Shaleen Rakesh Blog

This kitchen was never now—layers of heat and metal, air heavy with old hungers. Standing at the stove feels ancient, predating her heartbeat. The knobs resist like they remember other hands, lost to the valley’s fog. She twists one; blue flame unfurls—a flickering petal she watches, trance-like. She’s learning fire’s moods—she’s also reclaiming them. Underfoot, Bachelard’s “vessel of time” seeps shadows. She’s a recurring rhythm, no newbie watcher. That pause before the flame? Less burn-fear, more vertigo—her hand a shadow of every woman here before, feeding the same heat. Jung’s archetype whispers: this is etched deep, her life a borrowed thread in the pattern. The cat slices through differently. No history baggage—just pure pull to warmth. Girl sees lineage; cat feels now. It hugs light-dusted corners, wary of the sudden blaze—ancient duty, or just instinct’s edge. Room’s museum not—it’s repeating. Her moves: half-heirloom, half-new. Alone, yet crowded with ghosts of intent. Flame c...

  The stone of the third step is unremarkable, a slab of weathered granite that carries the indifferent history of the street. Every evening, as the light thins into a bruised violet, the dog arrives. He occupies the space, folding his limbs into the geometry of the threshold, and remains until the streetlamps hum with full current. Then, he leaves. This is an act of spatial longing—a tethering that requires no anchor. To observe this repetition is to witness a form of attachment that bypasses the traditional mechanics of ownership. In our human architecture, we struggle to conceive of belonging without the scaffolding of "mine" or "ours." We fence, we deed, and we domesticate. But the dog’s presence on the doorstep suggests a different topography of being. It is what Giorgio Agamben might describe as a state of exception rendered into a physical habit—a way of being "outside" that is nonetheless intimately folded into the "inside." The dog...

  The sun performs its usual mechanics, dragging shadows across the floorboards in a slow, silent sweep, yet I find myself standing in the wake of moments I cannot quite claim. There is a specific, quiet moment occurring in the margins of the afternoon. It is a soft betrayal. I am living a life of smooth continuity, yet the archive does not quite balance. I arrive at the terrace, the air tasting of impending rain and the bitter soot of the city, and the iron railing feels familiar under my palm—with the phantom warmth of a hand that was there only seconds ago. My own hand. I look out over the skyline, and the transition from the stairwell to this open expanse is missing. The climb has been edited out. There is no exertion in my lungs, no echo of my footsteps on the concrete. I have merely arrived, a ghost haunting my own physical coordinates. The day proceeds with an eerie, polished efficiency. I find a cup of tea on the table, the porcelain still radiating a gentle heat, the liqui...

  The air in the room remains the same, and so does the light as it leans against the peeling paint of the windowsill. Everything remains tethered to the mundane—the low hum of the refrigerator, the distant, rhythmic shunting of a train, the weight of the grey dog shifting in sleep. Yet, there is a hairline fracture in the afternoon. It began with the water. A simple glass, sweating circles onto the wood. I found my fingers already curled into the shape of the vessel before the thirst had fully announced itself in the back of my throat. It was an arrival. The hand had merely reached the destination a heartbeat before the mind had issued the map. We are accustomed to being the architects of our motions. We believe the "I" sits at the helm, pulling the levers of intent. But lately, the sequence has suffered a subtle rearrangement. I find myself walking towards the terrace because my feet have already committed to the gradient of the floor. They move with a quiet, terrifying aut...

  The mahogany dining chair at the head of the table has developed a subtle, stubborn curve in its velvet upholstery. It is an indentation of weight and time that suggests a long, hushed confession—a lean towards the center of the room that I do not own. I remember that Tuesday as a vacuum of silence, a solitary meal eaten over a book of verse. But the chair is quietly convinced otherwise. It holds the ghost of a physical gravity, a leaning-in of two bodies, the phantom resonance of a shared secret that never crossed my lips. No cold spots, no slamming doors, no melodramatic sighs in the hallway. Instead, there is a divergence of archives. I walk through the kitchen and my mind registers the kettle’s whistle as the sole punctuation of the morning. Yet, the tiles beneath the window seem to hum with the lingering warmth of a crowd. They remember a frantic, joyous pacing—the kind that accompanies good news or a sudden arrival—while I remember only the stillness of the dust motes danci...

