Diligent Candy

Adrienne Rich once wrote, “When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” I carry those words like contraband, slipping them quietly into the pockets of my daily life. Perhaps that’s why I created this place—this blog, this platform, this small corner of the world where words spill over and truth, once spoken, becomes a doorway to something more, something unnamed.

I live in Amsterdam, in a house that sometimes feels borrowed, sometimes like an old coat I’ve grown into. The city, with its waterlogged veins and bridges weighed down with too many memories, has held me longer than any other place. Since 2006, I have stayed. A small miracle, or perhaps, a quiet rebellion against my own restlessness.

But home? That word shifts uncomfortably on my tongue. It always has. It always will.

I was born in Cuttack, Odisha—a place thick with the scent of damp earth and old stories. A town so ancient its history hums beneath the ground like a secret, just out of reach. The ayah, Putti, who raised my brother and me, once caught me eating straight from the ladle and frowned. “Someone who eats from the pot lives far from home,” she said. I laughed, my mouth full, not knowing that some words stay with you like the aftertaste of something bittersweet.

I was born to parents from different worlds. My mother and grandparents were refugees, their lives torn apart and hastily stitched back together when they fled Lahore during the Partition. I have lived in villages, towns, cities—each one a room I’ve entered, settled into, and eventually left behind.

So where is home? Maybe it isn’t a place. Maybe it’s the way a language lingers on the roof of my mouth. Maybe it’s the books I hoard like treasures, or the smell of rain hitting warm asphalt. Maybe home is nothing more than a series of exits and returns, of trying to belong and learning, again and again, how to leave.

I am an INTJ, a reader who devours books as though they might vanish between my hands. A mother to a young man I call Bambi, who carries entire galaxies behind his eyes. A wife to my college sweetheart, Apoorva, who still looks at me as if he’s reading a book he doesn’t want to put down.

And this—Diligent Candy—is where I collect the scraps of my journey. The sweetness. The discipline. The hunger. The longing. The words that won’t let me go.