It was 11:40 pm when Ritika finally put her phone down and looked at Arjun across the bed like he was a stranger. “You told Aarav he could have the tablet for one more hour. After I already said no chocolate AND no screen time tonight. In front of him, Arjun. He looked at me …
Divya counted. She didn’t mean to start counting, but somewhere around her son’s second birthday, she found herself doing it anyway — at the park, at a cousin’s birthday party, in the paediatrician’s waiting room, silently tallying how many words the other two-year-olds around her seemed to be using compared to her own son, who …
When Meghna found out she was pregnant with her second, her first genuine thought — before joy, before nervousness about managing two under three — was a strange flash of financial dread. She still remembered, vividly, the spreadsheet she’d built for her first daughter: hospital package, nursery furniture, a stroller she’d researched for three weeks, …
Anand opened his daughter’s PPF account at the same post office branch where his own father had opened his, thirty-one years earlier, with a photocopy machine that still looked exactly as tired as it had in his childhood memory. The clerk barely looked up from her register as she processed it — for her, it …
Neha remembers the exact aunty, at the exact family function, who asked — in front of at least six other relatives — “Doodh nahi aata kya?” Does your milk not come? Neha’s son was three weeks old, she’d been trying to breastfeed through cracked, bleeding nipples for eleven straight days, her lactation consultant had gently …
Kavita sat in the goldsmith’s shop with her six-week-old daughter asleep in her arms, and for the first time since the pregnancy began, she felt genuinely torn between two people she trusted completely — her mother, who’d been saying “kaan chhedwana hai, jaldi karo” since the day the baby was born, and her paediatrician, who’d …
Aisha spent an entire evening on the phone with her mother trying to explain why she wanted a “baby shower” when her mother had already booked the pandit, the flowers, and half the extended family for a godh bharai on the exact same weekend. “Woh toh same cheez hai na,” her mother kept saying — …
Vikram’s own father visited exactly twice during the hospital stay when Vikram was born — once to see the baby, once to bring his wife home. He never changed a single diaper in Vikram’s first year, not because he didn’t love his son, but because it genuinely never occurred to him, or to anyone around …
At a wedding in Bengaluru two years ago, Radhika found herself at a table with five other mothers, all comparing notes on their children’s names the way people usually compare notes on schools or paediatricians. There was a Bengali mother whose son had two entirely different names — one on his birth certificate, one that …
Sneha still remembers the exact moment the guilt hit her — scrolling Instagram at 1 AM, seven months pregnant with her second, looking at a birthday party some influencer had thrown for her one-year-old. A candy cart. A professional balloon artist. A custom cake stand shaped like a tiny castle. Sneha’s own son’s first birthday …
