Neha Gupta's Blog

 

My daughter often makes up songs 

She sings… 

When I was little 

I was a pebble

My parents were

Big giants to me 

We grow up watching them in awe

Picking their manners, tone and words

The mother tongue, the father’s name

Inherited, borrowed or received

The wisdom, blessings, and admonitions.. 

It’s difficult to visualise our parents as anything else.. as babies, teenagers, students, spouse or lovers… 

While promoting I had to visualise my short stories as famous paintings

For Maape, the closest interpretation was -  the Gothic couple by Grant Wood 

Mostly a horror inspired genre

It reminds me of an aeging couple 

Who look the same, sound the same 

Hardened with life and each other 

Maape, a story about parents as a child

I wasn’t sure of its ending..

How do you end a story, a love story 

You hope you came from

How do you have a Happy ending 

Remembering them, as you wish they were

Reading #keepsake

Banu Mushtaq

Heart lamp is literally and literarily lights your heart and mind with the stories. Each story unique with underlying feminine voices silently rebelling against the patriarchy and prejudiced religious beliefs. 

The beauty of local colloquy makes the characters and settings richer. The characters with no names but tiles like Muttawali, Maulvi, give folksy touch to the stories like it could happen anywhere in the world. A fictional world based in the innards of a multi lingual Karnataka, where kanadda is as fluently spoken as Urdu or Arabic. Where Quran is as frequently quoted as Ramayana. Writing about religious patriarchy or traditions as a silent observer rather than a mirror of right or wrong. 

She talks about religious practices from multi narrators’ perspective. So one doesn’t really judge as different view points get their voice and expression. A son wanting to get his mother remarried, a curcumcision ceremony, four wives, divorce, toll of multiple births on women’s lives. Each theme a strong reflection of our society. 

Feminism is an important topic for me and such stories deeply impact me, making me proud to see them finding a platform. A booker prize means it reaches a larger, international, English speaking crowd. Coming from exactly opposite background I could associate with the hearts of women in these stories. The blessed and cursed both in their prisons of rules and misfortunes. 

The final story, Be a woman once, Oh Lord. The monologue with God is everything a woman would ask the day they meet their maker. Then why doesn’t the world change? Is a woman really free? The question continues to bother me and that is why these stories must be written to ask the questions first. Only then answers can come. 

Thank you Banu for some powerful writing. You have shown a woman with a pen is most powerful and can bring change one story a time! 

The Faux Pas

Today I called a 70-something woman Aunty.

She smiled sweetly… and said:

“Aunty mat kaho na!”

Classic Bollywood. Classic generational landmine.

My husband once called our neighbor Aunty.

She was in a saree, head covered—Balaji Bahu style.

She snapped: “What’s your age?”

He said: “30.”

She said: “I’m 29.”

They never spoke again.

Aunty is so not about the age, it’s about the ego, self care or sometimes poor dressing choices. I color my hair every month and sometimes not for months. Recently I did an online poll ‘To color or not’ and it was a split house. I still have to, as my own mother is not yet ready to leave her’s alone. 

Aunty No. 1 

Once I said “Not with a kid!” I was refusing the advances by a junior in school. 

Later I realised my mistake that kid was 6 feet tall and looked like an uncle.

The Boys teased him and called me Aunty, and everyone else chimed 

They crowned me: Aunty No. 1.

Thanks, Govinda. 

This is my origin story. Only 16! It was my calling, always! 

The favourite aunt 

I’ve been a Bua since ever

A Maasi before my first pimple 

Now a Mami, Chitti and what not! 

But Aunty?

That’s a social promotion.

It comes with unsolicited wisdom and selective kindness. 

You’re not a real aunty till you’ve said: “Yeh koi kapde hain?”

I make body-shaming sound fun 

I beat them at board games 

I ask them about their crushes

I give them unsolicited advise.. 

And still, they think I’m fun. Not that they have a choice! 

The legacy 

I grew up watching my mom’s friends and aunts dish gossip and gyan in the same breath.

Now it’s my turn.

Millennial Aunties are here—

We may or may not ask you when you are getting married! But we will ask you to throw a wedding party for us so we can dance the night away! 

With our wit, sarcasm, convent English, emotional awareness and a devil may care attitude… we are here to embarrass Gen Z with a flair.

Long live the sisterhood or the aunty-hood of the sassy saree sorority 💄👵💥

Chutki Bua, Keepsake 

The opening story in my book is about the universal aunt — the one who spins tales from thin air, drops truth bombs wrapped in kindness, and leaves a soulful touch… 

You’ll love her.

Because everyone deserves an aunt who tells stories, serves wisdom without a filter, and cheers you on like it’s her full-time job.

