Full moon evenings: small household observances
On the evening of Karthika Purnima my grandmother used to bathe by four in the afternoon, an hour earlier than any ordinary...
Darshak Yadav writes for Herbcare from a small flat in Ahmedabad. He grew up between his grandmother's kitchen in the old city and his father's slow evenings on the balcony, and became curious early about the household practices that never announced themselves as wellness. He reads widely across regional recipe traditions, Ayurvedic householder texts, and quiet cultural writing, and prefers writing that carries a specific place, a specific hand, a specific hour of the day. When he is not writing he is usually cooking, walking, or sitting with a cup of something warm.
On the evening of Karthika Purnima my grandmother used to bathe by four in the afternoon, an hour earlier than any ordinary...
The grass behind my aunt's house in Belgaum is cut short, almost like a cricket pitch, and in October it wakes up...
On the Konkan coast, somewhere between Ratnagiri and Malvan, the summer arrives quietly and then all at once. By late April the...
My grandmother in Kyoto did not practise tea ceremony in the formal sense. She had no tatami room, no scroll on the...
A small piece of cinnamon bark, perhaps the size of an adult thumb, sits in a glass mug of hot water on...
When the wind comes off the Atlantic in winter and the cold settles into Casablanca, my mother brings out a particular blue...
In a small kitchen near the harbour in Kochi, the afternoon ritual was simple. Two teaspoons of dried fennel seeds were dropped...
The monsoon in Bangalore is not a single event. It arrives in waves, sometimes three weeks of grey sky and steady afternoon...
A small ceramic jar in my mother-in-law's kitchen in Kyoto holds dried rose petals from her sister's garden in Yamanashi. They were...
There is a stone bench near my house in Kyoto, on the slope behind a small Shinto shrine, that points roughly southwest....
On the shelf above my writing desk in Kyoto, there is a small wooden box. Inside the box, eight candles in various...
In a majlis in Jeddah, on a Friday afternoon, the eldest man of the house held a small brass pot called a...