It’s been one week since we stepped into 2024. I would like to briefly summarize what the first week of 2024 was like for me. I started the year with lots of flowers around me! I love giving myself and receiving from others a colorful and fragrant bouquet. Below are some of the flowers from this week: I memorized the lyrics of my university’s anthem! It’s written in Urdu. I must have heard (and half-sung) it a hundred times at the university, but I never memorized the lyrics (in the correct order!

We had only been friends for a few weeks when A.H. proposed we take a stroll in the Tiergarten. It was a bright but very cold morning, there was a promise of snow. The garden was mostly yellow and dry this time of the year. But it was still a desirable change from Central Berlin streets which were very pretty, but weren’t especially green. We agreed the garden would be lush during the summer months and promised to visit again in summer.

Since coming back from my week long stay at grandmother’s village, my total mess of a sleep schedule has miraculously fixed itself. Perhaps this self emending is not too miraculous after all. In the village I would sleep on a charpayi on the roof with my grandmother, aunt, uncle and his children. Of course electricity is still erratic in that North Indian village, people call it bed time when the sky turns dark and wakey-wakey when the dawn breaks.