On a bright April Tuesday, we drive out to the Cliffs of Moher. It’s my parents’ first time in Ireland and like schoolchildren, they look toward the rugged landscape, finger to the window. Wild horses and yellow fields of mustard point back at us, like a monkey would at the zoo. The summer light over the burren is blinding. We ride past sparsely populated town centres, their Indian tongues bending in unfamiliar ways. Liscannon. Ballyvaughan. Ennistymon. Each with its own little pub and cathedral. My mother rolls the window down at the first sight of colour. Pink wall, blue window, red chimney. Through the wind, you can hear the click-click of her phone camera every so often.

It’s surreal having them here. Seeing Dublin anew from their eyes. Gold treasure at the charity shops. A pot of tea at Phoenix Park. The train ride to Dalkey. And Bray and Greystones. They learn to ask for €1.50s and the real price of a €.99. They like Francis Bacon and the oat and honey loaf from Lidl and Industry and Co on Drury Street. And I like sharing a Beamish with my dad on a weekday. We laugh at the dark beer on his moustache till the sun goes down.

I like washing their dishes after we’ve fought over dinner. About my kitchen cabinets or budgeting or settling down. They like trad music at O’Donohue’s especially when it’s busy and they like my friends, and the park by St. Patrick’s cathedral. We like to share a Deluxe lemon drizzle cake twice a week. Gossip. Whine about the weather. Hug. We like to hug. Especially at graduation, in front of the campanile. The cameras go click-click click-click click-click and I smile into their shoulders, body heavy with the dread of their departure.

It’s around 3pm and we’re turning the bend, jagged cliffs in clear view, white frills of the Irish sea. The visitor centre is choked with Americans in puffer vests and cargoes, so we off-road and park a few miles away from the edge. We jump over the fence that’s signed ‘no entry’ because my mother says so. It’s quiet and green, carpets of grass as far as the eye can see. We chat about something mundane like the dyson vacuum or my sister’s boyfriend.

The path grows narrow and we near a hard, 300 ft drop. My father and I inch forward, hearts in our mouths, light like chewing gum. We’re peaking over the precipice when my mother reaches her hands out and grabs us away from the drop. She looks at me sternly and then at my father and holding our hands in hers she says, ‘remember, we have a little girl waiting for us back home’.

Our bodies move differently the rest of the way. More solid. Intentional. Further into the earth. Wise up. Remember. You have somebody to live for.

From our spot on the great cliffs of County Clare, the sea shrinks before me. Past the Atlantic ocean, southeast from where I’m standing, my sister is reading Camus. It’s 9pm, she’s fresh out of a shower, hair still dripping wet. Her skin is burnt from the North Indian heat and her nails are a deep shade of blue. She’ll be waiting to hear from us, waiting for the pictures. To hug and gossip and maybe share the lemon cake my parents will carry back.

From my end of this shrunken sea, you might find that a big part of living is to share this life with people. With grocers and lovers and exes and neighbours. With the bus driver and your best friends and the loud kid in the group project. With the people you love and the people you don’t. From the edge of the earth, I fiddle with my zipper and I hold this big feeling close.

At 25, all I can think about is digestion and my parents dying. Punctuated of course with Bryan Noem’s bimbofication and whoever has dibs on oil these days. I throw my net over new women’s lit and The 5 Artists You Should Know at Basel Miami but I swear there’s only so many minutes to an hour and I woke up seriously bloated today.

The absolute agony of walking out the door on any given morning, like a balloon woman floating through a busy street. POP ME, you, woman in the tabis, or else I shall languish and die before I can get to An Post where my New Without Tags y2k Vinted is holding its trés long vintage breath for me. POP ME, VC dude with the 17 pro max, I swear my side quest is scalable!!! POP ME, Anna Karenina, before I’m forced to Gua Sha these tinted cheeks off my face, before I’m naked waist down on a third date and she’s thinking pizza, like The Vito from Bambino.

