My son almost got into an altercation at the park recently. As he was playing excitedly in a sandpit, scooping out the sand and pouring it into a plastic container, another child snatched the scoop out of his hands and 

“Yenna acchu kanna?” (What happened, sweetheart?) I ask my son lovingly in Tamil, as he starts to cry while watching an ad on TV. “Amma, paani kulle puppy!” (Puppy inside the water!) he explains, combining words from three of the four 

It was literally an afterthought. I begged and borrowed some rangoli and some candles from kindly neighbours on the afternoon of Diwali and raced against time to have some semblance of holiday decoration by evening. Thankfully, my 18-month-old’s standards were 

We concluded my son’s annaprasanam, the ceremony marking the day he is given solid food for the first time, with a little game: We placed him on his tummy on the floor, put a few things in front of him 

“Amma, are you planning to come sometime today? I have waited for 45 minutes!” “I am just leaving. On my way down.” “That is what you said 10 minutes back! You could have given me a better time frame than, 

“What kind of a mother are you?” asked the KYC form of a playschool I was checking out for my son. I HATED the question almost as much as I hated being asked what kind of music I liked when 

My 18-month-old said, “Fuck” — slowly, deliberately and remarkably clearly. Of course, he was repeating what he had heard… from me. I had used it conversationally, perhaps as a verb. When he said it, my husband and I exclaimed, “Oh, 

I was expecting a girl. It had to be. Even the Chinese website had confirmed it. I was craving spicy food. The signs could not have been clearer. I didn’t prepare the nursery in pink (like the color, hate the 

The first month of being a new parent is almost complete, and it isn’t what I expected. That I would have the time to think, let alone write, was completely unexpected. That I would yearn to do more, but not 

“If you cooperate, this process will move faster,” says the doctor, just as the delivery was about to begin. The first push, nothing. With the second push, a little head makes an appearance. The third push is the head again, just 

“Don’t go to the waves!” warned both my parents, at different times, as though they had discussed this as a major issue that needed to be attended to before I left for a beach resort in my sixth month of 

You could set a clock by my body. I used to wake up automatically at a certain time and feel hunger at the appointed hours; certain, fixed quantities of food was sure to satiate that hunger. My body was, by and large, not prone