Kya koi cheez jeevan mein sach mein sab kuch bhula sakti hai? Can something happen to you so completely that it resets the way you understand love, marriage, loyalty, motherhood, spirituality—and even yourself?

I used to think identity was permanent. I believed that somewhere underneath changing circumstances there was an unshakeable version of me: my values, my beliefs, the things I loved and the things I would never do. I thought I knew the boundaries of my character. I thought I knew what kind of woman I was.

Then I became a mother.

And perhaps the hardest thing to admit is that I did not simply become a mother. For a while, I forgot that I had ever been anyone else.

Before motherhood, there were so many versions of me that sometimes even I forget they existed. There was the woman who read the Bhagavad Gita, Ramcharitmanas, the Garuda Purana and other sacred books, returning to them across different years and finding different meanings depending on who she was when she opened them. She wanted to understand God, karma, dharma, moksha, death, the soul and the reason we are here. I believed that the only true purpose of being here was manav kalyan—to serve people, to reduce suffering, to make someone else’s life a little kinder, safer or more meaningful. There was a deeply spiritual woman inside me—not someone who wanted to appear holy, but someone who wanted to become so loving, generous and conscious that anyone who entered her presence might move a little closer towards kindness, truth and God.

But my inner world was not made only of serious scriptures and difficult questions. I loved Premchand and the honesty of his stories. I loved the wit of Akbar and Birbal, the cleverness hidden inside a simple exchange and the way a story could make you laugh while quietly teaching you something about people. I loved mythological stories too—the Samudra Manthan, Vasuki Nag becoming the churning rope, the gods and asuras pulling from opposite sides, and all the strange, beautiful, frightening things that emerged from the ocean. I have not forgotten those stories. I still tell them to my children at bedtime: why Hanuman tried to eat the sun because he thought it was a giant fruit, who Nandi was and why he became Nandi, and how the stories we inherit are not only about gods and miracles but also about courage, devotion, curiosity, duty and the consequences of our choices. Perhaps this is another part of me that motherhood did not erase. It simply gave me someone to share it with.

There was also a writer. She loved poetry and the exact sentence that could hold an emotion. She was someone who played the guitar fearlessly, and people would just club around, saying, “Once more.” Who used to sing bhajans and see people crying when they listened to her. She wanted to create something so alive that years later she would return to it and still recognize herself inside it. She had enormous, almost embarrassing dreams. Maybe one day something she wrote would become a book. Maybe someone would see a world inside it. Maybe something born from her own confusion would one day become a story people watched on a screen.

There was an artist who loved painting, art and craft. There was a woman fascinated by astrology and numerology, by planets and numbers, D1 and D9 charts, someone who knew palmistry, and people would come to her to solve their problems, who would say something and forget, and then people would come years later telling her it is true and the possibility that different stages of life awaken different versions of us. She wondered whether ancient systems could be used not to frighten people about destiny, but to help them understand themselves. Why does the sea soothe some people while mountains make others feel alive? Why can travelling somewhere surrounded by water feel like emotional release? Could place, element, psychology, spirituality and the inner life speak to one another?

There was a woman who loved geography because places fascinated her: how people lived, what they ate, what they wore, what their homes looked like, what history had done to them. There was a woman interested in finances—not only earning money, but understanding it, managing it and using it to create freedom. There was a woman who loved hosting, setting a table beautifully, feeding people, making a home warm and making anyone who entered feel that, for however long they stayed, they mattered.

And then there was fashion.

Fashion was not merely something I liked. I was good at designing clothes. I could imagine silhouettes, colours, costumes and the entire visual story of a person. I entered NIFT Delhi twice, and both times it stirred an ambition in me that I never truly managed to let go of. Even when I tried to convince myself that fashion was only a youthful interest and engineering was the sensible path, some part of me remained attached to that possibility—to the life I might have lived if I had walked through those doors and stayed.

I remember sitting in a design studio of NIFT Delhi’s basement once, when someone gave me something to design. It should have been a simple task, something I could have finished quickly, but I spent an hour and a half trying to turn it into a masterpiece. I kept thinking about what it could become, how the colors should work, what shape would make it memorable, what small detail could change the entire feeling of it. I was not doing it because anyone had asked me to spend so long. I was doing it because once I began imagining something, I wanted to honor the image in my mind. That kind of absorption was not casual interest. It was the part of me that came alive when I was creating.

