The Then, The There, The Now

A meditation on inheritance, memory, courage, and the quiet ways we are made

What Arrives Dressed as Ordinary Life

I have been thinking a great deal about inheritance lately.

Not the kind measured in deeds, jewellery or family names.

The quieter kind.

The one that does not arrive in our hands with ceremony, but slips into us almost unnoticed, like breath.

It waits patiently in the corridors of memory, in rooms we did not even know we were building.

A story told while lunch is being prepared.

A prayer overheard before dawn.

The smell of incense drifting from one room while someone hums an old hymn in another.

A festival spilling into the street, where belonging is not asked for, only absorbed.

A grandmother who never once announces she is teaching history, yet somehow leaves her grandchildren carrying centuries.

These are not merely moments.

At the time, they rarely feel important enough to be remembered.

They arrive dressed as ordinary life.

A roti puffing over an open flame.

A hand resting briefly on a child’s head.

A story beginning without warning, somewhere between morning tea and dusk.

A careless foot brushing against a book, followed by the instinctive apology of hand to heart, then hand to lips.

Only much later do such things reveal themselves as keys.

Keys to doors we did not know we would one day need to open.

Doors that lead into something older than language, older than nation, older even than the names we give ourselves.

We inherit far more than our faces.

We inherit echoes.

Ways of seeing.

Ways of standing.

Ways of responding when life unexpectedly asks something difficult of us.

And somewhere within all of this, quietly and patiently, something ancient takes root.

Only now do I find myself standing before one of those doors, my hand resting gently upon its weight, wondering where some of mine came from.

---

Bebe and the Work of Continuity

Our Bebe, my father’s mother, never imagined she was preserving a civilisation.

Stories were simply how she moved through the day.

One emerged while she rolled rotis, pausing only long enough to turn them over the open flame before continuing exactly where she had left off. Another wandered in while fresh methi was being sorted or karelas patiently prepared. Sometimes a tale arrived over afternoon tea. Others lingered until dusk, though they never believed bedtime possessed exclusive rights over imagination.

As children, we thought this was simply how Bebe spoke.

Only much later did I understand that Bebe wasn’t merely telling stories.

She was answering something older.

Something that had passed through countless hands before hers. Through mothers, and, grandmothers who had packed what little they could and still somehow remembered the correct way to begin a story.

She was not performing heritage.

She was keeping continuity alive because, for women like her, continuity was not a grand word.

It was duty.

It was love.

It was how one survived without allowing survival to become the whole story.

She belonged to a generation that knew, with painful intimacy, what it meant to leave a homeland behind.

Born in what was then undivided India and is now Pakistan, she was among the millions whose lives were forever altered by Partition. Like countless non-Muslim families, she crossed a newly drawn border carrying very little.

History often remembers what people lost.

It asks far less often what they refused to leave behind.

My grandfather was stationed far beyond the shores of these newly formed countries, bound by military service, while Bebe stepped quietly into a role history rarely expected women to occupy. She became the steady heart of a displaced household, carrying not only children, but hope. Not only uncertainty, but dignity. Not only survival, but tomorrow itself.

There was no audience for this courage.

No applause.

Only the daily discipline of continuing.

Looking back, I often wonder what else she carried.

Certainly not furniture.

Nor possessions.

Those rarely survive forced migration.

What survived were stories.

The Mahabharata travelled beside family photographs.

Stories of the Sikh Gurus wandered naturally through our afternoons.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj appeared as though he had only just descended from the Sahyadris.

Saints, sages, kings and poets entered our modest home with such familiarity that, as children, we never thought to separate mythology from memory, history from everyday life.

No one announced that we were receiving an education.

No one spoke of preserving culture.

No one used words like identity or heritage.

We simply listened.

And somewhere between a rolling pin, an evening prayer, another story, and the ordinary rhythm of family life, our inheritance quietly settled into us.

Long before we understood history, history had already begun shaping us.

---

Bombay, Where Roots Learned to Breathe

If Bebe gave us roots, Bombay taught those roots how to breathe.

Some cities enter one’s life as geography.

Bombay never did.

Even now, I hesitate to speak of her as though she were merely a place. She has always felt more like an ancient companion to me. Restless. Mischievous. Demanding. Endlessly generous. The sort of companion who never explains herself fully, yet somehow rearranges the furniture of your heart and leaves you grateful for the disturbance.

