Between the Lines: On Desire

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about desire and the ways it moves quietly through South Asian writing, shaping lives even when it is not spoken aloud.

Desire is often imagined as something that announces itself and yet, more often than not, it does the opposite, settling instead into the smallest of gestures, into pauses that stretch a moment just slightly longer than necessary, into the careful choice of words that circle what cannot quite be said, until it becomes less an event and more a presence, something that lingers at the edges of speech and thought, altering both without ever fully declaring itself. It is not always recognised as desire when it first arrives.

Sometimes it appears as restlessness, as a dissatisfaction that cannot be easily explained, as a quiet pull toward something or someone that feels both familiar and out of reach. Sometimes it is mistaken for duty, folded so deeply into expectation that it becomes indistinguishable from it. And sometimes it is resisted so consistently that it begins to reshape itself, finding other ways to exist.