Every festive table has a quiet centre of gravity. It might be a brass bowl of floating petals, a bunch of marigolds in an old pot, or a tall vase of mango l...
There's a moment, just after dusk in the days before Diwali, when the first lights come on and the whole house seems to take a breath. The marigolds look war...
Ask anyone who grew up in an Indian home about the dressing table, and they'll usually smile. It was where a mother got ready for a wedding, where a sister b...
Every year, before Diwali, Indian homes get a little brighter. The walls are repainted, the brass is polished, and somewhere in the planning there's usually ...
Wedding season is underway across Indian homes, and with it the usual list of gifts: appliances, cash envelopes, the odd tea set. Among wedding gift ideas In...
Living rooms across Indian cities have been getting smaller for a decade, and a second sofa is rarely the answer to needing more seating. What most compact h...
Navratri opens with nine nights of the Devi worshipped in nine forms, and in most Indian homes the walls get dressed before anything else does. A diya is lit...
The wedding season opens this month, and with it the season of new households. Somewhere between the paperwork and the boxes, each one arrives at the same qu...
The wedding season is about to begin, and with it the kind of hosting Indian homes do best: eighteen people who said they were coming for tea and stayed for ...
Every room asks something different of a chair. The one beside the dining table needs to be pulled out fifty times a week without complaint. The one in the r...
Janmashtami is the quietest of the big festivals. There are no fireworks on the street, no crowd gathered outside. The celebration happens indoors: the small...
There's no small object in an Indian home that gets picked up more times a day than a coffee mug. Morning filter coffee. Afternoon chai. Evening cutting. Lat...
Onam isn't really a decoration project. It's the whole household, changed. From the day the first yellow flowers arrive for the pookalam to the evening the l...
Raksha Bandhan is small, particular and unlike any other festival in the calendar. The gift a brother gives a sister isn't about the price tag; it's about be...
A kitchen isn't one surface. It's several. The dining table, the counter, the open shelf, the corner where mugs live. Each of those spaces gets used differen...
A painting is the wall that talks back. It sits above the sofa, beside the console, in the corner where no other piece of furniture will fit — and it holds t...
The monsoon is the season of the small dinner. Six friends. A slow evening. A window open to the rain.What the room needs then is not another cabinet — it is...
The overhead bulb is not enough — not in an Indian monsoon. When the sky closes over for three weeks at a stretch, the house needs a lighting plan: layered, ...
The pooja mandir is the quietest piece of furniture in an Indian home — and often the most carefully chosen. It holds the day's first lamp, the festival's fi...
The monsoon shifts something in an Indian living room. Light dims. Walls seem closer. The same paintings that glowed in March suddenly read as flat.The remed...