For Monsoon clouds lurk over Delhi like an omnipresent stalker, refusing to shed. We are being fed lies by every weather forecast that peddles predictions about the probability of precipitation. Some afternoons, when I stand in front of the kitchen counter, observing sweat emanating from my pores, I have to grapple with the consciousness of the humidity, how it transforms us into precipitating beings. I am simultaneously waiting for my womb to disseminate its own periodic fluids. All this potentiality just hanging in the air; all this urgency...

After a conversation at the New School, New York, some years ago, between Jill Soloway, the genius behind the series, Transparent, and the feminist activist, writer, and poet, Bell Hooks, a member of the audience asked how they wrestle with their eager anticipation for an imagined moment in the future when gender equality might finally become reality. "I live in a fantasy world where I believe patriarchy will be toppled any minute now," Soloway responds cheekily. "I don't live in that world," is Hooks' quick-witted comeback. Soon enough, though, they make a compelling point, about how hopelessness is the enemy of injustice. It's a quote attributed to Bryan Stevenson, a Black American lawyer, social justice activist, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Between these two moments, another insight resurfaced, about how part of the activist struggle also encompasses a desire for wholeness. I had to write these things down. Because it's too easy to forget. Eerily, when I returned to what I wrote in my column dated July 20, 2018, I retrieve this word. "Things really seem to be happening for me in a manner that feels effortless," I had written. "All my various identities as a writer, art critic, columnist, daughter, sister, friend, seem to be coalescing into a form of wholeness; revealing an unprecedented abundance."