Sometimes I feel nostalgia for my pre-motherhood lifestyle. I even feel a sense of incredulity when I think back to moments when I lived independently and was accountable to no one other than myself. Like one April, when the weather in Delhi was perfect—not too cold, yet not too warm—and I had decided to inhabit my living room in Kailash Hills and had created a nook for myself on the floor with these giant pillows a friend had given me and binge-watched The Good Wife. I remember deciding I should go to bed at some point, because it was already past midnight, but the story was so compelling, and I needed to know what would happen between Alicia and Will. So I lay in bed and simply continued watching until I passed out. I recently recalled the months I spent in Goa in 2018 when I watched every episode of Gilmore Girls. Yes, I read and wrote and did other serious things, but I also allowed myself to be flippant like that, to throw caution to the wind and be indulgent. And I often miss that. The last such act I can remember that involved gratuitous consumption of filmic material was during my pregnancy, when I was obsessed with watching almost all the episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

Early motherhood doesn’t lend itself well towards such time-absorbing activities. Time feels so elusive that the notion of ‘having it’ gets complicated. When you find yourself with a large swathe of it, your altered brain ranks priorities, arranging all your tasks into those you can do when your child is awake and those you can only do when they are asleep. Since I began full-time work in August, my child’s nap time is my work time. I am almost hyper efficient and can do in a compressed two-hour slot what would have otherwise taken me several more because I would surely have paused to procrastinate. It’s like everyday you find a small pocket of time and you must use it wisely to avoid feeling guilt. I have forgotten what it’s like to binge on a series. If I decide to get invested in one, my partner and I parcel out the episodes, watching one each day at that moment in time when our child is surely asleep. I gradually began to feel like there was a void in my routine that I felt unable to fill because I couldn’t find an adequate replacement that could satisfy my lust for narrative that is quick, pacy, frivolous, yet also clever and intelligent.