Upon seeing my name in the shortlisted candidates, for NIFT Delhi, it was once a dream so real that I could almost see my life inside it. I wanted to design clothes and costumes for Bollywood. I wanted to understand how a character could change simply through what they wore, how a fabric, a color, a neckline, or a texture could say something before the person even spoke.

Fashion photography came to me just as naturally. Sometimes an entire image would appear in my mind within minutes—the clothes, the light, the expression, the pose, the location, and the mood. I did not need hours to imagine it. It would simply arrive. Somewhere, I think I knew that this was a kind of intelligence too, a visual intelligence, something that was mine.

But engineering became the sensible choice. Engineering meant stability. Engineering meant the possibility of earning more money. Fashion felt uncertain, and when you are young, people tell you to choose the path that will keep you safe, as if safety can never become its own kind of regret.

So I let NIFT go. I let the fashion dream go—or I told myself I had. But dreams do not always disappear when you decide against them. Sometimes they become quiet and sit somewhere inside you, waiting for the smallest opening to remind you that they are still alive.

Then motherhood made the rest of me quiet too.

I thought I loved children. And I did. But loving children when their responsibility belongs to somebody else is very different from having them and knowing there is no going home from motherhood because you are already home, and they are looking at you for everything.

With my first child, I tried to do everything right. Then came my second, and somewhere inside me was the terrifying thought that I did not have the energy to do all of it again. I had help. From the outside, I was doing okay. And yet something was brewing underneath. Slowly, I became Mom, and Mom became so enormous that there seemed to be no room left for the woman carrying her.

My dreams could wait. My writing could wait. My body could wait. My interests could wait. My ambitions could wait. My exhaustion could wait. I could wait.

After all, wasn’t this love? Wasn’t sacrifice supposed to be beautiful? So what if I could not work on my dreams? So what if I lost my body? So what if some part of me disappeared while becoming a mother? My children needed me. For a long time, that seemed like enough of an explanation.

Until it wasn’t.

There is something dangerous about being seen when you have forgotten how to see yourself. Someone came into my life, and something shifted. I used to wonder whether it was possible to fall in love after marriage. The thought once seemed absurd. I would already have found my love. I would have a husband, children, a home, and a life. Why would I need anyone else?

I did not know any better.

Marriage did not make me immune to being human. Neither did motherhood. Suddenly I could see flaws in the perfect little world I thought I had created. My marriage had flaws. My ideals had flaws. And most frighteningly, I had flaws.

I had always imagined myself as spiritual and devoted, someone who loved with her whole heart, someone for whom betrayal would be unimaginable. Yet my thoughts began moving towards places I once believed I could never enter. Nothing happened neatly. There was no single dramatic moment in which one version of me disappeared and another arrived. There were interactions, conversations, yearnings, fantasies, and slippery slopes I am not proud of.

For a while, I blamed that person. I blamed them for disturbing my ordinary life, for making me feel more, want more and desire more. I wanted to say that they had destroyed my family and taken their mother away from my children. Anger was easier than admitting that another person cannot awaken something that has absolutely no existence inside you.

Maybe they affected me deeply. But perhaps I had given them some of their power.

And that forced me to hold two uncomfortable truths at once: someone had affected me, and I was still responsible for myself.

I was in therapy. I was taking the medication my doctor had prescribed. I was asking questions that frightened me even while I said them aloud. Why was I so angry with my children? Why did I sometimes feel like hitting them when I was overwhelmed? Why could their crying make something frightening rise inside me? Why could I not simply wake up, get them ready for school, make them a home-cooked meal and put them to bed without disappearing somewhere inside my own head?

Why was I thinking about one person while my little one was crying in front of me?

My children were beginning to fear my anger, and I was beginning to fear it too. There were moments when I felt I was failing not only as a mother, but as a decent human being. Therapy was not about becoming extraordinary. Sometimes my greatest ambition was painfully ordinary: I wanted to become Mom again. The mother who was present. The mother whose children did not have to be afraid of her emotions. The mother who could return to them fully.

But underneath the question of whether I wanted another person was another question: what exactly was I wanting?

Maybe I wanted myself.