Every great city gathers its own mythology.

Bombay seemed to gather hers from salt, sweat, monsoon, migration, prayer, appetite and sheer audacity.

She was not especially interested in where mythology ended and memory began.

Perhaps that is why those of us born upon her soil never quite leave her. We may cross oceans. We may build lives elsewhere. We may learn new roads, new weather, new silences. But somewhere inside us, Bombay continues to move.

A local train still arrives before thought can stop it.

A vendor still calls from the corner of memory.

The first hint of rain still loosens something in the chest.

And the sea, always the sea, keeps breathing somewhere beneath the ribs.

Whether this belongs to folklore or faith has never concerned me very much.

Some truths ask not to be proven.

Only lived.

Bombay had very little patience for spectators.

She preferred participants.

I do not remember anyone ever explaining this to me.

The city simply lived that way.

She asked for very little, and also everything.

Step into her rhythm.

Walk her streets.

Wait your turn.

Make room.

Fold your hands when reverence quietly asks you to.

Eat what is offered.

Laugh when the bargaining becomes theatre.

Learn quickly that a bench built for three may, with sufficient goodwill and disregard for engineering, seat five.

She never seemed especially concerned with whether your heart arrived brave.

She simply had a way of ensuring it never left unchanged.

Bombay is, in many ways, a coconut.

I realise this now with great affection.

Hard-shelled. Salt-weathered. Not immediately sentimental. Entirely capable of making you earn her tenderness.

She asks for humility before affection.

Resilience before belonging.

Yet once she opens herself to you, she does not merely welcome you.

She prepares you.

Like the Arabian Sea that forever kisses her coastline before carrying ships towards distant horizons, Bombay has always understood that love is never about possession.

It is about preparing someone well enough that they may one day leave, yet never truly depart.

As I write these words, I find myself laughing at a mystery that has somehow taken me half a lifetime to unravel.

Perhaps that explains my entirely unreasonable affection for coconut.

My sisters still tease me about it.

“If a dish is made with coconut,” they say, “save it for Daljeet.”

Fresh.

Grated.

Toasted.

Pressed into milk.

Folded into chutneys and desserts with great enthusiasm and very little restraint.

I had always assumed it was simply culinary preference.

Now I wonder whether Bombay quietly slipped a little of herself into my spine before I was old enough to notice.

---

The Sacred, Made Ordinary

She has always had a mischievous sense of humour.

She also possessed an extraordinary gift for making the sacred feel wonderfully ordinary.

Our footsteps wandered naturally to Mumba Devi, the mother deity after whom the city is named.

On another morning they carried us to Siddhivinayak, where small hopes were placed quietly before the remover of obstacles.

Mahalakshmi reminded us that abundance could never be measured by wealth alone.

At Gurudhwara Dashmesh Darbar Sahib we bowed our heads before the timeless courage of Guru Gobind Singh Ji.

And then there was St. Andrew’s Church, where I spent countless evenings in stillness, making plans, reflecting, and discovering that empty churches possess a silence unlike any other.

None of this felt remarkable then.

It was simply the rhythm of home.

Passing a temple, a Gurudhwara, a Dargah or even the smallest roadside shrine, folded palms appeared almost unconsciously, not because anyone insisted, but because reverence had quietly become a way of moving through the world.

Bombay did not ask us to choose one kind of reverence and abandon the rest.

She let reverence appear everywhere.

Sometimes in temple bells.

Sometimes in Azaan.

Sometimes in the hush of a church nave.

Sometimes in the instinctive way a hand rose to the heart and then to the lips after a careless foot brushed against a book.

No one gave us a lecture on pluralism.

No one sat us down and explained coexistence.

We learnt through integration, not announcements.

Through footsteps.

Through festivals.

Through meals eaten in homes where our names, languages, prayers and habits were welcomed without interrogation.

Bombay never saw tradition and modernity as rivals.

She simply invited them both to dinner.

Old shrines stood patiently beside an emerging economy.

Textile mills gradually yielded to towers.

Families arrived from every corner of India carrying little more than hope.

Another language.

Another recipe.

Another festival.

Another dream.

The city never demanded that they become less themselves.

She simply found room for them.

Looking back, I no longer think Bombay’s greatest gift was teaching me how to belong.

