People Who Leave, People Who Stay
In 2025, I wrote a book called Embracing Your Life. Within days of its launch, I was asked to live it more fully than I had anticipated.
When I wrote it, I believed I understood something about integration, about holding contradiction, about working consciously with change rather than resisting it. I wrote from lessons learned slowly over the years, from experiences I thought I had already metabolised.
And then life moved in ways none of us had designed.
We had been planning travel with my mother-in-law, simple trips, and future conversations. She was well one day, steady and present, and then everything shifted. Soon after, my younger cousin Almika also passed.
What lingered was not only the loss, but the reminder of how provisional our plans really are. We speak about the future as if it is waiting patiently for us. We book tickets. We imagine continuity. And then life changes direction without consultation.
It became clear to me that we participate in life far more than we control it. What remains within reach is not the outcome, but the way we meet what unfolds.
At the same time, the world outside felt increasingly unsettled. Conversations around immigration and borders sharpened. Headlines multiplied. Disruption became atmosphere. Even when physically safe, it was difficult not to register the quiet hum of collective anxiety. The personal and the collective began to blur. Both required steadiness. Both required capacity.
I had planned to write at the end of the year. Instead, I chose silence. The world was loud. My life was loud. What was needed was digestion.
In that quiet, I found myself thinking about Almika.
She was restless in the way some women are, ambitious, alive, unwilling to accept the edges of her world as fixed. She wanted more space. More possibilities. She spoke often of stepping beyond the systems that shaped her life. There was nothing dramatic about her longing. It lived steadily, like a pulse beneath everything else.
She remained close to the land where our mothers were raised. I did not. My mother left her village for a larger city. I grew up in Mumbai and later left for the United States. Almika stayed. Our lives diverged, not in love or worth, but in exposure to different systems, different permissions, different constraints.
In the fragile postpartum period, when a woman’s body and mind are neurologically and hormonally vulnerable, the systems around her did not hold her well enough.
Some experiences are deeply personal. Others illuminate the structures that quietly shape us long before we notice them.
As I prepare for a brief trip to India, I find myself thinking about what it means to leave the land that shaped your lineage, and how that departure quietly reshapes the psychological landscape you inhabit. Geography changes first. Identity follows more slowly. What begins as relocation becomes a shift in permission, in imagination, in what feels expansive and what feels bounded.
Migration is not new to humanity. Birds migrate. Animals migrate. Humans have always moved toward water, toward safety, toward opportunity. Long before passports and policies, movement shaped survival and evolution. Even those of us who have never crossed a border likely descend from someone who did.
And yet today, movement feels charged.
As I navigate visas and paperwork across countries, I become aware of the lines we have drawn on maps, in families, and within ourselves. Borders offer structure and belonging. They also introduce limits. They can open doors and narrow them at the same time.
Those who leave sometimes imagine that distance dissolves inherited ghosts. Those who stay sometimes imagine their world is permanently circumscribed. But the body tells a more complex story. We carry our histories with us across oceans and across generations.
Sisterhood, I am realising, is not proximity. It is shared inheritance. Whether we leave or remain, we negotiate expectation, ambition, duty, silence, and longing. Some of us negotiate these forces in new lands. Some negotiate them where they were born. Neither path resolves everything. Neither path guarantees freedom.
When I wrote Embracing Your Life, I thought embracing meant acceptance of what is. Last year revealed something subtler: that embracing also means staying fully present when unpredictability rearranges our plans, and noticing where we may be holding onto comforting illusions: that movement ensures freedom, that stability ensures safety, that careful planning ensures continuity.
I learnt that embracing life is less about mastering circumstances and more about widening capacity, the capacity to adapt when the map changes, to question inherited narratives gently, to remain open when certainty thins.
This trip is brief. I will return soon. But I suspect standing again on the land that shaped the women in my family will clarify something, not about geography alone, but about awareness.
We are only weeks into this year, and many of us are already carrying more than we expected: global uncertainty, private transitions, professional ambition, quiet recalibrations.
Maybe this season is not asking us to hold more.
Maybe it is asking us to hold with more awareness.
More (or less) after I return.
