There are days when the world arrives before the morning does. Before the tea has boiled. Before Delhi has awakened into the furnace of its late-summer heat. The phone glows. Another war. Another wound. Another child crying beneath a sky darkened by someone else’s ambition. Another country dividing itself into enemies. Another day when we are asked to choose a side before we are allowed to choose humanity. And then I look up.Outside my apartment in my mother’s compound in Delhi, the sun is savage. The heat has teeth. Humidity clings to the skin. Even the afternoon appears to be sweating. Inside, is my mother. And suddenly the world becomes bearable again. The world can be burning at the edges, and someone can still ask whether you have eaten. Civilisation can appear to be collapsing on your phone, and a mother can still insist that you take another helping.Love does not always arrive with violins. Sometimes it comes with a glass of water beside your bed.A familiar hand on your shoulder. A voice asking, “Are you hungry?” I have needed that comfort lately.We lost my aunt, Sunita Bhua. Barely a few days had passed when Om Phupaji went to hospital. And then we lost him too. They went within days of one another, as though grief, having entered the house, had forgotten the door. They were loved. Deeply. And the ending was not easy.Yet, strangely, amid all those departures, there were arrivals. My cousin Anjali and her brother Vikram came from America. My sister Seema, my brother Samir, my mother and I gathered for another journey of farewell. More than a year after the sudden death of my mother’s youngest sister, my beloved aunt Aruna — our Boo Maasi — we were taking her ashes to the Ganga. There is something about ashes that humbles you. All the ambition, arguments, compliments and catastrophes of a lifetime eventually become something you can carry in your hands.And then there was Luca. My magnificent Bernese Mountain Dog, though even now I resist calling him merely that. Luca was not a dog. Dog is a word far too small for the creature who lived beside us. He was a four-legged gentleman. A super creature of empathy and elegance, grace and grandeur. Majestic without arrogance. Royal without pretension. Handsome enough to stop traffic and gentle enough to break your heart. A beautiful show dog, yes, but his greatest education came from somewhere deeper. Luca had been taught, I often thought, by his own soul. He understood sadness without being told its name. He recognised silence. He knew when simply to be near. Luca has been gone for several years now. But when we travelled to the Ganga to return Boo Maasi to the river, Luca came too. His ashes travelled with hers. And that felt profoundly right.Those we truly love do not occupy separate compartments in the heart. Family is not a census. And so, my magnificent four-legged gentleman escorted Boo Maasi to the Ganga.Story continues below this adSome creatures leave pawprints. Luca left architecture. He changed the shape of our home, the rhythm of our days, the geography of our hearts. And as ashes rose and scattered, I thought, perhaps, this is what love teaches us. In the end, we do not remember who belonged to which category. We remember who belonged to us. And amid mourning, something miraculous happened. We found one another.We sat together after too long. We talked, laughed and remembered. Relatives who had spent years living continents apart discovered that we still had so much in common. We had travelled across oceans and carried ashes to a river, and somewhere along the way, rediscovered communion. Grief occasionally performs that miracle when it is not busy breaking us. It reminds us that we belong to one another. Not perfectly. But profoundly. Perhaps, that is why something I saw from my car the other afternoon moved me so deeply.A young person was walking barefboot. Around them was a little flock of children, gaggling and giggling through the Delhi afternoon. From their clothes, you could tell they came from different homes, different worlds, perhaps different faiths. And yet there they were. Together. Walking towards the Crafts Museum. I watched them disappear into the heat, this small, noisy parliament of childhood, and thought: Oh God. That will make something delicious. Delicious in the way life becomes when difference is not treated as danger. When coriander does not demand that cumin become coriander. When cardamom is not offended by clove. A good meal does not demand sameness. It asks for balance. That is what I wish the world remembered.My own life has rarely followed the straight lines others drew for it. I was the boy who carried Delhi inside him while imagining America beyond the horizon. The son who eventually had to tell his mother he liked boys. The Indian who learned that identity is not a locked room. It is a house with many doors. My mother’s kitchen. Ghalib and Kabir. Delhi dust and Bombay rain. Urdu poetry and English sentences. The men I have loved. Families I was born into and families I chose. None cancels the other. They make me. Perhaps, that is what I saw in those children. Not a lesson. A possibility. The world, for all its ugliness, is still capable of gathering unlike people and allowing them to walk in the same direction. Some days, the opposite of war is not peace. Peace is too grand a word. Some days, the opposite of war is smaller. It is cousins flying across oceans. Siblings sitting together. A mother making room for her child. A barefoot young person gathering children. It is setting the table. Every time we cook, we make an argument against despair. We soak lentils because we believe there will be a tomorrow. We set another plate because we imagine someone might come.Story continues below this adCooking is hope with onions. And so, sitting in Delhi, grieving those who have left us and grateful for those who have gathered, I keep thinking about that barefoot young person and their noisy little procession. The world is wounded. The world is weary. The world is loud with people who would rather build walls than tables. But somewhere, even now, someone is cooking. Someone is coming home. Someone is carrying ashes to a river. Someone is arriving from across an ocean. Someone is barefoot, leading children towards a museum. And someone, somewhere, is setting one more plate. I think that means we must not give up. Not yet. Not on the world. Not on one another. The table is still there. There is still room. Come. Sit. Eat. Tell me your story. And if you are different from me, stay a little longer. Together, perhaps, we might still make something delicious.