Keepsake was featured along with Storywala in Twinkl under To Be Read List 2025: Top Book Picks From Authors and Bloggers and all of Twinkl's 50+ domains, including the American, British, Canadian, Indian, Australian, Irish 
Check out the recommended book page . Also featured in Twinkl, as part of their To Be Read List 2025: Top Book Picks From Authors and Bloggers article.

Poetry, can be many things.. 

Growing up in CBSE English medium school, poetry was  mostly classical English poets. A melancholic view of European life, its beauty and miseries. The questions were broadly on the meaning, which was written in stone by the English literary critics and experts over the centuries. I remember especially the Albatross around the neck from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ mugged for the exams thru rot learning. 

As a hard core fiction reader, I never even tried any other genre. Until I found this book. The attraction - a book cover so titilatingly  vibrant. The woman in me was sold and I  gifted this to myself as part of my Diwali haul. The book opened me to the fact that 

Poetry can be anything… 

Catherine, I find out is a vibrant person with multi talents. Her poems start a bit abruptly, not sounding like poetry at all but random mismatched collection of random thoughts. No full stops, commas or grammar at all. I was confused but hooked. Every poem pushing my comfort zone and breaking my notions about poetry. Like pieces of flavored chocolates, I take one at a time and suck on it between my tongue, palette and lips. Each releasing multiple flavors of boldness, nudity, sensuality, feminism, modernity, funny, and strangeness. 

Some excerpts. Grab your copy now.. 

 

📚 Peeps, I will be in the city so mark your calendars! 🗓️ Join me for a special book signing event for #Keepsake, a short story collection! ✍🏼📕
Bengaluru: 📅 24 August 2024⏰ 3:30 PM📍 @attagalatta, Indiranagar
Delhi:  📅 30 August 2024⏰ 5:30 PM📍 Om Bookshop, Vasant Kunj
Delhi:  📅 6 Sep 2024⏰ 5:30 PM📍 @Jain Book depot, Connaught Place
Chandigarh: 📅 4/5 October 2024 (tentative) ⏰ 5:30 PM📍 @Baharisons, Sector 8 

💇🏻‍♀️Why did Maggie cut her hair? This story was in my English text book as part of ‘A mill on the floss’. A girl called Maggie cuts her hair as a rebellion when someone mocked her long hair. She just went up and asked her brother to cut them. The mother was furious but the father was quiet. Maggie is a different sort of heroine, she is not talking romance or desirability like Austen or Brontë sisters. She is tumultuous, rebellious, and prone to mood swings and anger. As Rachel Vorona calls them - Too Much Heroines—women who, in the face of patriarchal dictates, cannot or will not contain themselves emotionally, sexually, physically, or intellectually

💇🏽‍♀️Why did I cut my hair? I am not sure. The memory fades but I must be 4 or 5 years old, much before the story. The streak of rebelliousness brewing at a young age. Harmless stories of Maggie were meant to discipline young girls but rather than discipline it made it ok for a girl to cut her hair. My daughter did the same when she was 3 years old. I think it was about curiosity or playing with scissors. Either ways she went further and even cut her eye lashes. Now that’s a rebel without a cause.. but then every next generation feels like that. Eventually when Covid hit, cutting your entire family’s hair became a skill you didn’t know you would need one day. They all ended up looking like katora/ bowl styled hair. 💇🏾‍♂️

My mother must have had the same thoughts. Probably I wanted to try something dangerous (not so dangerous after all), or was it because I didn’t like how my mother made my hair. My hair was not easy - they were pretty, all silky and slippery, but never stayed in rubber bands. My mother and I had struggled getting them in. Later when I went to a strict girls convent school the Nuns insisted on two twisted plats folded in halves with a blue ribbon like a good Indian traditional girl in the early posters on good boy and good girl. My mother with her 3 sloth like kids chopped off my hair in a blunt cut which I maintain to till date. Wear a hair band, she said. Having no experience in managing long hair, I struggle now with similar hair texture of my daughter. I blame my fat fingers which can’t hold silky hairs in plats and twist them beautifully into works of art like other mothers. 

💇🏾‍♀️Why do women cut their hair? Mostly a mundan is a ritual for both Hindu boys and girls believed to improve the hair quality. In olden ages shaving heads was a ritual for widows to make them unattractive. To think of it, these women looked even more beautiful unbridled by those long hair. Most women I know, cut their hair to experiment and look good. Getting a complete makeover by simply loosing a few inches, albeit hair. I don’t have to even change my wardrobe and a hair cut gives me a fresh face to look at everyday in the mirror. I do believe and insist, that I can carry bangs which is borderline statement for me and many women. These happen once a year or the big moment when I need that extra pump. 