I think it was teaching me that civilisations do not become smaller by opening their doors.

Like the sea that shaped her shores, they become deeper by learning how to carry many journeys at once.

---

Where Food Was Never Just Food

Perhaps that is why food sits so close to the centre of my earliest memories.

Not because Bombay possessed extraordinary restaurants, though she certainly did.

Not because her street food has become legendary, though it has.

But because food was rarely just food.

It was where family instinctively gathered.

Our outings almost always found their way towards something to eat. We packed picnic baskets with astonishing seriousness, as though we were setting off for some great expedition rather than another Bombay afternoon. Looking back, I sometimes wonder why we bothered packing quite so much food when every outing somehow still ended with pani puri or chaat before heading home.

Apparently, these were considered entirely different meals.

Nobody ever questioned this deliciously curious logic.

Certainly not me.

The destination was rarely the point.

Being together was.

Summer evenings belonged to Daddy.

At some point, usually without consulting anyone, he would decide the day was incomplete without matka kulfi. Curiously, nobody ever seemed inclined to challenge this remarkably mouthwatering piece of reasoning. Before long the extended family and neighbours alike were wandering towards the kulfiwala as though the outing had been planned all week.

Looking back, I realise Daddy understood something long before I did. Ordinary days were already worth celebrating. The matka kulfi was never really the point.

Open markets were never simply errands either.

They were expeditions.

Bebe, Mummy, my aunties and the neighbouring women launched into bargaining with remarkable conviction, while we children faithfully trailed behind, convinced our principal responsibility was to remain just close enough not to get lost and just far enough to investigate everything that caught our eye.

Voices rose dramatically over coriander, tomatoes and whatever happened to be in season. As children we were never entirely certain whether an argument was unfolding or whether everyone was simply enjoying themselves.

It almost always ended the same way.

Somebody laughed.

Somebody slipped an extra handful of dhania, mirchi, kadipatta into the bag.

Everyone walked away convinced they had negotiated brilliantly.

Including the sabjiwala.

I grew up thinking this was simply how vegetables were bought.

Perhaps that is why feeding people seemed woven into the very rhythm of Bombay.

Bombay fed us everywhere, but never in a way that felt ordinary. It was always a little indulgent, a little excessive, as though the city took quiet pleasure in watching you surrender to her.

Juhu Chowpatty belonged to our family. Somewhere between sandy feet, repeated promises that this really would be the last round of bhelpuri and pani puri, and one more lingering look at the sea before heading home, an entire evening quietly disappeared.

Gandhi Market still tastes of falooda kulfi at the Himalaya’s. Elco takes me straight to pav bhaji and vada pav. Mahim will always carry the aroma of dosas. Lucky’s never really needed an introduction. If someone suggested Lucky’s, the conversation was already over.

Dadar had its sabudana vadas. Koliwada understood fish in ways the rest of us could only admire. Gujarati thalis arrived like generosity made visible. Kathiawadi kitchens never apologised for their boldness. South Bombay occasionally invited us into polished restaurants where, for a little while, crisp linen and gleaming cutlery persuaded us that we had become far grander than we really were.

She never asked you to choose. Why would she? There was always room for one more flavour, one more indulgence, one more moment of quiet delight. She simply placed another plate before you, as though refusal had never been an option.

All the while, Bombay carried on around us.

BEST buses grumbled past.

Local trains announced themselves long before they arrived.

Temple bells answered the Azaan.

Pressure cookers whistled from open windows.

Vendors bellowed.

Crows objected.

Someone, somewhere, was forever trying to sell you something you had not realised you needed until that very moment.

By every sensible measure it should have been too much.

Too loud.

Too crowded.

Too alive.

But it was not.

It was simply Bombay.

Before I realised it, she had quietly claimed another piece of my heart.

---

The Architecture of Making Room

The local trains carried this same spirit.

Women transformed the journey home into another room of the house.

Dhania was sorted.

Falli snapped into neat little piles.

Someone shelled matar.

Someone else exchanged recipes while discussing school fees, neighbours, rising prices and whose child had suddenly outgrown another pair of shoes.

Dinner had already begun long before anyone reached the kitchen.

Space obeyed different mathematics too.

A bench built for three somehow welcomed five.

Nobody appeared especially interested in the manufacturer’s opinion on the matter.

