Book Excerpt | Aging (Un)Gracefully By Lalita Iyer: A Memoir

In Aging (Un)Gracefully, journalist and essayist Lalita Iyer examines the complex realities of growing older as a woman. Through sharp storytelling and candid reflections, this memoir unpacks how ageing becomes a liberation and a reclamation of body, identity, and relationships.

Lalita blends humour with authenticity as she reflects on shifting hormones, changing priorities, and the sense of empowerment that comes with self-acceptance. The book invites readers to see ageing not as decline, but as transformation and liberation. Here is an excerpt from the book.

Book excerpt from Aging (Un)Gracefully

My Secret Life as a Domestic Goddess

One of the things I am discovering about myself as I grow older is that I love domesticity. I truly, deeply love it. I love making lists, buying groceries, planning meals, taking inventory of my pantry, using up produce in a rhythm that allows room for play and adventure and yet has some method and underlying meaning and logic.

I can finally say that there isn't a corner of my house now that is a blind spot. I know where things are, and I can always find what I want. My household finally functions. like a well-oiled machine. Every month, I have fewer and fewer things that I have no use for I simply give them. away or get rid of them. Knowing exactly where something is the moment you need it is sort of empowering. It's great knowing that you have got full control over what goes where in your house. You know exactly where the tool kit or the dough scraper is, or when you changed the batteries of your TV remote last, or how long a block of cheese usually lasts.

There is something deeply calming and satisfying about the motions of domesticity. The reassuring sounds of the rice cooker, knowing you have a cured skillet and your dosas/pancakes, omelettes will never fail, having just the right slots for spoons of every kind, the scent of bread rising in the oven, the joy of an open crumb when you slice the lovely brown crust of a sourdough boule-all these acts, small and mundane, offer me a sense of grounding and a day fully lived.

In a world that often feels fragmented and too fast-moving for me to keep pace with, often laden with too much information to process, I find solace in these repetitive, everyday rituals. And yet, as I revel in the comfort of these chores, I also wrestle with the implications of my love for them.

Does my enjoyment of domestic tasks make me less of a feminist? Is there an inherent contradiction in finding meaning in acts that have traditionally been associated with gendered labor? I still flinch when a bank manager asks me if 1 am working or a housewife for a financial information form and I can feel my hackles rising. These are questions I have found myself grappling with, but the more I engage in domestic work, the more I come to see it and experience it as an avenue for self-care and self-expression.

I love cooking, baking, pickling, tidying. I have found a new love in composting, recycling, visible mending projects. Two years ago, I started baking and selling sourdough bread and it's going well. I love it, as long as I don't have to scale up.

To be honest, I love doing all this much more than I have enjoyed attending lit fests, interviewing celebrities, editing copy, or attending meetings and photo shoots at my various magazine and newspaper jobs in my previous avatars.
I have finally found a way to lead a boredom-free life. I am never bored now, although in the past, once I knew I could wing something, I set myself up for boredom, and the restlessness and anxiety that came with it.

Last week, I pickled whole lemons, just the way my friend Reshu's mother does. I had a whole bunch of lemons from my friend Kamakshi's garden. I washed and dried them well, slit the tops off ever so slightly (the zest was intoxicating), then made two vertical slits along each, but not going all the way (this is the kind of stuff people tell you when they are talking to you, unlike a recipe off the internet). Then I stuffed them with a spice mix of black salt,
sugar, table salt, and roasted carom seeds, ground coarsely. I stuffed fistfuls in each one of them along the slits, rotated, stuffed more along the other slit, and so on. I drop all the lemons into a large ceramic jar.

For the next few weeks, every morning, I would bring out the jar, give the lemons a good stir, and sun them out the whole day, allowing them to cook in their own juices let out by the spice mix. In the night, I would shut the jar tight and let it rest. By the end of week three, the lemons were soft and plump with flavor from the spice mix. By week four, I could declare that my whole lemon pickle was ready.

With the lemons that didn't make the cut for the pickle (they were either bruised or aesthetically flawed in some way), I figured a marmalade was in order, so there began Project Marmalade.

This year, for my birthday, a friend sent me a harvest of wild jacks which I am pickling currently. I have already tested a small batch for a preserve I learned to make. (The pickling took a month of regular checking and spooning of yeast scum, looking for signs of blackening of the wild jacks, which then had to be rescued immediately and readied for the next stage.)

Extracted from Lalita Iyer's Aging (Un)Gracefully, published by Simon and Schuster India