Woh Humsafar Tha: On endings, echoes, and the book that became my beginning

Woh humsafar tha…
He was my fellow traveller.

It is a line stitched with sorrow and soaked in recognition — that someone who once walked beside you did so with sincerity, even if not with staying power. That companionship is not guaranteed continuity. That presence does not promise permanence.

But perhaps the ache lies in the next line:
Magar us se hamnavaai na thi.
But he was never in harmony with me.

December does this.
It opens the archive.
It makes the mind a museum.
It brings back the books we wrote with other people’s hands.

And this year — this luminous, lunatic, life-altering year — the song feels different.
Not bitter.
Not bruised.
Just true.

This was the year a book came to life — and so did I.

On the 15th of December, my memoir Tell My Mother I Like Boys officially steps into the world. A book that tested every tendon of memory, every ligament of longing, every secret I had swallowed to survive. A book that pulled me through decades — the Delhi of my childhood, the New York of my becoming, the India of my return — and asked me to look again, deeper, gentler.

And then, as if the universe wanted to underline the moment in gold, came the news:

On January 16th, 2026, the Jaipur Literature Festival — the grandest stage of them all — will host my book launch.

I still don’t know which part of me to thank:
the boy who hid his softness,
the man who hardened his edges,
or the writer who finally let both speak.

Life, like the ghazal, is rarely linear.
It loops.
It lingers.
It leaves a line unfinished only to complete it years later.

This year, mine was completed in ways I could never have predicted.
This was the year of humsafars — literal, metaphorical, magical, momentary.
Not all harmonised with me, but all held a note long enough for me to recognize my own.

“Tarke-ta’alluqaat pe roya na tu, na main…”

Neither of us cried when we parted.
But neither of us slept in peace either.

If I had to choose a sher that describes my year, it would be this.
So many endings.
So many awakenings.
So many almost-loves that entered my life like sudden season shifts — monsoon men, winter guests, summer ghosts.
Some stayed long enough to soften a scar.
Others left quickly enough to deepen it.

But each one — every humsafar — taught me the quiet intelligence of impermanence.

You can love deeply and still let go.
You can walk with someone without walking forever.
You can hold hands without holding hostage.
You can be undone without being destroyed.

This, perhaps, is the memoir’s marrow.
Not the revelation of queerness.
Not the retelling of childhood.
Not the recounting of recovery.

But the simple, sacred shift from shame to selfhood.
From secrecy to speech.
From surviving to living.

The book broke me open — and stitched me stronger.

This year I learned that success is not applause — it is alignment.

People use the word “success” for restaurants, for reviews, for the resumes we polish like talismans.
But I’ve started calling it something else:
fulfillment.

Success is external.
Fulfillment is internal.
Success is a sprint.
Fulfillment is a pilgrimage.

Every blessing this year has felt less like achievement and more like alignment — doors opening not because I knocked, but because I finally stood where I was meant to stand.

I was meant to write this book.
I was meant to return to India.
I was meant to come undone so that I could be remade.

Life, in its strange choreography, has taken me from Manhattan kitchens to Delhi monsoons to Jaipur’s literary stage — and each turn, each twist, each topple has been a teacher.

This memoir is not my success. It is my surrender.
A surrender to story.
A surrender to truth.
A surrender to the humsafars who loved me briefly, badly, beautifully — and showed me who I was becoming all along.

“Ke dhoop-chhaav ka aalam raha, judai na thi…”

We lived in a world of sun and shade —
But there was no real separation.

Isn’t that how the year felt?
Brightness and bruising.
Joy and jarring.
Belonging and bewilderment.
Days that dazzled.
Days that dragged.

I woke up sometimes filled with fire, sometimes with fog.
I wrote pages some mornings with clarity, others with confusion.
I fed hundreds with laughter and fed myself with silence.
I lost people I loved.
I found people I trusted.
I forgave those who had no idea they needed forgiveness.

I even forgave myself.
That may have been the hardest blessing of all.

We often think love is the lesson.
But forgiveness — forgiveness is the final exam.

And maybe that is what December comes to ask each of us:
What are you still carrying that you were meant to let go of?
What name?
What wound?
What expectation?
What echo?

For me, the answer came while writing the final chapters of the memoir.
I realized there were versions of myself I was still trying to apologise for.
The boy who loved wrongly.
The man who lived bravely.
The years I wandered.
The decades I hid.

Writing the book was not catharsis — it was consecration.

I did not heal by forgetting.
I healed by remembering.

And so I return to that first line: “Woh humsafar tha…”

He was my fellow traveller — yes.
But so were the people I never dated.
So were the people I never met.
So were the ones who broke me.
And the ones who built me.
So were the friends who came as balm.
So were the strangers who came as mirrors.
So were the editors, the mentors, the readers — all of you — who taught me that vulnerability is not a wound, but a window.

And so was this year.
A humsafar.
A companion.
A co-traveller across 12 months of making, breaking, birthing, becoming.

The harmony may not always have matched.
But the journey?
The journey was divine.

As the year closes, here is what I know:

Life will outwit your plans.
Love will outgrow your expectations.
Loss will outrun your denial.
Memory will outlive your resistance.
And some songs — like some truths — will return to you when you least expect them, only to remind you:

You survived.
You sang.
You stayed.

And maybe that’s all December is asking of us:
to honour the humsafars who shaped us,
to bless the paths that broke us,
to bow to the book that became our beginning,
and to walk into the new year with a little more wonder,
a little more wisdom,
and a lot more willingness to be beautifully, bewilderingly human.

Because in the end —
we are all fellow travellers only for a while.
But what a while it has been.