Someone shifted.

Someone smiled.

Someone tucked in a shoulder.

Someone made room.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether Bombay’s greatest architecture was never her buildings at all.

It was her instinct to accommodate.

Perhaps that was why strangers so rarely remained strangers for very long.

---

When Memory Becomes Character

There were patient hands teaching me to shape my very first ukdiche modak before Ganapati. Mine leaned awkwardly to one side, its folds clumsy beside the elegant ones made by practised fingers. Yet it still found its place among the offerings for Bappa.

It may have been my first lesson in grace.

Perfection, I discovered, had never been the price of belonging.

Bombay fed everyone.

Students counting every rupee.

Office clerks racing for the last local.

Fishermen returning from the sea.

Families celebrating.

Workers finishing another impossibly long day.

Somewhere there was always another pav bhaji sizzling on a giant tawa, another dosa crisping patiently, another kulfi beginning to melt faster than childhood itself.

The city never seemed particularly interested in who you were before she offered you something warm to eat.

Only much later did I realise how quietly she had been educating me.

Food was never merely nourishment.

It was participation.

An invitation.

A way of saying, “Come. There is room.”

Even today, when I think of Bombay, I do not first remember her skyline.

I remember the wild winds that suddenly swept through the city announcing that the monsoon was close behind. Before the first drop had even fallen, the earth released a fragrance unlike anything else I have ever known, a perfume so deeply its own that even today it can carry me home in an instant.

I remember the dabbawalas moving through apparent chaos with a choreography so perfect it seemed less like logistics and more like prayer.

I remember climbing the narrow staircase of a red double-decker bus, claiming the front window on the upper deck whenever fortune smiled upon me, convinced there could be no finer seat from which to watch the world unfold.

And I remember the sea.

Always the sea.

Not simply because she bordered the city.

But because she gathered us.

Every year she received Bapa with music, devotion, tears and gratitude before embracing him once again.

She received Durga with the same tenderness.

The sea taught us that letting go could itself become an act of love.

Only years later, watching one of my sisters leave Bombay and then, against every practical argument, find her way back again, did I begin to suspect that the city possesses a curious pull that refuses easy explanation.

At the time, many thought she was simply being unreasonable.

Now I wonder whether she had merely heard something the rest of us had not yet learnt to recognise.

Bombay has never seemed especially concerned with where mythology ends and memory begins.

Perhaps that is why she still feels less like a city to me than an old companion who quietly stitched a little of herself into my bones before I was old enough to notice.

There comes a curious moment in adulthood when one begins looking backwards and notices that the furniture of childhood had been arranged with astonishing care.

For years I believed I had simply grown up listening to stories.

Only much later did I realise I had grown up inside an inheritance.

---

The Stories That Refused to Leave

And perhaps, if I am honest, I did not first meet Guru Gobind Singh Ji and Shivaji Maharaj in history at all.

I met them in Bebe’s voice.

In the way her hands continued their work while entire worlds entered the room.

In the way a roti could puff over the flame while courage, sacrifice, honour and defiance quietly found a place in a child’s imagination.

What does it do to a child when two of the greatest figures ever to walk the Indian subcontinent enter her imagination long before she is old enough to understand history?

As children, we never asked such questions.

History belonged to classrooms.

These stories belonged to home.

Only adulthood insists on separating history from memory.

Childhood simply welcomes both to the same table.

And perhaps that is why Guru Gobind Singh Ji and Shivaji Maharaj never entered my life as distant historical figures.

By the time I learnt their dates, their battles and the worlds they inhabited, they had already taken up residence somewhere inside me.

As the years have passed, I have found myself returning to these two lives with surprising regularity.

Not out of obligation.

Not even out of devotion alone.

Something quieter keeps drawing me back.

For a long time I assumed it was because they were great warriors.

Only now do I wonder whether I had mistaken the battlefield for the lesson.

Bebe’s stories did not leave me with spectacle.

They left me with questions.

What does courage become when it is not governed by humility?

What does conviction become when it forgets compassion?

What does strength protect if it first loses tenderness?

The battles that shape most of our lives are rarely fought where anyone else can see them.

Some arrive in flesh and blood.

Many do not.

Pride.

Fear.

Resentment.

Vanity.

Despair.

The quiet temptation to abandon one’s convictions when they become inconvenient.

