A Letter To Society: "A Room Left Behind."

Dear Society,

Ever since I last wrote to you, life has moved through a strange, sacred rhythm of arrivals and departures. I was away on pilgrimage to Adi Kailash when I got the message: Dadi was gone. Her elder son sent a short text. That one line cracked something open.

She had not woken that morning. A neighbour — Rama — who checked on her because she always woke early, found her locked in her room. The door was broken open. Dadi had suffered a stroke during the night and slipped away. I was not there. I could not hold her hand as she left. I learned it by a phone screen, from miles away, from a son who had to tell me the practical things first.

I had been living with her off and on since 2021. This year I moved back in March with a different interior life — softer, steadier, less frantic. We spent mornings and evenings sharing tea. She did not nag me to marry. Instead she said, with a heavy tenderness I will never forget: “akele aaye hain, akale jana hai. Koi saath nahi deta kisi ka.” She asked me, again and again, to live my life on my own terms. That insistence sat like a gift between us.

Dadi kept a rhythm that was hers alone. She rose before dawn, filled the water tanks, checked the storages — habits from times when water was scarce and every drop counted. She tended the land attached to the house, sowed and harvested pulses, and even when her body ached she kept moving. That movement was not just labour; it was the way she kept herself present. She had routines that grounded her — and that grounded those around her.

She had a relationship with the village that was threaded with rules. Rama and she were neighbours, not friends; caste lines and ceremony kept a distance, even as they sat and shared the small, day-to-day things. Dadi would never accept food made by Rama, and yet they watched each other’s comings and goings and offered what quiet care those boundaries allowed. Their companionship was particular and constrained — a lesson in how intimacy survives within limits.

There were days when she wept as she harvested the daal she had sown. She told me she would stop sowing in the future, and we joked about planting flowers instead. But habits hold. In late September she was still hauling bundles, still crying at times. In July she was hospitalised; she told one of her sons, “Tum log ghar chale jao, Afrah ko bhej do mere paas.” That request landed in me like proof of a kinship no paper allowed to be simpler.

She loved her dogs. This year she found a white pup and became fiercely protective of her. The dog meant someone to speak to; it meant a reason to cook, to move, to make a small life for another being. When hospital demands and family logistics collided, Bella shifted houses more than once. The pup’s comings and goings are part of the story because they show what we make companions for — and what we leave behind when we cannot carry care through.

I have watched single women in the mountains carry the house, the land, the errands and the grief. I have watched them keep their dignity by work and routine, even as nights widened and sleep thinned. Night is the hardest hour: the house settles into silence and memories expand. Dadi would sometimes say, quietly, “dekhna tu, main aise hi raat ko mar jaungi, inko pata bhi nahi chalega.” She voiced a fear she had lived with, and that fear came true in the worst possible way: found only in the morning.

When I returned from the pilgrimage, the house felt different not because the hills changed but because the person whose small, insistent presence shaped the days was no longer there. I do not go downstairs to fetch morning chai for her. I do not shout across the porch for her to hurry. I do not hand her the sari I bought, the one she promised to wear on Diwali. I no longer wake up to her knocks or to the rhythm of her filling tanks. The simple, domestic choreography that tethered two lives has been broken.

Her absence brings a cruel clarity. A woman who birthed and managed so much becomes “manageable” in death — an item to be dealt with, a duty to be performed. The children who once passed through the house come and go with urgency and with the same human speed that moves on. The day-to-day tenderness that sustains a life is not always coded into our duties; it is the invisible thread of companionship that people assume will last without tending. It does not.

Singlehood is not one thing. It is not always lack; it is not always melancholia. It is both freedome and exposure, a life lived facing the self. For women — especially elderly women in villages and hills — singlehood often becomes a labor of holding the house, a quiet guardianship of what remains. The world trains us to valorise paired life and to pity solitary life, yet that script erases the dignity and the care embedded in surviving alone. The social safety nets are thin; the nights are long; the appetite to be seen is simple and human.

This is why A Room of Her Own matters to me. When we recorded the first batch of interviews last November, the voices I heard were not exceptional in their tragedy; they were ordinary in their courage. They carried memories, recipes, remedies, complaints, songs. They were women who asked only to be noticed. Dadi’s life — its routine, stubbornness, and tenderness — is the same story played smaller and nearer. The film’s lens was meant to hold that life up; her room was already a study in what attention does and does not do.

I am not writing to turn grief into argument. I am writing so that we, as a society, might see more clearly the cost of assumptions: that married life is success; that solitude is failure; that care is automatically given. We have constructed households and customs that make caregiving conditional, and then we act surprised when bodies and souls are left to fend for themselves. We speak of duty and honour while forgetting the daily acts that make a life livable: knocking at the door, sharing tea, watching the sweep of the sky together.

Dadi left with small, human finalities — a locked room broken open, a neighbour who did what she could within the rules she herself had learned, a son sending a text to tell me. I will miss the bidi-sharing, the quiet field conversations, the way she scolded me like a younger sister and loved me like a daughter. I will miss arguing with her, calling out to her, and the small, steady warmth of being answerable to another human at the end of the day.

If this grief teaches anything, let it be this: elder women are neither props nor problems. They are repositories of practice, courage, laughter, complaint, faith. They deserve our time, our hands, our seeing. We must not let ritual or custom stand in for care. We must relearn how to be near.

With a cup of tea left cooling on the porch and an empty sari folded where it should have been worn.

Love,

Afrah