The Lazy Desi’s 25-year archive of chaos, dreams, kids, ADHD, gaming, and everything life swallowed too early.
Every new mother gets one absurd storyline in her origin myth.
Mine was TSA.
For the first year, I migrated back and forth between New York and my hometown like a determined salmon with a stroller.
Every three months.
Diaper bags, breastmilk, infant Tylenol, winter clothes in summer, summer clothes in snow — the whole logistical circus.
I became so efficient at airport life that I could dismantle and reassemble a stroller faster than most couples resolve arguments.
^ One. Handed.
My son was the only baby in the entire American branch of the family tree.
The first one.
The golden child.
The experiment.
My parents were bewitched.
My cousins — babies’ aunt and uncle — were deliriously obsessed.
I watched them all fall apart in adoration and thought:
If only they loved my secret Doula Certification like this. Sigh. (Who am I kidding? Even I KNOW it’s utterly useless lol)
But there is something magical about watching your own family meet the next generation —
as if your chaotic early adulthood suddenly acquires mathematical symmetry.
Pregnancy is unpredictable, but my son apparently skipped the memo about due dates.
He arrived in late January 2010, tiny, dramatic, and entirely on his own timeline — clearly inheriting my flair for narrative crescendos.
I had just arrived in my hometown “temporarily” to wait out the final stretch.
Good thing.
The universe clearly knew I needed to be surrounded by the few humans who understood my chaos in its native dialect.
…and Mackinac Island Fudge…
definitely the fudge…
The brain has an elite, almost militaristic capacity to continue functioning when the body waves its white flag.
I currently rely on that ruthlessly.
While my physical form languishes in hormonal chaos, my mind pirouettes through complex thought with the same velocity it always has — analyzing, calculating, interpreting like a research algorithm.
It’s such a bizarre sensation:
my body belongs to this pregnancy,
but my mind still belongs to mathematics, anatomy, sociolinguistics, cosmology —
anything that could anchor me to myself.
I am two entities at once:
biological and intellectual,
deteriorating and ascending.
New York in Autumn is a creature with pulsating arteries, sprinting through its own existence.
Meanwhile I moved like a newly-installed operating system booting in Safe Mode.
Every step required triage:
the nausea, the vertigo, the tidal waves of exhaustion that would have made sense if I were finishing a residency rotation — not just walking to Duane Reade to buy saltines and ginger ale.
This city shouts; my brain whispers.
(There is something very wrong if I’m not the loudest thing in a place…It’s. Just. Wrong.)
The dissonance is astronomical.
Landing in New York felt less like travel and more like a dimensional shift.
I stepped off the plane carrying a private secret — a very new, very fragile pregnancy — and an overwhelming sense that I had been dissolved and reconstituted somewhere between continents.
The sensory cleanliness of JFK stunned me.
The geometric order of lines.
The sterile fluorescent lighting.
The absence of unsolicited commentary.
My brain, permanently rewired by South Asia’s emotional immediacy, kept waiting for someone to interrogate my life choices.
No one did.
No one even looked twice.
It was both liberating and disorienting — like being handed a new identity before I remembered the shape of the old one.
This one was… eye-opening.
Traveling alone as a teen, I masked effortlessly:
Quick reflexes in crowds Hypervigilance Silent efficiency No emotional leakage Zero sensory complaints
Traveling as an adult with someone else?
My mask cracked.
Hard.
Suddenly the noise was too loud, the people were too close, the expectations were too heavy.
I realized how much I’d intellectualized my way through fear and discomfort back then.
How much adrenaline compensated for the ADHD exhaustion.
How much of my “independence” was actually survival-mode brilliance.
Being with someone didn’t make me weaker —
it simply revealed how much stronger I’d forced myself to be when I was alone.
But hey! It’s New York City Baby!!!
So…
While other newlyweds went to family dinners and weekend outings with in-laws,
I was in the corner with the new Jak & Daxter, my go-to X-Men comics, and Call of Duty: World at War.
Gaming feels like breathing.
A place where effort isn’t punished and tasks come with reward sounds.
He’ll just pass by and kiss the top of my head, murmuring,
Harado saro ko, meri Gamer Princess!
For once, I wasn’t failing anything.
Every brilliant girl who failed to launch knows this feeling:
You can see the heights.
You can see the potential.
But your body refuses to move.
My mind could diagnose medical cases better than my physicians.
I could understand endocrine pathways and write code in the same afternoon.
But I couldn’t get up to fold the darn laundry.
People said, “She’s wasting her talent.”
He said,
“You’re not done. You’re interrupted.”
That sentence has kept me alive more times than I can count.
If marriage was a marathon, I started it already tired.
Burnout was my permanent roommate.
Fatigue hummed under my skin like background radiation.
I would start organizing the house like the Pinterest Fairy
…then fall asleep mid-task like a chunky, throaty, malfunctioning Roomba.
He laughs and covers me with a blanket.
Not mockingly.
Lovingly.
Like he knows brilliance doesn’t burn evenly.
…when I wake up (sometimes days later) I’m never alone.
UnderTheRock Diaries 