life, annotated

"I can't find the time to write"

Ankita — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:25:02 GMT

We were discussing this a few days ago in the Interior-Exterior group. How we all seek a room of one’s own, four uninterrupted hours, a settled mind that isn’t reaching for five things it needs to do. Most of us keep waiting for what Ritika, one of the writers in the group, described as ‘spaciousness’.

And while I will never deny the magic of that spacio…

#22. A full range of emotions

Ankita — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:01:14 GMT

In what relationships do you feel your full range of emotions? Where does it need work?

With Ramneek I find it effortless to air the smallest inconvenience or a gnawing worry or an irrational fear. Perhaps it is about feeling secure. With most other people, it is easy to protect myself from an imagined fracture in the relationship by holding back my ang…

Long Distance

Ankita — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:26:12 GMT

It happens when an old song comes on in the film I’m watching by myself. It is the song amongst songs that you play on our drives across Tavi running through your city—the highway built above it that offers tangerine sunsets and clearest of the crescent moons, the palace from where the river appears silver, the village carrying its gentle canals raising…

Why do you like something

Ankita — Sat, 09 May 2026 07:06:25 GMT

Qs: Has writing changed your relationship with reading? How do you continue to read for enjoyment when your writer’s eye is constantly noticing the technicalities of the work?

Not accident but intention as the maker of joy

Ankita — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:34:33 GMT

“We will come back here later” is a paradox. The statement carries an unreasonable confidence in things being the same. Like, somehow you can summon nature when you want, expect it to repeat itself, reconstruct its becomings. Things are not the same again, not the next moment, not tomorrow. The clouds will form differently around the rays of the sun; the apricot flowers will scatter like dandelion seeds upon meeting the wind, thinning the tree of its soft pink colour; something unknown to you would come in the way of the cat that perched at seven on the pillar the previous morning, seemingly out of routine as it repeatedly vocalised towards the kitchen window for food. “Coming back later” must consider that you and the thing you are coming back to both would have changed. A lot, a little. What is now is never the same.

Only vulnerability makes the right conditions for vulnerability.

After a round of sourdough with sherab (Tibetan chilli garlic mixture), seabuckthorn jam, and apricot marmalade, we sit by the Zanskar river to write. I ask the group to think about the word ‘water’. They each have hats and scarves and sunglasses on, and I am relieved they have not walked out in protest against the unexpectedly hot sun. Instead, they sit there, making constellations in their notebooks—mapping ideas, memories, and associations around the elixir of life. A raft of tourists, bulked up in lifejackets, is passing by, carried slowly by the stream that is on its way to meet the Indus. The people on the raft, like heads following a tennis ball across a court in unison, lock their gaze on our group, who are deep in their notebooks, deep in a whirlpool, deep in the adventure that is to meditate upon your thoughts.
writing picnic
Travelling is a reframing of being lost. Or being lost is a reframing of travelling. Our phones out of network, the rocky valley devoid of vegetation, on a gravelly path, we follow the car ahead of us, whose driver drives up purposefully until not. He comes to a halt, and we come to a halt, and we speak aloud what we have been feeling all along. “We are lost.” It must be that this is only our second day, that we have ‘time’ to be lost, or that we all want to keep the other calm, that we are laughing. We are laughing and searching for home. We are laughing and we are lost. The new place we are heading to and the new place we are lost in, what is the difference except for intention? The confident driver, whom we blame for our late arrival, and whom we confront later, says, “Aren’t you here to travel?”
Everyone has a style. For Ruby, it’s her humour cutting everything sharp. Prajakta tells everything like a story, even her feelings rest behind characters. Shivani has a knack for neat structures, swift progressions, and a callback at the end that gives her essays a circular nature. Everyone has a style, and I try to see it for them, to spotlight it back to them. This is my job. For Sophia, who already writes in visceral metaphors, who is unhesitant to be vulnerable, the best I can offer is an attentive space where she can see the kind of effect her writing has, so she can leave surer of its place in the world. Sumesh writes with confident specificity that holds his own way of seeing the world; Pooja has the gift of saying things as they are without ridding them of their softness; Rhythm shines in precise sentences that keep the greyness of the world intact. Vishal arrives at the sessions forgetting his pen, losing his reading list, and certain he has nothing new to say. I make it my job to make V love writing. I don’t have a separate strategy except what I had already planned: every morning begin with a selection of writing, read aloud, read again, picked apart.