💇🏼‍♀️Why did a woman cut her hair? My sister in law did it. It became a big deal in our conservative small town Punjabi family. My mother and her mother wondered and worried like all mothers do. Hair not here, is something the men in my family have always struggled with. My mother was worried that my sister in law was reducing the family average hair and also ‘log kya kahenge’. The log, aka people, said a lot. They didn’t stop at asking if she has got a disease or is there a problem in the family <wink wink>. Their knowledge limited to relative connectivity of baldness and sickness or madness, basis what they heard of in media. My heart goes out to women who have to do this as they heal, but this tells a lot about women who judge other women. 

💇‍♀️Why can’t women cut their hair? The movement of scissors and the ease with which they just come off. The weightless burden of gender, beauty and patriarchy. I asked my sister in law, why she did it. She gave a vague answer, something about how she felt good doing it. But her answers don’t have to fit my level of suitable reasons or justify anything to me. She wants to do it again but her kids tell her no. One day she mocked my red hair and said they are too much, and I retorted, someone who gets bald can’t comment on my hair colour. Over time we have become comfortable in each other’s weirdness, in a world where we all must be normal. Boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Girls have long hair and boys have short. Otherwise your identity is too fluid and loose for them to understand and fit you in the prescribed definition of the society and genders. 

💇🏿‍♀️So let the Maggies cut their hair. When I see young women posting their bald heads on social media, I feel their gentle streaks of rebellions like the color of rainbow flag or ribbon on your collar. It’s a strong voice and sentiment, a silent one but a powerful one of accepting themselves and rejecting others. Hair here and every where. We make statements with and without hair. A world where women do not dress for a man’s honor, or standards of society and fashion. Where clothes or hair do not control their minds and their boundaries, curtailing them to homes but allow them to step out to shine under the sun, blow with the wind, and dance in the rain.

#blog #amillonthefloss #women #georgeeliot #feminism #classicfiction #englishschool 

Roman stories 

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

#bookreview 

I am a certified Jhumpa Lahiri fan and her brand of short stories. 

Spoiler alert: 

But lately I am feeling dissatisfied. I find that her style and her stories are becoming a bit repetitive, her characters same old grey daily characters lacking personality. May be short stories tend to be about the situation than the people, and author spends less  time on them but more on the story progression. 

However I wish that her stories are more enchanting and connecting as she now evolves into this master storyteller from years of experience and expertise. Instead these stories seem like ‘Interpreter of Roman melodies’ similar to her earlier books but in a different language and setting. Sort of old vine in a new bottle. (Sorry if it sounds rude, but i don’t have your views on your chosen genre) But it’s still foreign like the Indian immigrant stories in the past so it’s still premium and niche. A life where people don’t worry about money, but their past and future, and write prose about it. 

‘To have the luxury to live life like an art.’ 

It seems like the stories are something she wrote while sitting at a plaza watching people and doing her Italian class homework. Her teachers must be greatly impressed on her command of language and story. To me it seems like an essay to write on what do you see in a prose! 

I did fall in love with the typical Bengali American immigrant fiction of her earlier days, which has been a top selling genre after her big wins and something of a comfort reading for someone like me who is all about the dilemma of belonging or not. 

Jhumpa, I can see that you are experimenting. 

These stories seem to be from someone who is watching the world from a two side mirror or a TV rather someone living there. A very expat experience than an immigrants experience which is as different as a rich and poor man’s version, or having the Roman experience rather than Roman life. 

I wonder when the author becomes bigger than their writing. It could be the curse of an author when you have exhausted your memories and inspirations in your first books and now people want something new. Probably this was not to be translated and is only meant for expats in Italy and just because of her universal personality the editors decided why not. 

I read and leave and get back to it not knowing if I have covered 50 or 5 pages with the book not wishing to move with me but at its own pace. Story after story seems same, and the plot seems same, where nothing is really helping other than the mind wandering of the narrator. 

The last 50 pages I could not even finish. It was slow and repetitive, dragging thru nameless characters. In the story ‘Steps’, I kept trying to keep track of the people and their mundane happenings. No one died but it seemed dark enough to assume that someone should. It was a nice try, to avoid chaos you made the story flow slow but instead you could have sharpened the characters which were the subject. Somehow the beauty of steps didn’t come out in the story. 

I had borrowed the copy from a friend and it was time to return. There is a certain timeline with borrowed books. My friend and I would definitely have a good discussion about it. 

Jhumpa do not write another book or an essay on a mundane topic like book covers - it was more of a blog or a podcast. I did enjoyed reading it and it gave me good ideas for my own cover design. I hope you do get involved in your book covers, you have the power to create art, pick artists, experiment and create iconic book covers. 

All the best, Jhumpa as you try to reinvent yourself. Eagerly waiting! 

 

Ps. I don’t think Jhumpa will read this but I have tried to be honest, but tell me if I need to be nicer. 

Bad words

I have had a complicated relationship with bad words. That’s what we were told to call them, right! As a child I grew up protected where bad words were not spoken in front of children or females, and I was both. If I stepped out around my vivacious Punjab, I found people to only express in loud roguish tones and generous sprinkle of interesting words. The words in Punjabi language seem cute but it’s still abuse. 

