The Better India · 1 day ago

A Mother's Schizophrenia, a Husband's Suicide, a Daughter's OCD: Nobody Asked How These Women Were. Now They Ask India

Three women - a daughter who grew up decoding her mother's psychosis, a widow who lost her husband to suicide, and a mother who has spent decades holding her daughter's future in an open hand - carried their families through crises that most of India preferred not to name. What they share is not only the weight of that caregiving but the silence that surrounded it, the way "stigma, shame, secrecy" sealed off grief and exhaustion from ordinary conversation, leaving no one to ask how they themselves were doing. Now, through the anthology *Homecoming* and the campaign it anchors, Kavita Arora, Nandini Murali, and Pheroza Godrej are turning their private reckonings into a public question. Kavita's choice to become a psychiatrist who asks about "the family members who are not in the room" grew directly from being the child no one thought to ask; Nandini built a support network in Madurai by beginning every group with her own story, because "when people hear my story, they know that I'm not manufacturing anything." What these three lives reveal, quietly and without drama, is that the people doing the hardest sustaining work are often the last to be sustained - and that naming this, finally, is its own form of care.