Dash Sisters

Apoorva: Big Fish, Small Pond

Summer afternoons at our boarding school were blistering—dry heat and sharp sun, in a rain-shadow pocket of south-eastern India. We’d gobble down lunch under the loud whirring of dining hall fans then run back to our dormitories to observe “silent time”. It was an hour-long break—sometimes two during the really unforgiving times of the year—when everyone read, napped or wrote in perfect silence. In the senior girls dormitory, silent time was sacred and strictly enforced. The only sounds you would hear were the soft turning of pages and the purr of overworked fans lulling us to sleep. And in the first few minutes, you’d also hear the shuffling of Apoorva’s feet as she ran up to my bed to tell me something exciting that had happened in her day. She’d try—heroically—to contain her giggles, then narrate the whole thing in a rushed whisper. She’d then run back to her home—the home of our warden, our “house parent”. The fact that Apoorva’s mother taught at the same school made little difference to how rebellious, angsty or fun her teen years were. Maithilee and I grew up with her, watching over her like big sisters do, no matter how little we ourselves were. Today, Apoorva is a lawyer. Still giggly. Still full of heart. It’s hard not to laugh with her when she whips out her quick wit, her long-winded analogies (which somehow make sense in the end!) and her unmistakable Banarsi turns of phrase. When you first meet her, it’s hard to imagine she has ever been anything other than herself—funny, confident and the kind of go-getter you want to place your bets on. But life is tricky even for the best of us. Her coming of age, though, is a story of reclaiming herself: relearning that she’s strong, smart, and good enough. As she approaches her thirties, Apoorva stands where many of us do — testing newly found solid ground, learning how to build up. She tells us about finding agency and power at her place of work, now that she’s no longer a starry-eyed junior. She talks about “settling down,” as per the standards society has set. She says that it has given her a freedom to explore who she is, now that the inherited checklist of life is mostly complete. Her eyes shine when she tells us that, like an explorer standing before uncharted waters. Then, because we’re two women cut from the same chatty cloth, we talk about marrying our opposites: how the differences drive us insane, and how they also steady us in small, life-affirming ways. She also tells us about the challenges of loving in a language other than the one you speak in your heart, and the beauty of finding a new language together anyway. Apoorva wondered whether she would have anything interesting to say in this episode. “I saw the other episodes. These are interesting people. They seem to have lives,” she said. I couldn’t believe she’d ever had a moment of doubt. Because the truth is, Apoorva has always been life itself. Even on those blistering summer afternoons in the late 2000s, she was already curious, tender, fierce, funny. She just doesn’t have to whisper anymore. PS: My dear Dash Sister Blue sits this conversation out, as she nurses herself back from a flu. We await her longingly. Love, Dash Sister Red This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dashsisters.substack.com [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Love, Love, Love

Valentine’s Day is here. Florists are sprinting. Heart-shaped things multiply overnight. Someone is panic-buying a crimson bouquet while texting “on my way” with the confidence of a liar. There’s a version of love we learn from movies. It’s cinematic — a thousand violins, a storm outside the window, someone sprinting through an airport. But beneath all the noise, it’s something so sweet, so simple: one shared day where the whole planet pauses to think about love. Messy, funny, sincere, insincere, confusing, all consuming, fleeting, but love, all the same. How do you capture so many colours, so many songs of love? We try, with this collage episode with voices from our old high school universe, scattered across the globe: cities, careers, marriages, heartbreaks, long-distance lives. This is the version of love you learn only after you’ve lived a little. It feels like a reunion — except instead of small talk and “what do you do now?”, we went straight into the matters of the heart. When you ask about love, everyone becomes startlingly honest. It feels like sitting with friends on a terrace at night under the moonlight after a long day, where conversation turns unexpectedly real—luminous. Someone laughs mid-sentence because they can’t believe they’re admitting it. Someone gets quiet, teary-eyed. Someone says something so true you want to hug them. It’s soft honesty that comes out with people you knew before you curated yourself for the real world. Each verse of this love song is different. Love of a son learning to see his father. Love as a sweet, one-sided, teenage obsession. Love for parents — secure, embarrassing, then priceless. Love for yourself. A warm bath, a memory, a little paper star. Love as friendship — the kind where you can share your worst thoughts, and you’ll be held close anyway. We reflect on what changes as you grow older: how younger love can sometimes look like fireworks — or anxiety in a pretty cute outfit — while older love is calm, peaceful. There’s also Kyoto. There are rivers. There is sunlight. There is the moment you pause inside your own life and realize: this matters. (When you know, you know.) So thank you, to our high school sweethearts — Harshita, Pranav, Datta, Deeksha, Rishvik, Sam, Priyanka, Niyathi, Spandana, Aqueel, and Meghnath — for giving your time, your truth, and for being you. You made this episode feel like a shared homecoming. We love you for it. And to you, reading and listening: we made this for you, too. To keep you company. Valentine’s Day, for all its glitter and marketing, is still built on a human impulse we can’t quite outgrow: the urge to say, I was here, and I cared. Love is not one thing — it’s a whole ecosystem. Tread softly. Xoxo, The Dash Sisters We want to hear your love stories too. Tell us when you fell in love, when it made sense for the first time, when you held it close, or let it go. Leave us a note. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dashsisters.substack.com [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Milestones & Meghnath