These, too, have a way of laying siege to a life.

Looking back, I realise that what has always stirred me was never simply the courage to raise a sword.

It was the far greater courage required to govern the hand that held it.

There is a tenderness in that realisation I could not have understood as a child.

Age has a curious way of revealing that the fiercest victories are often the least visible.

That strength without humility eventually becomes domination.

That conviction without compassion hardens into certainty.

That courage, if it is not accompanied by grace, slowly forgets what it was meant to protect.

Perhaps that is why these two lives have continued walking beside me.

Not because they offered me heroes to admire.

But because they continue asking better questions of the person I am still becoming.

---

Courage, Conscience and the Shape of Power

To understand why these two lives have remained such constant companions, one must return, however briefly, to the world that shaped them.

Not as a historian standing at a distance.

But as a granddaughter trying, many years later, to understand why certain stories refused to leave her.

The century into which they stepped demanded extraordinary things of ordinary people.

Empires expanded.

Kingdoms disappeared.

Allegiances shifted.

Faith was tested.

Power was negotiated as much by diplomacy as by steel.

The Indian subcontinent was not merely witnessing political change.

It was wrestling with questions that every civilisation must eventually confront.

Who are we?

What is worth preserving?

What must never be surrendered, regardless of the cost?

These are comfortable questions when peace prevails.

History has a habit of asking them differently.

It asks them when surrender promises safety.

When silence appears wiser than truth.

When compromise disguises itself as prudence.

When survival quietly begins negotiating with conscience.

It was into that world that Shivaji Maharaj and, a generation later, Guru Gobind Singh Ji stepped.

Not as men pursuing greatness.

But as men answering the demands of their age.

Their worlds were not identical.

Their callings were not the same.

Yet both seemed to understand something that has taken me much of my life to recognise.

That power without conscience is only appetite.

That courage without restraint becomes danger.

That freedom, if it is to mean anything at all, must begin inside the human being before it can be defended in the world.

One answered through the imagination of self-rule.

The other through the awakening of sovereign souls.

One rose from the mountains.

The other from the living fire of the Guru’s path.

Yet both seemed to understand that the true measure of power was never conquest alone.

It was restraint.

It was conscience.

It was the refusal to let courage become cruelty.

History remembers the battles, as it must.

It remembers forts reclaimed against impossible odds.

Mountain passes navigated beneath the uncertainty of darkness.

Letters written when silence would have been safer.

Communities transformed not merely through triumph, but through sacrifice.

But these stories did not endure only because they were dramatic.

They endured because they altered the moral imagination of a civilisation.

They reminded generations that sovereignty begins long before a crown rests upon a head.

That faith is diminished whenever it seeks dominion instead of dignity.

That power acquires its deepest legitimacy only when it remains answerable to conscience.

The kingdoms they defended have changed.

Empires have risen and fallen.

Borders have been redrawn.

Languages have evolved.

Yet the questions they answered have refused to grow old.

What does freedom demand of us?

Can conviction survive hardship without becoming hatred?

Can strength kneel before humility and still remain strong?

Perhaps that is why their lives keep entering the conversation.

Not loudly.

Not as monuments.

But as questions waiting patiently beside us.

And perhaps that is why Bebe never spoke of them as though they belonged only to the past.

She spoke of them as companions.

Looking back, I realise she was gently refusing history’s greatest illusion, that remarkable lives end when remarkable people die.

They do not.

Not if what they stood for continues finding shelter in ordinary homes.

Not if a grandmother still tells their stories while rolling rotis.

Not if a child quietly carries them into adulthood before ever learning their dates.

And whenever I return to these two lives, I find my attention lingering somewhere quieter still.

Not on what they conquered.

On what they refused to become while doing so.

For all the steel that surrounded them, neither allowed steel to become the measure of the man.

Power never excused cruelty.

Conviction never demanded arrogance.

Courage never abandoned compassion.

Perhaps that is why they have remained such faithful companions throughout my own life.

Not because they answered every question.

But because they continue asking them of the person I am still becoming.

---

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and the Mountains That Remember

Shivaji Maharaj entered a century that had grown accustomed to believing power belonged only to empires.

He quietly proposed something far more audacious.

That dignity could belong to ordinary people.

That self-rule was not merely a political ambition, but a moral responsibility.