Maybe being noticed felt intoxicating because I had become invisible. Maybe desire was not only romantic or sexual. Maybe I desired possibility, conversation, intellect, beauty, freedom, creation, and recognition. Maybe I wanted someone to look at me and see something other than somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother.

The tragedy was that I had needed another person’s gaze to remind me that there was something worth looking at.

Because look at everything I had forgotten. I had forgotten the woman who could discuss scripture and then become fascinated by a beautiful dress. The woman who could think about moksha and money in the same afternoon. The woman who wondered about planets and psychology. The woman who loved fabric, paint, poetry, food, homes, stories, beauty, places, and God.

I had mistaken being overwhelmed for becoming uninteresting. I had mistaken not having time for my mind as proof that I no longer had a mind worth listening to.

And then fashion began speaking to me again.

There is still a part of me that wants to go to the city of dreams and work around clothes, cinema, people, and images. I want to see how people dress and then change how they think about dressing. I want to redefine fashion in my own way—not as something only expensive or trendy, but as identity, character, psychology, power, softness, rebellion, and elegance.

I want to understand why one person can wear something worth very little and look unforgettable, while another can wear something worth lakhs and still look as though the clothes are wearing them. I love the idea that luxury is often minimalism, that real luxury does not have to announce itself. I want to create clothes that are minimal but powerful, feminine but not fragile, and luxurious without trying too hard—clothes that make a woman feel expensive not because of the price tag, but because of the way she carries herself.

I even gave my future label a name: Sin~the Style. Long before I knew whether I would ever launch a fashion label, I created a designer Gmail address for it: [email protected]. It was such a small thing, almost insignificant from the outside, but I think some part of me already knew that the dream deserved a place in the real world. I gave it a name, an address, and a tiny digital existence long before I had the courage—or the circumstances—to give it anything more.

Maybe one day it will exist beyond a thought. Maybe there will be sketches, fabrics, collections, photographs, models, and campaigns. Maybe someone somewhere will wear something I imagined years earlier while sitting inside an entirely different life.

And somewhere inside me there is still the almost unreasonable dream of New York. I want to go to photography school there. I want to shift to New York one day and call it home. I want to walk with a camera around my neck, look at strangers and buildings and clothes and faces and light, and think, This is my life now.

I want to photograph fashion in a way people remember. I want to become one of the world’s most famous fashion photographers, and even writing that makes me embarrassed because it sounds too large, too dramatic, and too impossible for the life I am living right now. But why should I make the dream smaller simply because I am afraid of it?

I do not want New York to remain wallpaper in my imagination. I want to know what it feels like to wake up there, complain about the weather there, miss home from there, have a favorite coffee shop there, and know which street looks most beautiful after rain. I want to watch the skyline so many times that one day I will stop photographing it because I know I will see it again tomorrow.

Not visiting New York.

Belonging there.

Looking at that skyline until it became ordinary, and thinking that through all the lives I almost chose and all the versions of myself I almost forgot, I made it here.

Maybe these dreams sound selfish beside motherhood, marriage, and responsibility. But I am beginning to understand that wanting a life does not mean I do not love the life I already have. Wanting to create does not mean I do not love my children. Wanting New York does not mean I hate home. Wanting fashion does not mean engineering was worthless.

Two truths can exist at once.

I can be grateful for what my choices gave me and still grieve what they cost me.

I can be a mother and still be a writer, a designer, a photographer, a spiritual woman, an artist, a traveler, a reader, a host, and a woman who wants to understand money. I can believe in moksha and still want a beautiful dress. I can study the stars and then study investing. I can love luxury and believe that the highest form of wealth is generosity. None of these women cancel each other out.

I do not want reclaiming myself to mean abandoning motherhood. That was one of the false choices I had created: either I sacrifice myself completely and become a good mother, or I choose myself and become selfish. Perhaps neither is true. Perhaps my children deserve a mother who is alive inside.

A mother who reads. A mother who writes. A mother who paints. A mother who learns. A mother who dresses beautifully because beauty gives her pleasure. A mother who travels and remains curious about the world. A mother who can say, “I was wrong.” A mother who learns to regulate her emotions instead of asking her children to accommodate her storms.

Maybe that is a better inheritance than perfection: showing them that becoming responsible for other people does not require disappearing from your own life.