This episode comes to you from the great outdoors - super long distance, but somehow more alive. I’m recording from Ahmedabad, Gauri’s in Madikeri, and we’re both a little oxygen-drunk in the best way. This week’s drop is arriving on Friday instead of our usual Wednesday. We’ve been moving in a different rhythm as we play catch-up with our lives. And somehow, it’s also my birthday. I turn thirty today! There’s something about that sentence that feels a little bit bigger than it should. Like a new decade is a new room, and you don’t enter it by performing. You enter it by noticing what you’ve actually learned. So we did what we always do when we’re trying to tell the truth without making it too serious: we ran with a Vogue format (Gauri’s words, not mine) and ran through 30 questions for turning 30 — rapid fire, mildly unhinged, and perhaps pretty sincere underneath the jokes. Somewhere between “sunrise energy” and my most-played song (yes, it’s We Return to Love), it becomes obvious what this decade is about for me: moving forward with more intention, but keeping the softness. And then (because this episode is a whole life in miniature) we shift into the second half: a catch-up with an old friend from school — the kind of friend who once ran through your childhood like a disruptive comet and still somehow feels like your smartest, silliest, most fun best friend. Meet Meghnath Pillay: London-based software engineer, chaotic good energy, raw honesty, and the kind of person who could have walked around campus with a textbook and still be cool. We don’t give away his entire life story in this newsletter — you need to hear the laugh, the timing, the way he says things that are accidentally deeply profound — but we talk about what it means to grow up outside your country, to build a life with your own hands, to miss home in very specific ways (I said mangoes, obviously), and to find your way back to agency. And yes, there is a school prank story involving rope, scissors, a chase scene, and my hair. I survived. Barely. But here’s why this episode felt like the right one to release on the day of a dash sister turning thirty: Your twenties are loud. They’re awkward in ways nobody actually warns you about. But you also collect evidence. Evidence that you can endure. That you can reinvent. Evidence that you can be tender but still be powerful as you begin to stand up for yourself, step by step. And by the time you arrive at thirty, the question becomes less “Who am I becoming?” and more: What do I still believe? What’s still true after all the detours? This episode is our way of asking those questions, with laughter threaded through it like string lights. And if you feel like leaving us a note, we’d love to hear it: What’s something you still believe, now, as an adult: something you didn’t know at twenty, but you know in your bones today? Leave it in the Substack comments. We read every one. With love, Dash Sister Blue This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dashsisters.substack.com [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Stories that Make Us

