ॐ
Manna
मन्नाThis isn’t really a website. It’s a mala — nine beads, each one a thing I know to be true about you. Some soft. Some sacred. All real.
begin the mala
This isn’t really a website. It’s a mala — nine beads, each one a thing I know to be true about you. Some soft. Some sacred. All real.
You love the way sunlight loves a room — without asking if it’s wanted, without holding anything back. In every photograph we have, your arm finds its way around me before the shutter even clicks. I have never once had to guess where I stand with you.
You made a face like that — ears pulled, eyes shut, laughing at absolutely nothing — and I understood the whole of you in one photograph. Underneath every serious, bearded, Shiva-eyed moment is a person who will happily be silly just to hear me laugh.
Joy isn’t something you perform. It just leaks out of you — into a flower tucked behind an ear, into a laugh that arrives before the joke is even finished. Being near you is like standing close to something that never stopped celebrating being alive.
You notice the small things nobody asked you to notice — the thing I didn’t say, the day that was quietly harder than the others. That is the quietest, most enormous kind of love there is, and you give it without ever making it a performance.
Every threshold you have ever walked through, you walked through slowly and deliberately, carrying the weight of it without needing anyone to see how heavy it was. You simply arrive — steady, unhurried, already having done the work in silence.
breathe in · breathe out
You hold the middle so gently. Not indifferent — just unshaken. I have watched storms arrive at your door and leave again without ever waking you.
“Some men perform stillness. You simply are it — hair unbound, breath slow, the world spinning safely around a center that never moves.”
There is a quiet at your centre that nothing seems to disturb for long. Not because nothing touches you — but because you’ve made peace with the touching. That is a harder, rarer thing than most people ever manage.
“And then, in the same breath — the flute again. Mischief, tenderness, a flower behind the ear like it was always meant to be there.”
The stillness of Shiva. The play of Krishna. Two banks of the same river, and somehow you are both — steady enough to lean on, playful enough to make the leaning feel like joy.
In a japa mala, the Meru bead is the one you never count over — the still point where one round ends and, if your heart wants it, another quietly begins. Loving, cute, sweet, joyful, caring, perseverant, equanimous, peaceful — Shiva in your stillness, Krishna in your smile. Manna, I could go around this mala a thousand times and it would still feel like the first.
— Divyanshi
made with the whole mala, for Manna