I did not understand this as a child, of course.

As children, we rarely understand the size of what has been placed inside us.

We only know the story has entered the room.

We only know the grandmother has paused, perhaps to turn a roti, perhaps to sort methi, and that suddenly the mountains have arrived with her.

Born beneath the watchful embrace of the Sahyadris, Shivaji Maharaj inherited from his mother, Jijabai, far more than lineage.

She nourished his imagination with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the lives of those who understood that sovereignty begins first within one’s own character.

Before she helped shape a king, she helped shape a conscience.

Perhaps every enduring civilisation begins this way.

Not upon a battlefield.

But in the lap of a mother.

The mountains became his next teachers.

Where others saw difficult terrain, he saw possibility.

The Sahyadris did not simply protect him.

They educated him.

Patience became strategy.

Silence became movement.

The land itself became an ally.

What later generations would celebrate as military brilliance was, in many ways, an intimate conversation between a young leader and the landscape that had raised him.

History remembers Torna, Rajgad, Pratapgad, Purandar and Sinhagad.

It remembers daring campaigns, astonishing escapes and victories won against forces immeasurably larger than his own.

It remembers the founding of Hindavi Swarajya¹, a vision of self-rule rooted not merely in territory, but in dignity, justice and moral responsibility. Its depth is too often reduced to politics alone.

For Shivaji Maharaj, self-rule was never merely about replacing one ruler with another.

It was about restoring moral responsibility to governance itself.

Power, he seemed to understand, derives its legitimacy not from fear, but from justice.

Perhaps what continues to move me most is that his greatness cannot be measured only by the battles he fought.

It must also be measured by the battles he refused to fight.

Again and again, accounts of his life return to remarkable acts of restraint.

Women were to be protected, never treated as the spoils of war.

Places of worship, regardless of the faith they served, were to be respected.

The innocent were not to become collateral for ambition.

These were not merely political calculations.

They were declarations of character.

And perhaps this is why Bebe’s stories never felt like stories about power.

They felt like stories about how power must answer to something greater than itself.

History remembers the forts.

Civilisation remembers the conscience that made them worth defending.

Long after kingdoms rise and fall, stone eventually surrenders to time.

Character does not.

Perhaps that is why Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj continues standing upon those mountains.

Not simply as their king.

But as one of their enduring custodians.

---

Guru Gobind Singh Ji and the Sovereignty of the Soul

If Shivaji Maharaj teaches us that sovereignty can be imagined, Guru Gobind Singh Ji reveals what it asks of the soul.

He inherited neither peace nor certainty.

By the time he became the Tenth Guru, the Sikh tradition had already been shaped by generations of extraordinary spiritual labour and profound sacrifice. The martyrdom of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, had declared to the world that another person’s freedom to worship was a cause worthy of one’s own life.

That inheritance became the ground upon which Guru Gobind Singh Ji would build.

As a child, I could not have understood the enormity of this.

I only knew that whenever Bebe spoke of him, something in the room changed.

The story did not become heavier exactly.

It became more still.

As though courage itself had entered quietly and taken a seat among us.

Then came Vaisakhi² of 1699.

At Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh Ji called the Khalsa into being, an initiated community of sovereign souls bound not by birth or privilege, but by discipline, equality, courage and devotion to righteousness.

Few moments in history have so completely transformed the imagination of a people.

With the creation of the Khalsa, ordinary men and women were invited to recognise something extraordinary within themselves.

Not privilege.

Not superiority.

Responsibility.

To live fearlessly.

To stand for righteousness.

To defend the vulnerable.

To see the Divine equally reflected in every human being.

The sword he placed into their hands was never intended to replace compassion.

It existed to protect it.

History remembers Anandpur Sahib.

Chamkaur.

Muktsar.

It remembers impossible odds.

It remembers the martyrdom of the four Sahibzade³, whose courage continues to humble hearts centuries later.

It remembers Mata Gujri Ji, whose quiet strength reminds us that history is never carried by great men alone.

It remembers relentless struggle, exile and unimaginable grief.

Yet whenever I return to Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s life, one moment continues to hold me with particular tenderness.

Not a battle.

A letter.

The Zafarnama*⁴.

Written after almost everything had been taken from him.

It is not the writing of a defeated man.

Nor of a triumphant one.