So I’m definitely intolerant, lactose and otherwise and my parents are definitely mortal. Not sure if it’s my algo in particular, but the girls are loving gut health lately and I’m tempted to think, will we ever and truly catch a motherfucking break? If the microplastics in my smoked salmon are killing me, (never mind my delicate sex drive) and my mother turns 60 next year, shall we do the commune thing? Thatched roofs on a lonely hillock?

Surely we’d end up on Architectural Digest with my stash of Zeitgeist lampshades. Hi AD, welcome to my home I’d croak, and promptly collapse from my Elemental Diet. Chat, what’s an elemental diet? GREAT question!!!! A medical-grade formula containing nutrients in their — simplest — pre-digested form.

Pre-digestion sounds fantastic. I could touch myself to pre-digestion.

Another thing the girls are loving lately is nostalgia. Yes it’s my parents’ first time living too and yes, this makes me want to shuck my skin off and hand it to them bare. Yes, the dappled light in this home video saturates the front garden in the same way I remember mine. Yes, it’s been 20 years since Hannah Montana and yes the Call Her Daddy cameo snapped my tween self in half.

I had a two CD rotation at 8, Shakira’s ‘Laundry Service’ and fresh off the late Rhythm House shelves, ‘Breakout’ by Miley Cyrus. It was my favourite part of any day, around 5pm after school, I’d play track no. 6, ‘Fly On the Wall’ and twirl about while my mother asked about my day. Banana bread growing in the oven, in place of an answer, I’d sing along, Don’t you wish that you could be a fly on the wall? A creepy little, sneaky little fly on the wall.

If I eat chai oats for breakfast and wash it down with 2 litres of water on a good day, it’s over for you bitches. Wrap it up, go home, throw the damp towel in because it is over for you bitches. If I got through a box of Lidl’s Cotton Candy grapes before 9am on a good day, I would vibe code for Disney. Get me some prune juice and I’d read Rich Dad backwards. Palantir’s got nothing on some heavy duty fibre.

It makes you consider every invisible system we never had a say in. I wonder if Lina Khan takes probiotics before plotting to sue Big Tech. She was 15 when Miley did ‘Breakout’, I wonder if she had her own CD. If Lina Khan was President, you wouldn’t call it the Middle East, the stone-ages, prefix it with ‘the war’. Turkey to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, BBC could cover Hiba Kalache’s acrylics on canvas. I wonder how often Lina sees her parents.

Industry is man-made and if god is a woman, why do all hot girls have IBS? And as if that weren’t enough, these days I cramp when I ovulate. You’d think in ‘26 they’d have a pill for that. Instead, we have viagra. If I’m being honest, my Roman Empire is all the things I could do with a working bowel. And if the guilt of my youth couldn’t wring me dry, I swear I’d be a big guy.

If you’re lucky, on a Spring evening in March, Dublin is golden. You’re on the back of her motorcycle with the visor up. The wind licks your cheek like the tongue of a cat. Rough, it’ll shock you into attention. Look, it’ll say. How the water bites into land, how it swallows the grey stones along Killiney strand.

The houses in Dalkey are massive. You recognise the white facade of Sorrenro terrace from the Gerard Byrnes that hang in the gallery. Friends from the village tell you stories when they visit, of the old house opposite Finnegans and from this bend on Vico Road, you can almost see it — the wine spilling onto cobblestones long after a 6pm opening, pretty glimmers of the Celtic Tiger like the low light of a party that refuses to end, how surely the bright day promised to last.

The golf course is overfed, lush carpet combed through by quarter-zips on weekends. Your envy surprises you. How simple it must be, waiting at the stoplight, Birkenstock couple with a sausage dog and a baby on the way.

Your grip tightens as the light turns green.

Dubliners will milk every last drop of a sunny day. Dún Laoghaire to Blackrock, you count seven parks. The world whizzes by with threatening speed but you catch the piggyback, the linen, the tag football, the blue bicycle and you plant them in your pocket for a rainy day.

