Don’t get me wrong. We have had many, many, many amazing volunteers. But just being willing to come and work with us for a few weeks or months is no guarantee of anything and I would be a sad team leader if I didn’t know that.

So I welcomed Ritesh knowing full well that he might end up being a forgettable chap – well-meaning, but forgettable.

Well. Not. Ritesh was one of our stars. The darling of our team. Talented. Loving. A person who truly wanted to make a difference in the world. And he did just that in our world.

And because he was from Vodafone, he also brought with him a whole train of connections and possibilities. One of the features of accepting a Vodafone volunteer was that we were automatically entered into its fundraising challenge – a fact I realized late in the game.

I had thought that the fundraising was internal, that each Vodafone group was meant to raise money for its designated NGO. I had no idea that anybody could participate. Our assigned group was the Gujarat Circle. So I went all the way to Ahmedabad to inspire and rouse the troops – and they responded! After my visit, donations increased significantly.

But we still remained in 4th place overall – the Gujarat Circle had raised around 2.3 lakhs, while the top contender was the Kerala Circle with 3.85. It didn’t seem possible that we could overtake them. Then one day – just three days before the end of the whole competition – we got word that not only Vodafone employees could donate. Anyone  could.

We swung into action.

Dear Friends! (I wrote on my Facebook wall)

Vodafone has included the Latika Roy Foundation in its World of Difference program and so far, its Gujarat Circle of Employees has raised over two lakhs ($5000) for us. We are now in the running for a matching grant from Vodafone itself, provided we move to first position in the race – a race that ends the day after tomorrow. We are currently 4th, but the difference between the 4 top contenders is marginal. PLEASE support us! Follow the link below and give whatever you can. The money will go into our building fund – how amazing if we could start construction for the state-of the art centre we have been dreaming of for so long! Please do it now! We have only two days left, so there is no time to stop and think. Quick! Straight from the heart!!! Lots of love to all of you!

A sweet, simple Facebook appeal. But look what happened!

Rs 25K raised in less than an hour!!!! Let’s keep it up folks!!!

We could hardly believe it. Yet more was on its way!

Thanks so much to Vina Srivastava for her generous donation to the Latika Roy Foundation Building Fund! Excelsior!

In almost no time, small donations began pouring in. Rs 1000 x 10, Rs, 500 x 25 . . .

Hey Guys!!! We are almost there! You have all been amazingly generous – we’ve surged to 2nd place and have a very strong chance of winning. Tomorrow is the last day – all we need is another Rs. 41K. To all our India-based friends: rupees are now the currency of choice. Foreign donations take a day or two to process. Rupees go right through. Please do make a donation – right now, if possible! 40 K and we will be over the top and eligible for up to five lakhs as a matching grant!

The adrenalin was pumping. Maybe it WAS possible. We were all glued to our computers. Refresh! Refresh! We couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

All we need now is Rs 37,000 and we will win the matching grant!!!!! Almost there, but you must act TODAY! Calling all holders of a few spare rupees! This is your chance to really make a huge difference to the Latika Roy Foundation!!! At this point, even a small donation will be a huge help. But you must act NOW. Today is our last chance!!!!

We were in different rooms in our office, shouting the news out with glee as one person’s internet connection went a little faster than the others and she or he got the latest total first.

You can watch the excitement here. What I love about the Latika Roy Foundation’s effort???? Look at the number of individual donors!!!! More than DOUBLE anyone else’s and we are now in second place. Proof positive of the difference each individual makes. Today is our chance to be the change. To donate, see the link below this post. I love you all!!!

The response was truly a joy to behold. It came in waves from the different continents where our friends are scattered. We could see the totals rise depending on time zones: Jack Young is waking up in California. There’s Asha Pai-Sethi rising in London. Now India is awake again.

You guys are AMAZING!!!! We are inching our way to the top – just Rs 25K to go now. Please give!

But now for a little more drama. The ending of the contest coincided with the last session of the Dasra training which was how we got into this Vodafone lark in the first place. So right at the HEIGHT of the frenzy, I had to fly to Delhi and then to Mumbai . . . out of touch and offline for several hours.

It was harrowing. I was on a direct flight from Dehradun to Mumbai, but it stopped in Delhi for 20 minutes to load more passengers –  long enough for me to check the latest tallies and post my response on facebook:

Incredible!!!! Just Rs 18K to go and we are golden!!!

And just before the stewardess came to glare at me for the third time, the total went up again:

WHEEEE!!! I cannot get over this! We now need only Rs 10K to go!!!! What an outpouring of support!!! You all are simply MARVELOUS!!!

I reached Mumbai and even before going to get my luggage, I got online again to check. Only Rs 1000 since Delhi??? But still, spur the troops on:

Countdown!!!! 9K to go. We can do it!!!!

In the taxi to Vibha’s place, I kept checking. Not only online, I kept getting regular text messages from Sumita and Ritesh who were in just as much of a frenzy as I was. When they sent me the latest tally, I posted on facebook again:

Edge of seat time! We need only 8K now and we win this thing!!!! How ridiculous if we let this chance slip away! A matching grant for our building fund! Just picture our kids walking in to a state of the art building that BELONGS TO THEM!!! 8 k, folks!!!