It is the voice of a conscience that refused to surrender its moral clarity.

He reminded an emperor that power built upon deception ultimately collapses beneath its own weight.

Truth, though often slower, possesses a far longer memory.

Perhaps this is why Guru Gobind Singh Ji has never seemed to me merely a warrior.

Or merely a saint.

He dissolved that distinction altogether.

In him, prayer and courage ceased to be separate disciplines.

The one nourished the other.

The deepest victory was never over another human being.

It was over fear itself.

When he bestowed eternal Guruship upon the Guru Granth Sahib, he performed one final act of astonishing humility.

He ensured that no throne would belong to a man.

The Guru would belong forever to the Shabad.

To the living wisdom that continues guiding those willing to listen.

History remembers the battles, and rightly so.

Civilisation remembers something even greater.

The human possibility he revealed.

---

The Architecture of Character

Only now, standing centuries later, do I begin to understand why Bebe never hurried through these stories.

She was never simply telling us what happened.

She was patiently introducing us to the architecture of character.

As children, we believed we were listening to stories about remarkable people.

Only adulthood revealed that she had quietly been teaching us how remarkable people are formed.

Not in a single act of courage.

But in a thousand unseen decisions that precede it.

Character, I have come to believe, is rarely built in the moment history remembers.

It is built long before anyone is watching.

Long before the fort is defended.

Long before the sword is unsheathed.

Long before the letter is written.

It is formed in disciplines so ordinary they almost escape our notice.

The daily choosing of restraint over impulse.

Humility over vanity.

Duty over convenience.

Compassion over power.

Perhaps that is why these two lives have continued accompanying me.

Not because I have ever imagined my own struggles to resemble theirs.

That would be neither truthful nor worthy of them.

Rather, they quietly altered the way I came to understand struggle itself.

When I was younger, I thought courage belonged mainly to visible battles.

Age has gently persuaded me otherwise.

Some adversaries announce themselves.

Others arrive disguised as certainty.

Or fear.

Or resentment.

Or the subtle intoxication of one’s own importance.

Some wear uniforms.

Others borrow our own voice.

Those, I have slowly discovered, are no less demanding.

History taught me that kingdoms may be defended with steel.

Life has taught me that the heart asks for different instruments.

Patience.

Forgiveness.

Discernment.

The willingness to remain a student long after the world has begun calling you experienced.

The older I grow, the less interested I become in victories that can be counted.

The ones that continue humbling me are quieter.

The victory over pride.

The victory over bitterness.

The victory over the comforting illusion that I have already arrived.

Perhaps every generation inherits different battlefields.

The landscapes change.

The weapons change.

The language changes.

Yet the work of governing oneself remains astonishingly familiar.

And perhaps that is why history continues to breathe.

Not because it asks us to relive another century.

But because it quietly asks every century the same enduring question.

Who are you becoming?

There are moments when I wonder how differently I might have understood courage had I grown up elsewhere.

Not better.

Not worse.

Simply differently.

For years I believed these stories belonged to history.

Only now do I begin to understand that they had quietly become part of the grammar through which I learnt to see the world.

---

The Doorway of Language

Perhaps language itself played a quiet role in this shaping.

English, for me, often became a language of instruction, precise, structured, a way to organise thought.

But it was in the vernaculars that something deeper unfolded.

They allowed me to travel, not just across words, but across worlds.

Through them, stories did not remain ideas.

They became lived textures.

They carried tone, rhythm, memory and emotion in ways that could not always be translated.

Only received.

Only felt.

Being a polyglot was never a crown to wear.

It was a doorway.

One that allowed me to absorb more fully, to listen more closely, to understand not just what was being said, but what was being carried beneath the words.

I never consciously decided that conviction ought to be accompanied by humility.

Or that strength without compassion eventually forgets what it exists to protect.

Or that leadership begins with governing oneself before attempting to govern anything else.

These ideas arrived long before I possessed the language to name them.

They settled into me the way rain disappears into good earth.

Without announcement.

Without ceremony.

Simply becoming part of the landscape.

Perhaps that is the quiet genius of civilisational inheritance.

It rarely asks us to admire it.

It patiently invites us to inhabit it.

Looking back, I no longer believe Bebe hoped we would remember every story.

Stories are not examinations to be passed.

They are companions.