  The terrace has become a vessel, and I am the sediment settling at its base. High above the street’s mechanical pulse, the air carries a texture that refuses to be categorized. It is a presence that registers just behind the ear, a silver thread of frequency that occupies the spaces between my own breaths. At first, the mind attempts its clumsy forensics. I tell myself it is the hum of the city’s distant chaos or the ghost-echo of a wind that has already passed. But these are the lies of a frightened logic. The sound lacks the indifference of nature. It possesses a terrifying, patient lucidity. I have noticed the shift in the architecture of the evening: the sound is shy of my scrutiny. When I hunt for it with a sharpened focus, it retreats into the mundane—the rustle of a dry vine, the click of settling brick. It waits for the precise moment when my intention dissolves, when the "I" that listens begins to fray at the edges. Only then, in the softness of my diverted attenti...

  The terrace is a place of long negotiations with the light. Usually, the arrangement is simple: I move, and the dark silhouette pinned to my heels mimics the geometry of my intent. But lately, there is a thickening at the edges of our contract. A subtle friction has entered the choreography, as if the shadow has begun to develop a private map of the stone and lime. It happens most clearly near the wicker chair that faces the blue-misted rim of the Mussoorie hills. When I turn to head back towards the doorway, there is a microscopic lag—a brief, elastic tension where the shadow seems to catch on the weave of the chair.  It does not pull away or morph into something monstrous; it remains a flat, unremarkable stain of grey. Yet, it lingers. It holds its breath against the warm floorboards for a second longer than the laws of optics should permit, as if the evening light, falling there with the weight of poured honey, is something it is loath to leave. Inside, the house is a cav...

To paint the anatomy of terror is, an act of surrender. We are taught from the first tremor of ambition that art is a mountain to be scaled, a discipline of the iron will, a relentless sharpening of the blade. We believe that if we only try harder—if we refine the stroke, master the pigment, or sweat over the syntax—we might finally pin the ghost of our anxiety to the canvas. But the ghost only responds to silence. The fundamental challenge of the artist is the systematic dismantling of the self. To reach the jagged edges of fear and the suffocating depths of anxiety, one must achieve a state of radical porousness. It is a terrifying vulnerability, a deliberate thinning of the skin until the barrier between the internal abyss and the external world becomes a membrane of light. We must become vessels rather than architects. This is the essence of Automatism: the courage to let the hand move before the mind can censor it. When we sit before the void of a blank page or a white canvas, our...

  The terrace has its own clock, one that refuses to be governed by the clinical ticking of quartz or the digital pulse of a phone. It is a measurement of light against stone, the way the shadows of the potted palms stretch until they are no longer shapes but a single, cooling skin over the floor. Usually, this transition is indifferent. The sun sinks behind the Mussoorie ridge with the mechanical grace of a guillotine, and the day is severed. But lately, there is a stutter in the mechanics. It happens on the evenings when the world has held me too long—a phone call that frayed into an hour, a paragraph that refused to yield its final verb. I climb the stairs with a sense of minor mourning, expecting to find the violet bruise of dusk already settled. Instead, I find the sun suspended. It sits a finger’s width above the horizon, caught in a state of unnatural arrest. The light at these moments is a hesitant, watery amber rather than the triumphant gold of a postcard. It feels unfini...

The transition arrived as a series of soft, corrective silences. I noticed it first on the terrace, where the light at dusk has a way of flattening the world into copper silhouettes. I was standing by the railing, perhaps staring too long at the fraying edges of a cloud, when I felt the weight of a gaze—not predatory, but clinical. He was sitting by the terracotta pot of withered basil, his paws tucked with a terrifyingly precise symmetry. He was looking at me. It was the look a seasoned foreman gives a trainee who has forgotten to put on their hard hat. There was a faint, twitching disappointment in the tip of his tail, a rhythmic tallying of my inefficiencies. It began with the pacing. My movements, which I previously considered intentional, were revealed to be erratic through the lens of his new stewardship. If I rose to make tea, he was already at the threshold of the kitchen, not begging, but presiding. He would watch the kettle whistle with a turn of his head that suggested he fo...

  The light dissolves, a slow hemorrhaging of gold into bruised arteries of the horizon. He sits where the stone of the terrace meets the cold insistence of the air, a figure carved from the same silence as the balustrade.   Before him, the forest a receding tide. The oaks and ancient pines lose their sharp, barren edges, surrendering their green identity to the creeping ink of the blue hour.   It is a theft he does not protest. He watches the shadows climb the valley walls with a gaze so unblinking so absolute, that the boundary of his skin begins to fray.   There is no sudden snap, only a gentle evaporation. The ache in his joints becomes the hum of the rising wind; The silver of his hair, the first frost of a distant star. He watches the stillness until he is no longer the watcher, but the thing being watched.   The perspective shifts—a quiet, cosmic inversion. He is now the cobalt depth of the s...

