When Feeling Found a Form

When Feeling Found a Form

Some ideas stay soft until someone, or something, gives them an edge.

Srikanth and Chitra had introduced us to Snehalaya earlier, but it was the 2019 visit that made it real. I had carried the question — what would it look like to be close at hand, to do something meaningful near Appa — for two years by then. Walking through Snehalaya is where that question stopped being abstract.

Dr. Girish Kulkarni and his team gave us a full day. We walked through the orphanage. We visited the school — a full boarding school, built specifically for the children of women Girish has worked to rehabilitate from prostitution. A place that says: whatever your mother's circumstances, your story can be different. And then we stepped into the dining hall — a room built from donations that had poured in after Snehalaya was featured on Satyamev Jayate. Aamir Khan had told their story on national television, and people had responded. What that response built was this: a room where children sit down to eat every day. Standing in it, I felt the distance collapse between a story told and a life changed. Between someone deciding to give and something real existing in the world.

We spent time at the greenhouse — run by families of HIV positive patients building a livelihood with quiet dignity. We saw the Paithani weaving center, staffed by women finding economic ground under their feet. Each space was its own world, each with its own logic of care.

And then there was the moment I didn't anticipate. A baby at the orphanage was being placed into her permanent home that day. Girish offered me the chance to hand her to her new parents. I did.

There are experiences you process later, sometimes much later. That was one of them.

In conversation with Girish I tried to articulate what I was circling — how does one actually begin this kind of work? How do you move from caring about something to being useful to it? He listened, and then he said something that cut through cleanly: to really get answers to those questions, you need to be immersed in this space. Not visiting. Not observing from a distance. In it.

That was the first time the word internship entered this story. Not from me — from someone who had built something real and knew what real engagement required.

I left Snehalaya that day with the soft intention of 2017 hardened into something I could almost hold — a plan, or at least the shape of one.

The Seed (2017)

 When Ashraya Became Home

Some intentions don't arrive with a plan. They arrive as a feeling — quiet at first, easy to set aside. For me, 2017 was the year that feeling took root.

That was the year Appa and Amma moved from Dosti to Ashraya. From an independent home they had built their life around, to a community setting — a different rhythm, different neighbours, a different kind of daily life. It took some adjustment, not just for them but for all of us. The Ashraya family didn't come pre-fitted into our world; they had to become part of it, and we had to become part of theirs. Slowly, they did. That extended family is now simply family.

And with that came something else — the address of celebrations shifted. Appa's 80th birthday. An anniversary. Family get-togethers. The place for all of it was now Ashraya. A specific, named place where they were, where we gathered, where the texture of family life was now rooted.

Before Ashraya, "being close to my parents" was an idea spread across many spaces and memories. After Ashraya, it had an address.

I don't think I said it out loud then — not clearly, not as a plan. But somewhere in watching them settle in, in learning to belong to Ashraya the way they were learning to belong to it, I started asking myself a question I couldn't quite shake: what would it look like to actually be close at hand to my makers? Not just visiting. Not just calling. Present. Available. Close enough to matter on an ordinary Tuesday, not just at a milestone.

That question has followed me for eight years now. It has survived a pandemic, a profound loss, two near-misses with internship plans, and the quiet accumulation of life's reasons to defer. But it started here — in 2017, when Appa and Amma made Ashraya their home, and something in me decided I wanted to find my way back.