On the third day, V shares his personal essay with me in private. “You are philosophical, and it’s a good thing,” I tell him. Throughout the six days, I am holding in my palms Annie Dillard’s insistence about the necessary work of a workshop. She said, and I paraphrase, that a workshop must leave writers with an unmistakable sense of their potential and the confidence to expand the scope of their attempts.

On the last day, without my prompting, V writes something. It is a 3-page essay, which I am told I won’t get to read until maybe a year later, in which he has asked many whys about things he assumed he knew. “I am so happy about this essay,” he says, the third time that day. He is glowing in the way you do when you dive into a pool, and instead of drowning, discover your buoyancy.

in which I make everyone pitch their essay ideas to each other

I am woken up by the soft orange sky streaming through my window at five fifteen in the morning. I left the curtains drawn open just for that. I can see, down in the field, someone’s at the scope, tracing the brown and muddy mountain range across from us, looking for something.

Eight pictures stuck in the wallet of my mind

Ankita — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:34:26 GMT

Two hours before a hailstorm, the wind is soft, the fields in the lowest exposure of brown and green, and hanging above, a river’s worth of a grey cloud stretches over the entire expanse that forms the frame of my eyes. How everything peaks to its most beautiful before it goes wrong, like shiny lucidity arriving at the disposition of a sick man hours be…

The underappreciated story essay

Ankita — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:21:09 GMT

Every literary genre is quite malleable. I wish someone had told me this earlier, for I’d have spent less time trying to learn the rules and more time writing. I used to have these fixed ideas that a true poem always rhymes and is arranged in quatrains, that a story contains a protagonist fazed with a problem who goes on to overcome it, that an essay is…

#21. Some kind of belonging

Ankita — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:23:40 GMT

I feel farthest from home when I am flailing in the deep end of the pool, but it is the home I desperately want to make my own. So I keep trying. It helps to have a friend who knows water better than land, and allows me the space to experience that fear. I find him reaching for me when, in the middle of my lap, I panic—becoming hyperaware of the growing…

Hallucinations of an Artifact

Ankita — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:23:16 GMT

The Dancing Girl is not dancing, I say with the same certainty as the man who, in his research paper, claimed she was Parvati, an Indian Goddess.

The Dancing Girl

The Dancing Girl is a bronze sculpture, discovered in the southern settlements of Mohenjo-daro—a civilisation unearthed in the excavations of the 1920s by the Archaeological Survey of India and…

The reader in my head

Ankita — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:37:07 GMT

I answer one question on writing every month. Ask your questions here!

A growing anthology of first essays

Ankita — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:38:53 GMT

Over the past few months, I’ve been sharing the fundamentals and the freedom of the personal essay form with the spirited people who join my workshops. Across three weeks, we move from idea to a finished piece that, as personal essays do, examines a core experience of being human. We closely read four essays by Durga Chew-Bose, CJ Hauser, Annie Dillard,…

#20: walking is knowing

Ankita — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:36:23 GMT

To say I walk to regulate my temperature is only half-truth. Yes, it gets chillier as the day progresses here, and a long walk in this mostly hilly terrain immediately acclimatises me; walking is not a chore but an impossible-to-ignore yearning. The village I have been in these past few weeks is surrounded by expanses of fields, and the fields are surro…

Jan write-along session with Ankita

Ankita — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 08:53:40 GMT

Hello!

Writing is easier to postpone than almost anything else. A sink full of dishes somehow feels more urgent than the image that emerged in your head. A notification on the phone feels louder than the persistent ping of the essay that’s in the drafts. That’s why we have the Writer’s Table and our monthly write-along sessions.

The details of our upcomi…

Writing is movement and an ending is a shift

Ankita — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:00:14 GMT

I answer one question on writing every month. Ask your questions here!

three notes on beginnings

Ankita — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:31:22 GMT

Becoming, no matter the seduction of great starts, happens in the great middle.

Just as the earth moves around the sun, orbit after shifting orbit, so does living feel like returning to the same questions - altered, shaped, edited. What then is a new beginning if not an iteration? What do we keep writing if not the same poem?

What does a bushchat kn…

#19: A few questions

Ankita — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:54:13 GMT

Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Was this year a question or an answer? What did it say?
When do I feel the lightest? In whose company? Or doing what?
What actions would make me more coherent with who I think I am? What actions have already made me who I think I am?
What am I seeking from the past that I…

Dec write-along session with Ankita

Ankita — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:06:45 GMT

Hello!

Our next write-along session is on 10 Dec, tomorrow! The write-along sessions take place every second Wednesday of the month, and a recurring invitation for the same is in your inbox/calendars.

