers she loved so much? I don’t remember. I think of my father and the way he used to hum when he shaved, a...
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A Village Denied

By Sadhika
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Co-authored by  Shrankhla and Sadhika on August 28, 2025 Of all the deprivations visited upon modern childhood, none is so grave and yet so little acknowledged as the absence of other people. Those of us who grew up in fuller households know what today’s children are missing. We remember weddings where ten different families would squeeze into one house, sleeping on the floor, with cousins lined up like sardines. We remember giving up one’s own bed to an elderly uncle, and waking up to the sound of aunties and uncles gossiping arguing over tea. In those homes, very little belonged entirely to us. The bed we slept on, the food on our plate, not even our stories. Someone was always listening in, correcting us, mocking us, softening our triumphs with their own, or placing a hand on our shoulders when we faltered. It was infuriating. It was also how we learned that life is not designed for any one person’s comfort—least of all a child’s. Siblings taught us this brutally and tende...
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The Sundays of my Childhood

By Sadhika
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In the small cities of India in the late nineties and early 2000s — places neither smothered by the pace of the metros nor forgotten like the crumbling hamlets — Sundays carried the weight of rituals too gentle to be laws, yet too old to be questioned. Where I grew up, a city that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it was a town or metropolis, Sundays drifted in like a lazy cow on a narrow street — unhurried, familiar, and oddly authoritative. The week in India is a relentless machine. It groans into motion Monday morning, fueled by honking scooters, school tiffins, the slap of wet laundry, and the stubborn smell of boiling rice. But come Sunday, the machine grinds to a halt, as if the city itself had taken off its slippers and leaned back against a cracked cement wall. Fathers stayed home. Their presence was both comforting and inconvenient, like a large piece of furniture dragged into the centre of a room. They read the newspaper with such gravity, you'd think the nation dep...
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