Fun Is My Every Moment

Twenty years old.

Barely grown, barely formed.

At an age when other girls were preparing to become brides,

you came home from college to find your father gone.

Your weeping mother, your six siblings stood in a line of shock.

The house felt hollow, like someone had scooped out its heart.

What were you supposed to do?

How does a girl barely out of youth carry the weight of eight grieving souls?

The means had always been meager, but now they were none.

Your baby brother cried from hunger.

The ground that held you steady that morning was the same ground that swallowed your father whole.

So you swore something sacred that day.

You rejected tradition.

They pitied your mother for not having an eldest son — so you became him.

“Call me Ahmed,” you said. Not Ahmedi. Not the girl they expected.

The son they needed.

Fun wasn’t a moment.

Barely after losing your father, you lost a brother.

Then another. A fever carried him away before you could even grasp what death meant.

But you kept going.

You had to.

You had become the provider, the man of the house, the strength your family leaned on.

In a post-colonial India, a land still occupied by the echoes of nizams and new rules, you pushed through ceilings not built for women.

You became the PA to the Chief Minister.

A girl from nothing who became something because she had no choice but to survive.

Fun wasn’t a moment.

With your salary, you married off your sisters — one by one — giving them the security you were denied.

By thirty, you had completed responsibilities most people never touch in a lifetime.

Then on one fateful afternoon, your cousin said,

“There is a man. He is like you. His father died young, he provided for his siblings. He is smart, responsible, steady.”

So you married him. The two of you together understood a life shaped by duty.

You had your first child, a daughter with your father’s smile.

Then two sons.

But even then, fun wasn’t a moment.

You traded the role of the household’s son for those of wife, mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, disciplinarian, backbone.

For you, excellence was never an achievement.

It was a habit. A choice. A necessity.

You raised your children with the values you had carved into your own bones —

discipline, humility, self-respect, faith.

You taught them early so they would never have to learn alone,

the way you did.

Life was a blessing, yes,

but fun still wasn’t a moment.

Your children grew, married, migrated to the land of opportunity.

They built new lives, lived in bigger homes and in comforts.

But, somewhere along the way, something slipped.

The simplicity faded.

The humility thinned.

The values you carried like armor felt foreign to them.

Towards the end of your life, you looked around and wondered:

“I suffered so much.

I raised my children and their children.

Why does no one understand?

Why do they chase more, more, more?”

And then there was me.

your granddaughter.

The beauty queen, people said.

The one that’s too American.

The one that rejects tradition..

Not the child of discipline and restraint.

You scolded me harder. Guided me straighter.

Not because you doubted me, but because you doubted the world.

——

It’s been almost two years since I lost you to death.

But you’re still alive, in my mind.

And in my dreams.

You talk to me.

And I talk back.

I tell you everything I couldn’t tell you during the last 10 years of your life while you were battling Parkinson’s.

I tell you about boardrooms full of men twice my age and how I can disarm them with the same intelligence you wielded in secret.

I tell you about how your discipline became my armor, how your grit became my inheritance, how your instincts live inside me like memory.

My life is soft where yours was hard, abundant where yours was scarce, gentle where yours was demanding.

Your fears from when you were alive never came true.

The simplicity stayed.

The humility stayed.

Your values stayed.

I lived them into adulthood because you lived them into me.

And because you gave up your own youth for duty,

I get to live mine in joy.

Because you never had a moment for fun,

I get to have fun in nearly every moment.

You built the world beneath my feet.

And nanam, because of you,

fun is my every moment.