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Spaces: The Garden

Winter tends to be the least beautiful time in a garden. This is especially hard-hitting for those who garden in the city, like myself. All the dead plant material collected on the ground of a balcony, the overgrown branches of rose bushes snagging at your clothes without the leaves and flowers to conceal them, the pots of plants that got blown over in the wind, the battered flowers and bedraggled leaves weathering the wind, the dark and cold discouraging you from venturing out to tend to your plants…for the past couple months, it feels like the universe had come together to starve me specifically of my passion. The space that was once overflowing with life—plants spilling out of their pots and reaching for the sky, bees buzzing from flower to flower, birds chirping as they poke about, butterflies flitting among their abundant choices—felt suddenly barren, somehow simultaneously too empty and overcrowded with scraggly dead stems in pots at the same time. Now, I love warm sweaters and...
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My Nani's Nankhatai

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I am the first to admit that my baking skills are sort of hopeless. Still, though, I keep trying out new recipes in hopes that they will click. Somewhere in the midst of all the temperature changes and the eggs, I seem to get a bit lost. Eventually, after one such experience, after my mom mentioning a kind of cookie called nankhatai from her childhood, I finally decided to call my grandmother for a recipe. Nankhatai is a kind of cardamom shortbread. The process is simple: combine six parts flour (preferably with some of the flour being besan, or chickpea flour) with one part sugar (I use one of the steel bowls called “katori” around my house to measure these proportions out), a few pods of cardamom that you grind right before mixing it in, some baking powder, some salt, and enough ghee (clarified butter), whipped with the sugar, to make everything into a crumbly dough. It’s deliciously buttery, sweet yet a little more savory than expected, and complex in flavor despite the ease of its ...
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Belonging and Cultural Norms - Sakshi Shrivastava

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It must be such a luxury to have a week or two off from school or work to celebrate a holiday culturally important to you. It's something I've never really had the chance to experience. Some people are more taken aback by this than others, but I don't celebrate Christmas or Easter. I'm not Christian; my family is Hindu, and even though we participate in the overall holiday cheer and love having vacations, there has always been a sense of being distanced from it all. And it's not just me and my religion. Hasan Minhaj, a Muslim South Asian American comedian, also admits that he never celebrated Christmas growing up in a humorous video where he tries out various Christmas traditions, never truly enjoying or identifying with them. Watching this video for the first time was almost cathartic for me. I enjoy listening to Christmas music and giving gifts and gorging myself on baked goods at that time of year, but I've always felt out of place when it comes to ...
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