Chapter 4

 There was a time when my life had grown dull — not tragic, just tasteless.

A kind of slow erosion where laughter fades into duty, joy slips into habit, and silence becomes the default reply to everything.

I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t happy either. I was just… surviving.

The house was spotless, the meals were warm, but I felt like a ghost moving through a life that wasn’t mine anymore.

And then — she came.

My daughter.

Born under stark hospital lights and sleep-deprived prayers, her tiny wail cracked open a chamber in my heart I didn’t even know was sealed. Her arrival was not just the birth of a child. It was the rebirth of me.

Suddenly, there was music in the mundane.

Even exhaustion felt beautiful because it had a purpose. Her purpose.

I watched her sleeping beside me — fragile, curled, miraculous — and felt a surge of love so fierce, so humbling, it moved me to tears.

That night, I picked up my pen — for the first time in months — and wrote.

This poem is what spilled out of my overflowing soul.

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Poem: "Happy Daughter’s Day" by Arundhati Sen

In the life that was insipid...

an angel knocked at my door...

Little did I know

all my good deeds had surfaced to the fore...

A heart brimming with love,

two eyes gleaming with joy...

It seemed destiny had finally played in my favour —

a divine ploy.

My prayers ripened into blessings,

My dreams, long dormant, came alive...

With your arrival,

our home began to truly thrive.

My prayers for you — the ritual of my life,

Your laughter and joy — the cause of all my strife.

One day is too little to celebrate your place in my world,

Your presence is a festival — a lifetime unfurled.

You filled our lives; you completed our soul,

Oh my little one, you made us whole.

– Amita Joshi (as Arundhati Sen)

Happy Daughter’s Day to all the women who have been a daughter first — before becoming anything else.

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Tara’s Reflection

I paused at the last line.

The room was quiet, except for the ticking of the clock and the faint scent of sandalwood lingering on the pages. I looked around — the same house where she once moved quietly, often ignored, often misunderstood. Everyone said she was aloof, strange, hard to please. Even I believed it.

But now… reading this… I felt ashamed.

This wasn’t the voice of a bitter woman.

This was a mother — a woman of fire and tenderness, devotion and silence — who had hidden her ocean of love behind a calm face.

I remember her daughter — tall, reserved, perhaps unaware of what she meant to her mother.

But now I see: Arundhati Ma’am lived and breathed for that girl.

She wasn’t heartless. She was heart-full — just never given the space to show it.

And in this poem, in this chapter of her life, she isn’t just a misunderstood woman.

She is a mother in bloom.

If only someone had read her sooner.