We stood in front of the conveyor built on Tuesday morning at the Delhi airport preparing ourselves for the inevitable. Given the kind of luck we-d been having, there was an exceedingly high probability our baggage hadn-t made the journey from Vienna. We had, because we are able-bodied. We had barely 20 minutes to transit between our incoming flight from Innsbruck to the outgoing one to New Delhi. We sprinted through the airport. I begged people in the immigration queue to let me skip to the front and somehow we found ourselves aboard our crowded flight back. Two days later, our baggage is yet to be delivered to us. We have Air India to thank for this. And yet, this hasn-t been the most preoccupying problem. No, I-m still struggling to get my bank to return me the money that was skimmed from my account. I am still laptop-less, and my fingers feel an itch for the luxury of a typing mechanism, so much so I might fire up my typewriter, clean and oil it so that I can return to being on top of deadlines.

I-ve been trying to repress the niggling suspicion that I might be cursed. It-s so tempting and so easy to fall into the trap of believing that there must be some causal link. My fiancé and I are both quite convinced that we must indeed be cursed or ill-fated. It doesn-t deter us, though. Sometimes I feel an urge to seek refuge in some ceremonious gesture that-ll lift this continuing streak of bad luck, some ritualistic mechanism that might offer the false security of feeling like I am once more in control of my destiny, that I am not as unmoored as I feel. However, from the fringes of my rational mind I hear voices of reason that remind me that in instances like these, one cannot appeal to the heavens for the privilege of an obstacle-less existence. Instead, we must, as Simone Weil suggests, ask for grace instead so that even while the shit is hitting the ceiling, we find within us, the fortitude to bear it all with dignity and elegance.