The air in the apartment was a pressurized vessel of unspoken accusations and the sharp, metallic tang of anxiety. To Nirmala, silence was the quiet before a structural failure. To her husband, Mukund, it was the only sanctuary left in a world that had become increasingly loud and unnecessarily frantic.   They were seventy-two and sixty-eight, respectively, ages where time should have slowed to the pace of honey. Instead, the upcoming trip to Nainital, orchestrated through a fly-by-night storefront titled “Easy Travels,” had turned their living room into a theater of the absurd. Nirmala’s panic was not a frantic thing but rather was architectural. She built it brick by brick, starting at 6:00 AM when the first dial to Bharat, the proprietor, went straight to a sterile recording: “The number you are trying to reach is currently switched off.” “He’s gone,” she announced, her voice a vibrato of practiced doom. She was standing by the window, her silhouette framed by the dusty li...

The "now" is a fragile clearing in a dense, encroaching forest of memory. We walk through the world under the illusion of immediacy, yet we are rarely ever truly there. Instead, man is a complex architecture of sedimented time, a living archive where every past tremor—the sharp sting of a schoolyard rejection, the velvet warmth of a first love, the cold ash of a mid-life failure—is meticulously stored in the lightless vaults of the psyche. We believe we are looking at the horizon, but we are actually looking through a lens ground and polished by everything that has already ceased to be. When the old man stands on his terrace at dusk, watching the shadows stretch across the valley, he can be mistaken as a singular point of consciousness engaging with the cooling air. He is actually a crowded room. He sees more than the purple bruising of the sky today. He also sees the sky of forty years ago, the sky that hung over a funeral or a forgotten celebration. His "present" ...

  The siren song of "clarity" is perhaps the most sophisticated deception we perform upon ourselves. We treat it as a terminal station—a sun-drenched plateau where the jagged edges of existence finally align, and the static of the soul yields to a crisp, high-definition signal. We tell ourselves that once the fog lifts, once the "model" is perfected, we will finally possess the map to the labyrinth. But clarity is a flickering phosphorescence on the surface of an endlessly churning sea. It is the temporary, often desperate, engagement with a perceived understanding of a world that remains, at its core, indifferent to our need for symmetry. We craft mental models to maintain a functional sanity—to prevent the sheer, unadulterated chaos of being from collapsing our internal architecture. As George Box famously noted, all models are wrong, though some are useful. We navigate by these ghosts of logic, these obsolete frameworks of how things ought to be. We build a cathe...

Humans are architects of the ethereal, constantly drafting blueprints for ghosts because we cannot endure the cold, hard geometry of the void. There is a peculiar arrogance in our humility when we look at the stars and sigh of "mysteries." We dress the cosmos in the velvet robes of the occult because our eyes are too small to hold the light. The "mystery" is a cataract on the human lens. The immensity of the cosmos is a mathematical brutality that the human psyche is simply not wired to digest. To look into the throat of a vacuum that stretches across billions of light-years is to feel the ferrous plates of the ego begin to fracture. So, we reach for the sedative of the mystical. We take the terrifying, silent indifference of physics and name it "wonder." We take the complex, unyielding laws of entropy and call them "fate." It is a coping mechanism of the highest order—a psychic insulation against the biting chill of our own insignificance. Myste...

The architecture of human suffering is built of a frantic, stuttering temporal displacement. We are a species of ghosts, haunting our own lives. We reside in the sepulchers of yesterday or the shimmering, unreachable mirages of tomorrow, rarely occupying the skin we are currently wearing. This is the fundamental indenture: the refusal of the Now. Most people exist in a state of perpetual oscillation. They are caught in the centrifugal force of a mind that abhors a vacuum, spinning between the cold iron of regret and the frantic, feverish silk of hope. We look back and see an archive of debts—shame, "what ifs," and the phantom limbs of lost opportunities. We look forward and see a horizon of anxiety dressed as ambition. In this constant flitting, the present moment becomes a mere transit lounge, a sterile corridor we hurry through to get to a "somewhere" that does not exist. This is a cultural mandate. From the moment we enter the collective machinery, we are "t...