There's no wrong way to do this
A look back at four essays from 2025 plus an editorial offering
Hello and welcome back to shelf offering, a Tuesday newsletter by Apoorva Sripathi. Writing this newsletter is a crucial, rigorous, and joyful part of my work, so if you’d like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.
It’s 2026 and I find myself stirring semolina again till it resembles hot sand. This sounds like a very mundane thing to do in the first week of the new year but that’s the beauty of everyday life. I keep coming back to making upma because I always have coarse semolina in my cupboard and because it’s an easy dish to whip up for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. I describe it as savoury porridge but lately I’ve begun to think about it as all-in-one polenta where you fry vegetables and spices in a south Indian tempering of your choice, add twice the amount of water to semolina and bring it to a rolling boil, before adding the semolina and mixing it vigorously, and finally letting it steam on a low heat for about 10 minutes and then off the heat for another 10, if you can be patient enough. With no other dish do I think of previous iterations as much as I do with upma – to me it is like laying in the bath and observing the foam, passing it from hand to hand. This is so mundane again but I love these little moments of intimacies with myself that seem to lead to nowhere. Which neatly brings me to today’s newsletter.
I thought long and hard about my first newsletter of 2026 and unfortunately I haven’t been inspired enough to write. This is the way of the world – my world at least. I’ve been busy with other things, including illustrating commissions for a publication, writing fiction, and getting ready to announce pitch calls for issue 3 of chlorophyll (which is fun and holds a surprise). All of this takes planning, energy, and time which I’d like to preserve for something (and someone; it’s my one year marriage anniversary soon) else.
Anyway, January is always pushed to be the month of reinvention and I don’t care much for that. You cannot change much in a month, good habits you want to cultivate take sustained effort. Unless you’re Kafka, transformation takes time. This is also why I’m reluctant to make any resolutions because I think of them as solely January things and even if not, I forget about them. In any case, I am already too hard on myself and I need to show myself some kindness and grace – and I find that resolutions make the latter impossible. Instead, I will be exploring that which excites me; I’m going to be following fun. I hope you do too!
After the links, I offer my services for editorial consultation if you’re keen on it. My books are open from 12 January - 30 March and I’ll open them again for summer depending on beach/holiday plans!
Works of art
I love the way my nails look but they are also my undoing. I approach an orange with the gentlest of intentions – to peel it in one long endless strip with no ruptures to the fruit but I fail immediately at this task. My claws have breached the perimeter of the flesh and now possess within them the flaming pulp. The peels are short and rugged like the outlines of mountains or unpaved dirt roads ridged at the edges. I’ve longed to be like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, peeling an entire Granny Smith using a knife, a curl of itself reaching further and further below. In the same movie, Jonah asks his father about his late mother: “I’m starting to forget her.” “She could peel an apple in one long curly strip,” the father replies. “The whole apple.” What a way to be remembered, as adept and loving. I’m yet to be this person.
Failing recipe writing
So how can recipe writing be considered universal and standardised when it’s personal – personal to the recipe writer who gives birth to it and personal to the cook who will later mould it into their own? I routinely struggle with this; in fact, I was so against writing recipes initially that I only gave in because I thought that it would be a good writing challenge for me to take on. Of course, this is the unique challenge with food itself - it is both universal and personal. Which, I think, renders it to be lawless. How can you have rules for something so ephemeral and unambiguous? This is what sets me up to fail when I write recipes.
The bizarre and the beautiful
The beginning of my breakfast sketch starts with the end: an empty plate with leftover crumbs, knives and spoons in the sink, the streaks of thick yoghurt stubbornly clinging onto my glass bowl, coffee stains on the lips, pen on paper… The scene isn’t absurd enough; but an untouched breakfast is rarely interesting. It’s mundane – everything is set on the table ready to rot and be exhausted. The butter will melt and spoil, the apple will brown, the jam will mould, and the toast and coffee will go cold unless art preserves it. Even then, it isn’t so; nothing is permanent. I often think of the remains of my breakfast as ‘memento mori’, that cheerful Latin concept of an object that reminds one of the inevitability of one’s death, but to be fair it is everywhere around me.
Transit, or something like that
The week after that we left for Hyderabad (to visit my sister and her husband), a city that I visited in 2011 with someone I’m no longer friends with. I remember fragments of the earlier visit: hot and dry; in search of delicate cotton fabric, oxidised silver jewellery; and bottles of musk, jasmine, and rose attar. I don’t remember any eating but I remember the wandering, the muddy pits of old Hyderabad staining my white salwars, and the prickling friction of our dying friendship. Critics accuse me of saccharine nostalgia in my work (and they are right for the most part), but I’ve come to think of myself as an investigator of memory, longing for a different future without having fully released my past. I imagine that kind of senility can congeal and unfurl constantly in the mind.
Offerings
Last summer, I introduced two new editorial offerings and a surprising number of people availed of it! So I’m opening my books again for this year (12 January - 30 March for now), combining the two offerings into one. If you are:
working on an essay (about 750-1000 words), a newsletter, your website, or anything that involves words and require a keen, meticulous, and anal eye – I’m your girl! People I’ve worked with said I’ve been indispensable to the whole editorial process and very thorough. It’s priced at £120 for a 60 minute call (including editing). We’ll have a discussion beforehand on what you want to work on and I will come prepared with ideas, suggestions, and edits and talk you through it all on call. Send me an email with questions to figure out the nitty gritty of it or book below. Paid subs, I’m happy to extend the call to an extra 30 minutes!
If you’d like help editing your self-published book (I edited the cookbook Sindh: Stories and Recipes from a Forgotten Land, which was picked up by Harper Collins India) or magazine (I have proofread and subedited three issues of PIT magazine), email me so we can discuss rates.
Solidarity!