When I went to senior schools and colleges, and suddenly there was a bombardment of Fs, Bs and Ls. We got our biggest kick to say it loud whenever the song 🎵🎶Alice played. Boys would have great fun in telling double meaning jokes to girls. Initially I couldn’t understand them. Delhi university is the national potpourri of the language from north to south, east to west, you just need to open your mind or should I say loose your mind. They should charge money for the literally the best course on the dark arts of abusing. Or should I say National Institute to F epistemology as it’s quite fashionable art. If you don’t know the meaning or speak these then you are just a loser who needs to be called all these names. 

The choice was clear. I didn’t like to hear these words so you don’t call me and I don’t call you. 

Thankfully there was another social practice which exempted good girls from saying it. I got away or tolerated enough even though I was surrounded by jerks and it was always on the tip of my tongue. Corporates discouraged such usage but in closed doors, male groups and smoking areas this was a common practice. The vocabulary became more diverse as I moved the cities and my husband’s Tamilian heritage was added. In fact I realised that I am quite capable of saying these words when I don’t know their meaning. The impact was brilliant any any decent Tamilian would not want to mess with me. His ears will need Ganga snaan. 

Then came raising our child, who was picking up these words from her Danish kindergarten in a new language. We happily stayed oblivious to them until we were called to her school. Now in junior school with the language studies, she is learning 3 different ones and she is curious about the meaning of them. 

While kids learn the text book stuff in school, the environment teaches them the spoken language. It’s easy to brush off and say that it’s a bad word not to be used, or closing them off to any exposure and very selective Tv, films, music, park, social gatherings, and what not. She would hear from her circle of friends and some kids use it more freely. I was surprised when I was myself embroiled in it as Mother is the favorite person of interest when it comes to abuse. I am not sure if it’s patriarchy or matriarchy but it’s simply rude. Apparently you can’t abuse kids back as an adult. 

What do you do. I do try to explain my child the meaning of them in a broad way (there should be a dictionary for it, puffinbooks just a book idea) like the names of private parts, or simple meaning of F words. We still haven’t been able to explain the double entendres. We can hardly catch up with the evolving etymology of these words and it’s getting global. It’s a totally new subject and pace. 

Moreover whenever there is an intense moment like a fun ride on a roller coaster, the words just pop out of my mouth in my thrill and excitement. When my daughter hears it she gives me the same look I give her for bad behaviour. I apologise and accept humbly that we both are parenting each other in many ways. 

This brings me to the conclusion that kids learn for themselves, if you allow them to. Eventually you can’t stop as a language has a life of its own and people are %#*?!. All we can do is to help them not take things personally and choose kindness in a very rude world. 

As an author, I finally understand the emotions behind them but does it add to my writing. There are words that hold a certain emotional quality to them to express anger, jealousy, humor or sarcasm. They can help create diverse characters starting from funny 👺to plain evil 👹. But an author ✍🏼 needs to be cautious as these words also impact the emotions of people, and we write to heal not to scar. ❤️‍🩹

Ps I realise I can’t even speak it or write it as I am not comfortable. Also I don’t want to leave digital footprint for the internet algorithm to pick my writing up for such language. 

Life over two beers

Author: Sanjeev Sanyal 

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A wonderful find in a strangers library at a homestay at Chikmaglur. It was an Indian contemporary short story collection, my fav kind. I finished about 12-14 short stories in 24 hours flat. Sometimes it’s wonderful to read like that. I loved each and every story especially the short poetry - rich and felt. 

The troll, used car salesman, two beers were such a stark reflection of the society we live in where we all drift in our usual patterns connecting and disconnecting on our paths. Satire has a way of saying the bitter truths without offending the populace. Throw in Social media, livelihood, community themes dominating big parts of our lives. I loved the conference call story of the corporate jungle. Probably, it’s due to my recent disillusion with the corporate world. 

A note on the author - 

Sanjeev Sanyal is a great find and I felt so much affinity with him. How? Just by reading a book. I think a book tells much about how an author thinks. Even though we are strangers it felt, that we could have some interesting conversations. 

- Firstly, his case for reviving the short story collection. He talks about some of his original stories which he wanted to publish in 2005 but it couldn’t happen as no publisher would bet on this genre. 

His second case for boosting satire is another ideology we share. I think Indian humor has been underestimated and has a way to take a swing. My second is a comedy. 

Thirdly, he is from my alma mater SRCC Delhi and has also been at the epicenter of 2008 financial crisis in investment banking. I was employed with  the titanic of the sub prime crisis - Lehman brothers. No one thought a 150 year old company will sink so fast. 

Although I survived that threw me on to a path of writing where I find myself now and it sounds like he did too. 

Hoping someday I meet Mr Sanyal and we can discuss these and many other topics.