The Synthesist

  Motherhood, I have realized, is a lifelong game of losing and finding. You lose sleep… and find strength. You lose control… and find surrender. You lose the woman you once were… and somewhere between spilled milk and tiny fingerprints on the clean walls, you find a newer version of yourself waiting quietly. I learned this most painfully and most beautifully on an ordinary afternoon with my twins - Saket and Smriti. They were around one-and-a-half years old then with unstable feet, endless curiosity and a suspicious talent for making household objects disappear. Honestly, I don’t know why I spent money on toys. Because nothing fascinated them more than my kitchen vessels. Steel tumblers were drums. Lids were frisbees. And my chapati rolling pin? Apparently a national treasure that needed to be hidden daily. That afternoon, my neighbour rang the bell asking if she could borrow the rolling pin. I walked confidently into the kitchen pretending I was a woman who definitely knew where ...

  At 36, life did not send a formal appraisal note. Instead, it unfolded slowly beneath the weight of routine and responsibilities, with reshuffled priorities and a questioned sense of purpose, eventually leaving me standing at an unsettling crossroads. The kind HR professionals would recognize as more than just a midlife phase. It felt like one of those appraisal cycles where everything on paper looks perfectly stable. Role unchanged, designation untouched, but deep inside, the “employee of the year” energy had silently resigned without even serving notice. That was the moment I began to walk, not as a symbol of change, but simply as movement, one step at a time, in the real world. One hour every morning through the narrow, winding streets of Muttrah, a place where time seems to pause just long enough for you to notice what you usually ignore. At 6:30 a.m., the city is not asleep. It has already lived a full chapter. The first people I encounter are the civic workers. Broo...