Siri, Don’t Mop: On Buckets, Lists, and the Post-A2Z Void
“Siri, don’t mop,” I muttered to myself.
Not because I was about to mop. But because I felt like I should be doing something productive, noble, and preferably with a whirring sound in the background. Something that makes people nod approvingly and say things like, “She’s always doing something, even when she’s doing nothing.”
The problem was — I had just finished the A2Z blogging challenge. Thirty days, twenty-six posts, and more cups of chai than the Tannirbhavi beach has grains of sand. And now? Silence. Stillness. Vacuum. The kind of silence that only descends after you’ve been living with a daily deadline and suddenly the only thing left to do is… mop?
From the background came the unmistakable voice of Amma’s bestie, Rema Aunty — the unofficial Censor Board of our family WhatsApp group.
“You’d never catch Indira sitting like this,” she announced in the tone reserved for failed governments and soft chapatis. “Even while watching TV she’d be ironing! While saying the Suprabhatam, she’d be cutting vegetables! That’s discipline!”
I blinked. Was she comparing me to Indira Gandhi? No. Worse. She was comparing me to my own mother, who was clearly some sort of domestic multitasking ninja in a starched cotton sari.
Jenny, our resident nine-year-old philosopher-in-shorts, piped up:
“Yake? Did Ammamma have ADHD?”
Andy, her eleven-year-old brother, who reads Ayurveda before bed because it calms him more than graphic novels, offered sagely, “Alla, Jenny… Vata prakriti. The Ayush site says so.”
Rema Aunty tsk-ed loudly. “What happened to your A to Z challenge?”
“I completed it,” I said.
A pause.
“Ah,” she nodded. “That’s why you’re like this. Void-u.”
As if the absence of twenty-six alphabetical deadlines had sucked my soul out of my body like a vacuum cleaner.
“You need a bucket list,” Andy offered helpfully.
“Which you can throw out,” added Jenny, already bored with this line of conversation.
“Then you’ll be listless,” Andy concluded, clearly delighted by his pun.
“Then you’ll be enlisted by Rema Aunty to cut vegetables,” the kids chorused with a high-five …like prophets of doom.
I watched them go back to their UNO cards and considered my situation. They weren’t wrong.
When you’ve spent an entire month tethered to a daily routine — churning, editing, posting, reading, commenting, replying — your brain develops a beat, a rhythm. It’s like being in daily rehearsals for a performance, and then suddenly, the show is over. The lights are off. The script is closed. And you’re left blinking in a puddle of purposelessness.
The discipline that gave structure now felt like a hollow scaffolding. What do you do when there’s nothing to rehearse for?
“Discipline idre, everything is fine,” Rema Aunty declared again, like a one-woman RSS branch meeting.
Yes, Rema Aunty. Discipline is great. But must we all function like domestic CPUs with multiple tabs open and a vegetable chopper in hand?
There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes after intense creativity. Not the pleasant, stretchy exhaustion of a good nap, but the kind where your brain sits on strike and your soul starts haunting the fridge for no reason.
I wasn’t sad, exactly. I was… untethered. As if someone had removed the invisible to-do list I carried in my head and I was floating aimlessly through the apartment like a deflated party balloon.
I considered taking up gardening. Then remembered I’d killed a cactus once. I briefly flirted with the idea of organizing my sarees by season, occasion, and degree of regret, but the wardrobe glared at me and I backed away respectfully.
That’s when Paddu Aunty, the family’s very own retired IAS officer and occasional chaos consultant, wandered in.
“What’s this I hear about you feeling lost?” she asked, pouring herself a filter coffee like she was interrogating a suspect.
“It’s just post-A2Z blues,” I said.
“Good. That means it mattered.”
She took a long sip.
“Now go write about it.”
And just like that, the void looked like fertile soil again.
There’s comfort in knowing that even the vacuum after a project is part of the process. Like a breath between movements in a symphony. Like the moment between exhale and inhale. Like that glorious pause between pressing ‘publish’ and the first comment notification.
It turns out, the silence wasn’t emptiness. It was space. Space to rest, to remember, and to return. And yes, possibly even to mop. But only after I’ve written about it.
So here it is. From Void to Voice.
And Siri? Still not mopping.
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