The exhale you didn't know you were holding
You know the fortnight. It arrives on the calendar with its own logic, a period of mourning, an inauspicious stretch, a religious observance, and with it comes a quiet social permission: don't dress up. No new clothes. No bright colours. No occasion to perform. And somewhere in the first two or three days of it, you notice something you weren't expecting. Your shoulders drop. Your mornings are three minutes shorter and somehow twenty minutes calmer. You reach for the cotton kurta without negotiating with yourself first.