I want money. I want success. I want beautiful things. I want to create something valuable. But I hope I never confuse any of those things with richness. Luxury can be simplicity, space, time, sunlight, clean sheets, a beautifully prepared meal, carefully chosen clothes, a welcoming table, and the ability to say, “There is enough. Take some.”

I want to become more generous as I become more prosperous. I want whatever enters my life—money, beauty, intelligence, or influence—to make me softer rather than harder. What is the use of wealth if it makes the heart smaller? What is the use of spirituality if it makes us feel superior? What is the use of knowledge if it does not make us kinder?

Maybe healing is not going back to the woman I was before motherhood. She does not exist anymore. Too much has happened. Healing may be meeting all these pieces again and deciding what I want to carry forward: the mother, the writer, the spiritual woman, the designer, the reader, the artist, the traveler, the host, the wife, the flawed woman, the woman capable of desire, the woman ashamed of some of her thoughts, the woman who wants to become kinder, and the woman who still wants more from life.

I want my children to someday know that their mother was a whole person. Not only did the woman who woke them for school, made food, worried, arranged their lives, and put them to bed. I want them to know there was a universe inside her too. She read scriptures and poetry. She thought about stars and numbers. She loved fabrics and colors. She wanted to paint. She wanted to understand money. She wanted to see the world. She wanted to write stories. She wanted to understand God. She wanted to make beautiful things. She wanted to give. She wanted to love better.

And perhaps this blog is how I stop losing those parts again.

But I do not want to keep turning my dreams into beautiful sentences and calling that enough.

I need to sketch something. Take the photograph. Learn the software. Study fashion. Make one garment. Build one collection. Apply to the school. Go to New York.

Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not in the exact order I imagined at eighteen or twenty. But I need to take at least one real step.

Because I am not afraid of dying without becoming famous. I am afraid of dying without ever finding out what I could have become.

What if I could have designed those clothes? What if I could have gone to NIFT? What if I could have photographed the campaigns I keep seeing in my head? What if I could have built Sin~the Style? What if I could have lived in New York?

There are so many things we call unrealistic simply because they require us to rearrange our lives.

So, future me, if you are reading this from somewhere far away, I hope there is a camera near you. I hope there are sketches somewhere. I hope Sin~the Style exists in some form, even if it becomes something completely different from what I imagine today. I hope you created photographs that made people stop scrolling. I hope you made clothes that made someone feel extraordinary.

I hope you became gentler with the children. I hope they remember more tenderness than anger. I hope you repaired what could be repaired and accepted what could not. I hope you learned the difference between love and longing, between being seen and being saved, between desire and destiny. I hope you stopped handing other people the power to determine whether you felt alive.

I hope you still open the Gita and find sentences you swear were not there the last time. I hope you understand money and have enough to give generously. I hope your home is full of people who leave feeling loved. I hope there is paint somewhere on your hands. I hope you wrote the poetry. I hope you built something. I hope you created at least one piece of writing you adore.

And I hope, at least once, you looked out at the New York skyline from a window that belonged to you and remembered the woman who once sat very far away from it, terrified that she might die before taking even one step towards the life she wanted.

Because I understand something now that I could not understand when all of this began.

I was not only yearning for another person. I was yearning for the enormous, complicated, intelligent, spiritual, creative, ambitious and imperfect woman I had misplaced somewhere between marriage, motherhood, responsibility and survival.

I thought someone had arrived and awakened me. Maybe they did. But awakening is not the same as belonging to the person who woke you.

What I do with this consciousness belongs to me.

So I will read again. Write again. Paint. Study. Learn about money. Learn about places. Study the stars because they fascinate me. Dress beautifully because beauty delights me. Host people. Give. Travel. Sit beside the sea. Read scripture. Write poems. Raise my children. Work on my marriage. Question myself. Forgive myself. Hold myself accountable. Create.

I will stop telling the girl who wanted NIFT that she was foolish. I will stop treating New York like a wallpaper I am only allowed to look at. I will stop waiting for a perfect future in which I am no longer tired, responsible or afraid.

I may not be able to give her everything immediately.

But I can give her a beginning.

And if I ever forget her again, I will come back here and remember: she was never gone. She was underneath all of it, waiting for me to remember how much existed inside her.