NIKHAT-E-MAAZI: The Things We Thought We Had Left Behind

Lucknow, India (Jan, 2022)

Some places don't feel new. They feel like something you recognise before you can explain why, like a word in a language you were never taught but somehow understand. Lucknow was like that. Maybe it was the old homes, standing unhurried and unapologetic in the middle of everything. Maybe it was the conversations that took their time, that didn't rush toward a point. Maybe it was the scent of food drifting through narrow lanes, the kind of smell that doesn't just reach your nose but reaches somewhere further back. Or the sound of a song playing from somewhere you couldn't quite locate, a song you hadn't thought about in years, and yet there were the words, rising up from somewhere inside you like they'd never left. Whatever it was, the city felt completely unbothered by the speed of the world. And something in us exhaled.

We spent our days wandering through old architecture that had lived through more than we could imagine, through markets that were loud and alive and layered, through family homes where the past wasn't kept behind glass or preserved with careful hands, it was simply lived in. Still warm, still present, like a conversation that had been paused mid-sentence decades ago and was somehow still waiting to be finished. Lucknow carries its history differently. Not as a monument. As a home.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we found ourselves thinking about the things we carry forward, not the big things, but the quiet ones. The habits we picked up from people we don't see anymore. The memories that surface without warning and catch you off guard in the middle of an ordinary day. The old versions of ourselves, the younger, softer, more uncertain ones that we think we've outgrown, until suddenly we haven't. We're taught, most of our lives, to look ahead, to move forward, to treat the past like a place you visit briefly and leave efficiently, because lingering too long means you're stuck. But Lucknow made us wonder if that's entirely true. Here was a city that had looked back every single day for centuries and was somehow still moving, still breathing, still becoming and it wasn't burdened by it. It was held by it.

We think about the things that fell apart. The plans that didn't survive, the periods of life that ended before we were ready, that left us holding fragments we didn't know what to do with- a habit that outlasted its reason, a memory that aches in a way you can't fully explain, a piece of yourself you thought you'd lost somewhere in the middle of becoming who you are now. We think everyone has those fragments. The things you packed away quietly because looking at them hurt, but couldn't quite bring yourself to throw away because some part of you knew, even without being able to say it out loud, that they still mattered. That they were still, somehow, yours.

Nikhat-e-Maazi. A fragrance from the past. Not a wound, not a weight, a fragrance, which is perhaps the most honest way to describe what the past actually is when you let yourself return to it gently. Something that can't be held directly, that arrives softly and unexpectedly, and reminds you of something true about yourself that the noise of the present had drowned out. A reminder that not everything you've left behind is gone. Some things simply wait, patient and quiet and without resentment for you to come back around, to be still enough to notice them again, to pick up the fragment and realise it was never broken. It was just set down for a while.

Maybe you needed to hear this today. That it's okay to go back, not to stay there, just long enough to find what still matters, long enough to remember what made you you before the world got loud and the years got fast. Because sometimes the only way forward is through something you thought you'd already passed, and moving ahead and looking back were never opposites. They've always been part of the same journey, the same person, the same story- still being written, still making sense of itself. You don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to remember. The rest tends to find its way.

Every collection begins with a feeling. What follows are the ways we try to hold on to it through scents, textures, sketches, keepsakes, and stories. We'll tell you about those another time. For now, we're just really glad you stopped by.

With love, always.

— su.i ✨