In Donnybrook, the light is biblical. The weeping willows bend impishly, they tease you, soft tension between your nose and the canopy, deceiving. You’d like for this road to run for miles but there’s a church on the horizon that’s growing in size. You’d like to take a picture but your hands are too busy holding her tight.

It’s like if you were at Reggie’s, fingers sticky from hot honey or cashel blue and they’re playing something Impala-adjacent but you can’t shazam it so you hold the tune in your mouth plus maybe an odd word — Cadillac or mountain dew — for later. Or when you’re bottom on a third date, their breadth is wet romance, like velvet all over the skin and you beg your thighs to hold that feeling until your silly brain knows what to do with it.

On the back of her motorcycle, you’re tongue-tied, forced into reflection for what feels like the first time in years. You take mental notes of everything you’d have liked to photograph. Instagram save it. Add to liked. Queue. Watchlist. Bookmark. You swear you’ll circle back.

In Dublin, over most places, to carpe diem on a sunny day is Bible. Seize. Wring. Work. Suck this fine day dry. Value what’s transitory or die.

But there’s something about having your hands too busy to hold something in place. In time. You’ve forgotten the lightness, how easy it can make living. This ride along the coast, the generous death of immediate reproduction. To own a thought. To own a thought longer than you need to before finding its mirror.

If you’re lucky, on a Spring evening in March, Dublin is golden and you’ll have nothing to show for it.

Bangalore in the 2000s was technicolour. The lakes were wide and the winter air still stung like fire ants, especially early January. We lived in a quiet lane off Nandidurga Road. My sister and I would hang our socks over a heater in my parents’ bedroom and sit by the little machine till its humming softened the wool. Then we’d slip the socks on and sink into the bed like baby owls in a tawny nest while the wooden floors creaked outside.

When we still lived in Bombay, my father was doing his MBA and would spend months away at a time. The new house we had just moved into was in Colaba, Scherezade Building with its cream exteriors and rounded balconies, mosaic tiling and large monsteras out front. The area was full of art deco buildings and through the painful nostalgia of its bylanes, bright ghosts always lurked- of a postman, a barber, a fisherwoman selling fresh catch. A colonial shadow, blue-red, stretched over the city- from the Gateway of India to SoHo House on Juhu Beach.

My mother knew everyone by name- Ashok the tailor, Pochu the watchman, Anu the fruit vendor. She knew the backroads and the best deals and the fastest way home. Navigated the city like it was an extension of her own body, which streets flooded first during monsoon, who sold the sweetest mangoes.

*

I was 9 when we hired Lokesh. He would drive me to school in our old Honda City. On most mornings, my mother would come too, drop me off at the big black metallic gates just after 8 and then head to Mosque Road to pick up the meat. She had taken me along once, it was a Saturday morning and we were hosting dinner at our place.

There was traffic pooled every three minutes, cars screaming over each other, and the pavement was an accurate imitation, but it smelt like mutton samosas — kebabs gently charring against the grill, romali rotis hot from the stove, you could taste rose in every breath, the way it hangs in the air like salt by the coast.

And then suddenly cut clean down the middle. Warm blood on a breeze and a slow buzz in your ear. I had begun to sweat. The goat bodies hung from metal hooks on storefronts, feigning life when the wind came heavy. Skinned bare and flesh hanging from bloody joints, hot carcasses in a Southern summer. I could taste their mercy, metallic on my tongue.

We went home and Mum made mutton Dhansaak. I sat nearby in the corner of the kitchen, playing the snake game on our cook’s Nokia button phone as the meat boiled on the fire. My mother brought me a little taste on the wooden spoon Noor Jahan was stirring with. I licked it clean. Chewed the mutton and swallowed the cartilage whole. Licked my lips and asked for more.

The body sometimes learns on its own and without permission, to crave what it first rejected.