The details of our upcoming session:
Dec 10, 8:00 – 9:00 pm IST
Video call link (the link remains the same each month!)

This is also a reminder for you to send…

a body, not my body

Ankita — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 05:37:13 GMT

This story includes references to sexual harassment, emotional abuse, and images that contain nudity.

Seven Tiny Epiphanies

Ankita — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:36:31 GMT

1.
A name eats up the details of things.
A plant with three leaves, each like a tiny butterfly, becomes a green shamrock in my notebook. On Google, I type, “greyish, small, stout bird that looks like a rock with a streak of red by its wings,” and a wallcreeper is what I will forever remember it by. A boy who lights me up the way water sometimes lights up an entire civilisation, is saved on my phone by his full name—what a reduction of all that he is. Naming something is the beginning of losing the details, an impossible act of fitting an entire composition into a single invented note. A name is the beginning of all forgetting.

2.
Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/for one thousand six hundred and ninety-five mornings that we have lived in different cities or different houses, a goodmorning arrives in my inbox without fail. I respond. My mother and I tell each other we are alive and we are okay. I may miss one day but never the next. For I am made real by my mother calling out to me. To be part of someone’s routine is to be pulled out of some slumber, to be summoned into existence.

3.
The shortest two minutes I’ve experienced are from 6:59 to 7:01 when I’m on another tab, thinking I still have a minute before the meeting at 7:00. The longest two minutes when I’m in a plank holding my body against gravity. The depth of time is in the awareness of it. If I look away, I pass by my own life at the speed of light.

4.
Something went wrong, and instead of panic or anger or sadness, I felt a strange sense of relief, because this thing that had gone wrong acted like a veil lifting. It answered some doubts. And then I considered that mistakes are doorways. They release us from the grip of false assumptions we have or expectations we hold.

5.
I found my hair towel in my travel bag, which I’d completely forgotten I’d packed. It came in handy after every walk, when the water collected by trees from last night’s rain would drip and drop over my head. Thoughtfulness toward your future self is an underrated form of self-love. Keeping a nail clipper in the bathroom, tucking a safety pin in the wallet, having a duplicate copy of the house key in every bag I might potentially carry when I leave home are such empty, mechanical acts of housekeeping until the moment when I’m in need, and I find myself looked after by none other than me.

6.
You miss places and homes you were in once because of who you were in them. Which is to say, homesickness is a longing for a version of yourself. Which is to say, longing is a relegation of who you are in the present.

7.
Folded in my cupboards are many kinds of easy whites and beiges that I now wear for days spent indoors, writing. I don’t exactly miss the years when going to work meant spending an hour mixing and matching outfits that were meant to say something. Now, I pare down what I am wearing to something simple, as if I were rerouting the channel through which I will speak.

If you’ve been wanting to write or return to writing, I have some news for you.

I am hosting a 6-day writing retreat in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas of northern India. It is timed with the onset of spring, when apricot blossoms begin to soften the mountains, and the air feels clear and spacious—an ideal setting to listen, notice, and write.

We begin with a few different ways of noticing in our first brush with the apricot bloom and then with the Indus River as we sit by it to write. The next day is about patience and inquiry. As we look outward to notice the wildlife, so we look inward at our interior landscape. This will emerge in a narrative essay. Then, at Lamayuru monastery, we work on bringing poetry and music into our prose, and later, sink into a sensorial cooking workshop back at home. Our last day will be spent in the heritage Leh town, assimilating routines and principles that should strengthen our writing practice.

What to expect:

Four kinds of writing days with guided prompts: practising different ways of noticing, exploring the interior world, working with poetry-in-prose, and identifying routines and principles for a sustainable writing practice.
Lots of writing time that emerges in list essays, a narrative piece, and fragments of lyrical prose.
Reading of curated essays and poetry collections to attune your ear to the music of language.
Small group discussions: On craft, on practices, on writers we love.
One-to-one feedback: On the work you generate during the retreat.
A writing community that you can be a part of for long after the retreat.

This will be a small group of 10-12 participants only.
The retreat is in collaboration with Travel Dirty, founded by Aishwarya, who lives in Ladakh and curates immersive journeys around the country.

Detailed itinerary and cost:

Itinerary

For booking or questions:

WhatsApp Travel Dirty

Glimpses of where we will be:

#18: three books

Ankita — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:14:23 GMT

1. Annie Dillard — Teaching a Stone to Talk

I find Dillard’s sentences delicious. They wind and unfurl with humour, never not carrying also a spiritual undercurrent even when she’s describing something as silly as a weasel staring back at her.

“I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, m…