My father's midlife crisis was a watch collection that began with one "sensible investment piece" and metastasised into a safe with 11, alongside a sudden, connoisseur's obsession with V60 dripper and green beans couriered in from a specific coffee plantation in Chikmagalur because everything else, he insisted, "lacked complexity". He was 50, affluent and bored. Mine arrived in my mid 30s as a... sneeze. An actual sneeze-rumbling, unglamorous and entirely unladylike-that had me convinced I'd cracked a rib. I hadn't. But I did throw out my back.
Later that week, my mother, extremely displeased with me and my spine for being so dramatic, passive-aggressively sent me an article titled "7 Reasons Your Kundli Says You're Marrying Late". There was no need for captions or context. My mother has never read Austen, but comports herself with the unflinching conviction of Mrs Bennet: A single woman, in possession of a good apartment, must be in want of a husband. This was also the week I read three apocalyptic think pieces that confidently timelined my profession out of existence, and I noticed a new-to-this-decade anxiety of being professionally mourned while still very much on a deadline.