This week’s episode is a little different — we didn’t invite a guest into the room. We invited stories. The ones we grew up inside of. The ones that made us cry as children and still make our throats tighten as adults. The ones that subconsciously built our inner architecture. The ones that found a way quietly inside us finding space inside our lives and started shaping how we understand devotion, integrity, sacrifice… the whole aching, beautiful question of what it means to be human. Because isn’t it kind of wild? We spend our adult lives thinking we’re shaped by our big decisions — our education, jobs, heartbreaks, cities, the people we love — and then one day a folk song, a myth, a moment from childhood taps you on the shoulder and goes: Hey. I’ve been living with you this whole time. So… we sat down, legs crossed (mentally), fist under chin (spiritually), and did what we always do: we got emotional, we got philosophical, and even a little bit ridiculous. Punyakoti: the cow who kept her word Gauri opens with a Kannada folk song she used to beg her mom to sing at bedtime - Punyakoti Govina Hadu: the story of Punyakoti the cow. A starving tiger. An honest cow. Motherhood. Love. Honor. It’s a story that sounds simple until it isn’t. It asks: What guides you — instinct or integrity? What happens when your moral and survival compass disagree? (Also: if you’ve ever wondered why Gauri has natural “confess immediately” energy / is too good to be true … yes. We found the origin story. There’s a whole childhood prank-call moment where she literally cannot run away from accountability. I’m still shook.) The maple leaf in the teacup At the end, we come back to reflection, a kind of softness. A Zen master in Kyoto pours tea for a student and asks, twice: “What do you see?” It’s a story about slowing down until you begin to see that there’s more in the cup than you thought there was, if you care to look. And it reminded me of a Rumi poem — a line that has followed me around for years: “There is a moon inside every human being… Give more of your life to this listening.” That’s where this episode lands. In listening — the kind that makes the world sharper, redder, more alive. The kind that lets you see something so surprisingly beautiful, where you thought there was nothing. Listen to this week’s episode: * Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5lAtprMmzW7FFjXUMcOfdg?si=000123607cf64d58] * Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dash-sisters/id1865431683] * YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@DashSisters] * Substack [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web] And we want to hear from you: What’s a story that has stayed with you? A myth, a family story, a book, a film — anything you heard once and never forgot. If you feel like sharing, leave it in the Substack comments [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web]. Maybe we’ll invite you on to tell yours! With love (and a teacup held very carefully), Maithilee, for The Dash Sisters This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dashsisters.substack.com [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Sree: Field Notes on Motherhood

Some friendships hold their shape across time: you open the old pages and recognize the handwriting is unmistakably of your very own: refined by years, warmed by living, honest at the edges. That’s what it felt like to have Sree with us — sister of our hearts.Sree has always been a force in our orbit — lyrical and incisive, steady and wise, gifted in a way that feels almost unfair. The fastest runner, yes, but also the one who can lift an ordinary sentence into something that sounds like music. Even then, she listened so deeply you’d leave the conversation feeling like life had suddenly expanded. She still has that effect.We called ourselves Ethnic Charm and we made music, with Sree stitching words together to describe the difficult, beautiful, complicated things we were feeling as tiny teens. It was the era of writing songs like secret doors: Just Another Song, Dhol Re, Fly Away, Disconnected, Farishta, Dream, Rain — love songs, dream songs, friendship songs. Songs from the age where you trust your feelings, and new love feels like the most real thing you know. Sitting down with Sree now feels like returning to a language we grew up speaking and hearing it, suddenly, with greater depth. Familiar, and newly resonant. She approaches motherhood attentively, with precision and deep consideration. She talks about the work of learning a child and the way a home is built one decision at a time, amidst a thousand recalibrations. The conversation drifts through family systems and inherited advice, the chorus of voices that surrounds parenting, and the choices that create a life that feels right at the root. Love, in Sree’s telling, lives in repetition: in the small calibrations, the tired days, the return to presence. A practice of meeting reality with care.What makes this conversation glow is not parenting alone, it’s friendship - the ease, the cadence, the way we can be ridiculous and truly honest within the same minute. The past and the present sit side by side. And near the end, Sree returns to what she’s always carried so naturally: language. She talks about stories — why telling them and reading them matters, why they belong at the center of life itself. Stories are how she makes sense of the world: how she moves through other lives, other perspectives, other kinds of humanity, and returns with more understanding than she left with. This episode feels like a bright rekindling. You realize you’ve grown, your people have grown, a thread that holds, now with more depth - more laughter, more wisdom, more life inside it. To listen to the music we made in the late 2000s, between ages 13-15, head over to our Substack! https://dashsisters.substack.com/ [https://dashsisters.substack.com/] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dashsisters.substack.com [https://dashsisters.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]