#theweightofjupiter

you so luckkkkky

i’m so freaking excited, my sister saw her last tour and talked me into it, it’s cost me like 170 + booking fees

When I go to Delhi, whether by a fifteen hour flight in which the attendant wishes me a good stay and the first face I see getting off at Indira Gandhi International Airport is that of the slain Prime Minister herself, or in my mind, listening to old, melancholic Mohammad Rafi songs on cassette tapes my father played lying on his terrace as a teenager, I find peace. There is a peculiar kind of halcyon rest in the blaring of car horns from every which way because traffic laws are last week’s news, in the Urdu language of poets who read their mournful couplets every Saturday, in the gravelly voiced salesman in the bazaar who tries to sell me bangles clean enough to see my own reflection, in the tied tight veil I have to wear over my hair before entering holy places, like mosques, or unholy ones, like the city buses, which no girl over ten rode alone.

Delhi is a mess; no one knows this better than me because no one loves Delhi quite like I do. It is a town of contradictions, a living, breathing conundrum. If Delhi were a book, I would be a flower, dried and steam-pressed into its frayed pages. I cannot speak of myself without speaking of Delhi too – we are inexorably intertwined. My experiences there have defined my personality – my stubbornness, my humor, my hope. There are parts of me scattered all over this town; it’s overwhelming in a heart-swelling sort of way to notice when I’m waiting for a train and the platform is crowded with women in saris tugging along their children that I’m every one of them and they’re all me. If you went to Delhi, it would adopt you too, because Delhi is both a barren woman and an orphaned child. It was designated the capital because it had no history, because it was a marriage between everyone – Tibetan refugees, Punjabi businessmen, Bengali teachers, American travelers who, riding on rickety red rickshaws, charmed with the “exotic” locale they see through rose-colored glasses with Orientalist lens, perhaps loved the city better than me, maybe because they hadn’t had to put up with it and it hadn’t had to put up with them.

There is no place I feel more love than in Delhi, and there is no place where I feel more cynical. Its history is one littered with shards, a violence that is at once casual and unspoken, and it is for my sisters in Delhi that I weep the most. Like them, the city almost lives in fear of itself, its underbelly clouding the entire foggy mirror. Like them, the city is bruised and ignored – I want change for them and for this hometown of mine, so cursed by its inhabitants, current and former – my parents included.

Nonetheless, a beautiful hope springs eternal in that town. It is in all of India in fact, but nowhere more so than Delhi, because it has embraced everyone – the British imperialists, the persecuted Zoroastrians, me – and it has been marred by many, yet, in a country with an immeasurable palette of languages, ethnicities, and religions, it has never closed its doors. As James Baldwin once said, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition,” Delhi is not a city, it is a constellation of all the stars and scars that compose me.       

#persimmonlions #why r u onto me

congrats!

Those exit polls are ridiculous, it looks impossible, I'm so excited and I can't stay up. Poo.

yeah ur right i deserve zayn

EXCUSE U i really into the madame zeroni suffering a mid-life crisis look