*

Some days it was just Lokesh and I. Mum would ride with a neighbour to drop my sister off to nursery school. It was always such a task, she would scream hoarse and throw a tantrum, clinging onto my mother’s shirt with all the strength her little hands could muster.

Lokesh would strike up conversations on the way to school, sometimes about the weather, sometimes about school and other times about how brown my eyes were, how long my hair, how sweet my little uniform. I would giggle, blush, look him straight in the eye and grin or wink or hold his gaze till he was forced to turn away. I had never held power in my hands like that before. I could feel my arms and legs and collar bones for what felt like the first time.

He brought me a rose once. I was upstairs in the window and he whistled out to me from outside. Acting coy, swaying from left to right like a schoolboy, his burly chest peeking through the shirt he had on. There were dark pools under his eyes — big, black, bullish gaze. Like a wine stain you can’t get out no matter how hard you scrub.

I was dizzy and high from the attention. Not because it felt good or because I particularly wanted it — the rose or his notice, but because he made me feel desired. Like I thought a woman would.

I knew about ‘bad touch’. That it was bad when it felt bad. That people were bad sometimes. Men were bad most of the time. And this felt bad — in the backseat of the City — uneasy in the way that lines the inside of your skin till you hate the way your breasts move when you breathe or undress and the light fabric grazes your nipple, how you gag.

*

Shame has its own geography, spots on your body it likes to visit. High chest, low stomach, corners of memory it claims unannounced, like how the City would always smell of jasmine from the air freshener and leave a bitter taste on the back of my tongue.

When my mother was only a girl, she was taking the bus from Churchgate to Colaba after an evening on the promenade, bitching and eating peanuts from newspaper cones. The stop was dimly lit, a deep golden casting the crowd in long brown shadows. She was wearing a floral button-up that she got for 20 rupees on Fashion Street the day before her birthday, and velcro sandals under her jeans.

At the foot of the bus stairs, there was pushing and shoving. Broad shouldered men on their way home from playing house at the office and stroking each other’s skinny egos. City flies buzzing in my mother’s ears, it was 6pm on the BST. Loud and sweaty.

Halfway up the stairs, someone touched her. A big hand over her breasts. She could tell, despite the wild commotion of the city at rush hour, that it wasn’t an accident.

*

That summer, I took swimming lessons in Bombay. The fringes of my swimsuit were hot pink. The fabric had stretched thin in certain places, exposing the white elastic that held the thing to my body. It was the height of June, a loud evening by the pool. I had understood floating in theory – what it was supposed to feel like — buoyancy, chlorine etc. But I kept getting in the way of myself.

The United Services Club on Sundays such as this one, was bright. Green. Blue. Spots of white from the golf balls and the red of the flags. It was a Cantonment area, so the tables were made of plastic and most drinks were served in a beer glass.

The water was marked with dark hexagon shadows from the net overhead. To catch the coconuts when they fall. Mihir sir was tan, he had broad shoulders but his shins were slim and scabby. He walked toward the pool stairs in a navy speedo, his knees arching back like maybe an emu’s before it’s ready to run. I was terrified of drowning, my eyes, through the blue tint of my goggles, fixated on the deep end.

Mihir sir waded over to me. It was a private lesson because we were private people. He held both my hands that were now scaly and human from being underwater. Take a deep breath, he said, and exhale when you go under — through your nose, and don’t come up before you’ve counted to ten.

Underwater, through the dirt — dry peepul leaf, dead beetle, water spider — were his speedos. Tight against his bony hips. My head felt light and I began to push my weight upwards to the water’s surface, when I felt his hands on my shoulders. Big and rough. Resisting stubbornly as I shook in place.

The speedos grew suddenly. I felt my breath catch, all the bubbles I blew out had floated away from me. I reached for his chest, grabbing onto the skin, the hair, fistful of water when I missed. Finally, he let up. I gasped. The sunshine was blinding. Through the blueness of my goggles, I looked for my grandmother in the hazy crowd.

