What My Book Tells Me: It’s still a life in conversation with itself

 YEARS DON’T END neatly. They don’t pack themselves into boxes, tie bows around regret or offer conclusions on demand. They taper. They loosen. They leave the door ajar.

This year does that for me.

On Monday, December 15, Tell My Mother I Like Boys entered the world officially. Not with a trumpet blast, but with a quiet courage. A book that took years of circling, decades of deferring and a lifetime of learning how to say one sentence honestly— without apology, without disguise, without armour.

It is a memoir, yes. But it is also a reckoning. A queering of memory. An unlearning of shame. An exercise in catharsis that demanded I return to rooms I had sealed shut, conversations I had rehearsed but never spoken, truths I had carried like contraband. Writing it was not brave. Publishing it felt braver. Letting it be read—misread, loved, resisted—felt bravest of all.

What I did not expect was how gently the world would meet it.

How voices I admire, respect, and trust leaned in—not to judge, but to witness. Shobhaa De heard a raag in it, a melodic unfolding of delicate truths. Rashmi Uday Singh tasted fire and tenderness on the same plate. Vikas Khanna saw resilience stitched through ruin. Sonal Ved asked readers to sit with it, slowly, with chai and time. Randeep Hooda recognised performance stripped of costume. Orry called it a mood. Asma Khan called it layered, fragile, human. Frances Mayes traced its peripatetic hunger. Shashi Tharoor named its courage for what it is—authenticity offered without disguise. Radhikaraje Gaekwad heard a friend whispering his life. Geetanjali Shree saw the anguish behind the acclaim. Abhay K felt it flow, river to ocean.

These are not blurbs to me. They are benedictions.

They remind me that books do not arrive alone. They are carried. Held. Interpreted into being by readers who invest their own breath into the pages. It takes a village to raise a child, we say—but it takes many villages to raise an adult willing to speak the truth. Family villages. Literary villages. Queer villages. Chosen villages. Readers who may never meet you, but still recognise themselves somewhere between the lines.

There is also the quiet miracle of timing. That the Jaipur Literature Festival chose to host the book’s official launch on January 16, 2026, feels less like validation and more like continuity. The year does not end here; it spills forward. The work of this book—its conversations, discomforts, consolations— belongs as much to the new year as to the one closing its eyes.

I feel lucky. Not in the transactional sense of success, but in the spiritual sense of being met. Lucky to have been read with generosity. Lucky to have survived long enough to tell my own story. Lucky that when I finally spoke, the room did not empty. As this year exhales, I am left with gratitude more than pride. Gratitude for my mother, whose name opens the book and whose courage made it possible. Gratitude for readers who trusted me with their attention. Gratitude for voices that stood beside the work rather than above it. Gratitude for the permission—self-granted, finally—to be whole.

The year doesn’t conclude. It pauses.

And in that pause, I recognise the rarest gift of all: a life still in conversation with itself, and a story that no longer needs to be hidden to be held.