She trusted that somewhere, years later, when life eventually placed us before our own difficult questions, something from those afternoons would quietly rise to meet the moment.

Perhaps she understood what only now I am beginning to learn.

That memory is not the highest form of inheritance.

Transformation is.

We honour those who came before us not by repeating their words exactly.

We honour them by allowing the quality of their lives to refine the quality of our own.

There is a tenderness in that realisation that catches me by surprise.

For so much of life is spent believing we are making ourselves.

Only to discover that we have been gently made by countless hands we scarcely noticed at the time.

A grandmother rolling rotis.

A father laughing as though ten rupees contained limitless abundance.

A city that never stopped making room for one more.

Two remarkable lives that entered a little girl’s imagination long before she knew they had already altered the course of history.

Seen separately, they are beautiful memories.

Seen together, they become something else.

An inheritance.

One that asks for neither admiration nor possession.

Only faithful stewardship.

And perhaps that is all any generation has ever truly been asked to do.

Receive well.

Live well.

Pass on well.

---

Another Pair of Hands

I sometimes watch my daughter without her knowing.

Children reveal their inheritances most clearly when they are unaware they are being observed.

She pauses instinctively before a shrine.

She asks questions that carry genuine wonder rather than easy certainty.

She finds delight in stories that are centuries old, as though they had only just happened yesterday.

She moves through the world with a kindness that often feels older than she is.

No one ever sat her down and announced these things.

They arrived the same way they arrived for me.

Quietly.

One ordinary day at a time.

---

What Remains Living

Perhaps this is how civilisations have always endured.

Not because every generation remembered every date.

Or every battle.

Or every name.

But because somewhere, in an ordinary kitchen, a grandmother rolled another roti.

A father laughed with whatever little he had.

A city made room for one more stranger.

Someone folded their hands while passing a place made holy by another’s devotion.

Someone touched a book with reverence after brushing it carelessly with a foot.

Someone patiently taught a child to shape one imperfect modak.

Someone told another story.

And another.

Until, without anyone quite noticing when it happened, those stories stopped being only stories.

They became character.

They became instinct.

They became ways of seeing.

Ways of standing.

Ways of loving.

Ways of carrying one another through difficult times.

Perhaps that is what I have been trying to understand all along.

Not simply where I come from.

But what has been quietly entrusted to me.

The older I grow, the less I think inheritance is something we possess.

I think it is something we are asked to care for, for a little while.

We receive it with gratitude.

We tend it with humility.

We leave it a little richer than we found it, if we are fortunate.

Then, when our own stretch of the journey is complete, we place it gently into another pair of hands.

Perhaps that has always been the work.

Not to preserve the past in glass.

But to remain a faithful link in a chain far older than ourselves.

Some inheritances are never finished.

They simply keep finding another pair of hands.

1. Literally, swarajya means self-rule or self-governance, and Hindavi Swarajya is closely associated with Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s vision of indigenous self-rule rooted in dignity, justice, and protection of the people.

2. Vaisakhi, traditionally a spring harvest festival in Punjab, holds defining significance in Sikh history because on Vaisakhi in 1699, at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh Ji founded the Khalsa Panth, the initiated Sikh community committed to spiritual discipline, equality, courage, and the defence of righteousness. The founding of the Khalsa is widely commemorated by Sikhs during Vaisakhi.

3. Sahibzade refers with reverence to the four sons of Guru Gobind Singh Ji: Sahibzada Ajit Singh Ji, Sahibzada Jujhar Singh Ji, Sahibzada Zorawar Singh Ji, and Sahibzada Fateh Singh Ji. In Sikh memory, the elder Sahibzade, Ajit Singh Ji and Jujhar Singh Ji, are remembered for their martyrdom at Chamkaur, while the younger Sahibzade, Zorawar Singh Ji and Fateh Singh Ji, are remembered for their martyrdom at Sirhind. Together, their sacrifice remains one of the most sacred and formative memories in Sikh history.

4. Zafarnama, often translated as “Epistle of Victory” or “Declaration of Victory,” is the Persian verse-letter traditionally attributed to Guru Gobind Singh Ji and addressed to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1705, after the Battle of Chamkaur. In Sikh memory, it is understood not as a declaration of military triumph, but as a moral and spiritual victory, a fearless rebuke of broken oaths, injustice and power severed from truth.