She was busy chatting to her friend Veena from the ground floor apartment in the building beside ours. They were drinking fresh lime sodas — Dadi with a straw and Veena straight from the beer glass. They had been friends for a long time. Women tend to find each other, hold, save, raise each other.

The drive home was quiet except for my grandmother’s humming — a pretty song about birds returning to their nests. I pressed my forehead against the car window and watched Bombay whizz past: Cafe Ideal on the corner of Churchgate, the paan shop, the promenade. A green tint stretched over the city. As if submerged underwater. Murky from a spill.

*

The cities changed overnight. We sold the Honda City to someone else’s family 6 years ago and I learned how to float.

I used to think of the women in my family as soft, the way they touched fruit to test for ripeness, the way they peeled pomegranates without spilling the seeds, their voices low when they spoke of private things in public places. But they were never soft, not really.

Growing up a woman is saying yes and yes and yes and yes. And yes and yes and yes and yes.
‘Are you finished eating?’
‘Do you like him back?’
‘Will you carry this weight for me?’
‘Can I touch you here?’
‘Do you remember where it hurt?’

Yes. Yes and yes and yes and yes.

Growing up a woman is swallowing the bloody cartilage whole. It’s knowing how to navigate the floods and the butcher shops. It’s knowing the backroads and the best deals and above all, the fastest way home.

If the Poxtons have their way, I can’t tell if I’ll miss the Late Bar or how we’d turn to each other, say, ‘Izakaya after?’ and tragically find ourselves on Drury in rained-on boots. Trade tequila breath for Mani’s carbonara and blithely call it a night.

If the Poxtons have their way, when you fly down from London, Berlioz weekend, would you recognise this city? This funny, grey, serpentine city. If we make it out to Smithfield and there’s a hotel where it shouldn’t be, would you nod in its direction and ask if I remember that time we were in line outside the Complex? For Dublin Alt Fashion Week, and Seeking Judy was in the line-up. Your Residence Permit was due to expire that week and I could understand your worry, your distaste for the 9-5 in a country that doesn’t seem to have room for our baggage.

Shall we move to Australia you said and I vehemently disagree, the accent feels ingenuous. Like in that Naomi Watts film where she and Robyn Wright fuck each other’s sons all summer. So you settle on London, think Burberry and riding the Tube in open-toe sandals. I pretend to choke on this idea, sick at the thought of drinking a spicy marg without you. Inside, VaticanJail holds a low note under the low light and I wonder how many times I must feel this feeling before someone decides to stay.

Because here we are the night before you leave. Down a bottle of white in our matching furs, we take the 15 to George’s Street, opposite the Arcade. We walk down to the new photobooth at Nine Crows, we blink and miss the shutter snap, laugh open-mouthedly and stuff the strips deep into our pockets for safekeeping or to hang beside our bedroom mirrors, in Rathmines and Maida Vale, little corners of big cities miles away from home.

Most relationships these days are long distance. Sprawling spiders on a map. Short legs stretching long and wide in all directions. It feels unprecedented, how close we can appear despite all this space, tar, bursting land and sea between us.

‘Keep in touch’ rolls off the tongue in any language faster than you can catch it. Touch in the sense of a tether — stay tethered to me, write enough words to feign your presence, I’d like your image to keep me company on Sunday evenings, if you’re not busy. While I wash these dishes, if you’re not busy. I’m sick and lonely and need our friendship, if you’re not busy.

You say it back, ‘keep in touch’ and

you shut my door behind you.

I’ll write you letters in the Spring, we will be romantic and make hefty promises and I will cry about the year past when people ask where I got my nails done. I’ll grow my bangs out and send you pictures. You’ll make a home for yourself by the park. Find the nearest open water like your spot by Grand Canal. We’ll exchange secrets and reels and recipes and flight timings but never an Irish goodbye.