And suddenly, all in a whoosh, we moved up:

Latika Roy has surged ahead to first place!!!! But it’s not over till midnight when the fat lady sings. So don’t stop yet . . . (plus we still have one lakh to go to reach the matching grant limit – whatever you give will automatically double). My goodness! We are all trembling with the excitement here. What an amazing group you all are. We can feel your love and support coming to us like WAVES.

But then! Oh no!!! Our competition began to realize what was going on.

We are holding on to first place but Gourav Jaiswal, that sleeping giant, has woken and is now defending his spot. Oh no! What to do? I love him like a son.

The Kerala Circle, I later learned, was determined not to let go of their spot at the top. Their lead fundraiser swung into action himself, making calls and encouraging stragglers to donate TODAY. But we were on a roll:

Just broke through the 4 lakh barrier!!! Now at 407,353. Keep it up, team Latika!!!

417, 353!!!!!! There is such a thing as TOO MUCH excitement. Be still my heart.

Jack Young, one of our most faithful supporters, wrote to say: Do not lose this contest. My donation is taking longer to show up because of the foreign transaction lag, but I am good for whatever it takes for you to win. Put it in yourself and I will repay you when this is over. Noted! One of our fat cats with ready cash agreed to standby, ready to donate at the zero hour if it proved necessary.

OK, guys!!!! We are now up to 424,585. Our nearest “friend” is at 394,323. DO NOT RELAX. We need a full-out effort to get us up to the Five Lakh mark.

Three. Hours. Left. To. The. Midnight. Deadline. Go for broke!!!! 76K and we get the full Vodafone match!!!!

Now the organizations in 3rd and 4th place were also getting in on the act. It was brilliant! Our efforts spurred theirs and they too found donors they hadn’t reached out to before.

As the money is flowing in, many others are waking up and starting to fundraise too. The result is that everyone is raising money for their organizations now! Spark the Rise!

And then a series of tense, staccato updates – I was sitting in Vibha’s guest room, totaly exhausted, but unable to even think of sleeping until midnight:

In a sudden burst from behind, Gourav Jaiswal’s Agrini Samaj Kalyan Samiti is now only 261 rupees behind the Foundation. Redouble your efforts, troops!!!!!

43.4 to 42.9 – we are still ahead, but just barely!!!

90 minutes till showdown! Jack Young, are you watching????

And then it happened. With only an hour to go till the midnight deadline, the #2 group forged ahead of us:

Ok, kids. Our friends at Agrini Samaj Kalyan Samiti are now 20K AHEAD of us!!!! Someone is asleep at the wheel. Let’s rev it up again. No Stopping!!! We’ve come so far, so fast. Let’s see it right the way through.

Donations came slowly. We couldn’t close the gap.

45 minutes to go and we need at least 30K to be donated right now!!!!

But look!

OK!!! All I have to do is speak and it happens!!! Someone just donated 40K!!!! New total: 474,585 to 452,149 with us ahead by 22K.

By now, in that room at Vibha’s in Mumbai, I was at a fever-pitch of excitement. SO was Sumita in her house in Dehradun and Ritesh in our guest room at the CVT. We kept speaking by phone, squealing with nervous tension, venting and refreshing the page again and again.

We’ve got only 20 minutes left, people. One last chance to make a difference. We are going to win this. I can feel it in my bones (and there’s Devika Praveen’s “typical good feeling” too).

Then finally, when we thought we could no longer bear it another second:

12 midnight – all pages have expired and the Latika Roy Foundation is NUMBER ONE!!!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of our dear friends for helping us do it. What a day!!!!!

As it turned out, we had actually raised 9.8 lakhs – all the donations which people sent from abroad but which didn’t clear by the deadline were counted. And all those people who tried to donate but got transaction failure notices (too much traffic on the site???) were also allowed to send their checks in by regular post. And, in another total surprise, Vodafone matched the entire amount, not just the five lakhs we had expected them to limit it to. So our total take from this very short burst of frenzy and amazement was 20 lakhs!!!!!

In real time, it was an incredible experience – cheered on from the sidelines by people from all over the world: former staff, volunteers, longtime friends and donors – everyone who knew and loved us seemed to be right there encouraging, supporting and rejoicing as we inched closer to the goal.

And, believe it or not, that was actually sweeter than the victory.

But today, it HAPPENED.

We’ve been invited to set up a Help Desk in the Women and Children’s section of the Doon Hospital – right outside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

Not just any Help Desk. This one is official.

Every single baby in the NICU will now be discharged with instructions to see our team at Gubbara - at six weeks, three months, six months and one year.

It’s a protocol now. We are part of the plan.

From here on in, parents will be asked to visit our Help Desk before taking their baby home. Our sensitive, caring staff will be there at discharge time to talk with parents at length, allowing them to share their fears and ask their questions, giving them hope and confidence and the reassurance that comes with knowing that there are people out there to support them on this new road they will be walking.

This is momentous, and who knows what will come of it? We set up our first Help Desk at the Doon Hospital over ten years ago and today we have a state-of-the-art assessment centre as a public private partnership with the government and we have put early intervention on the state’s agenda.

This is how it happens. Change is not cataclysmic. It doesn’t happen overnight. Change comes slowly and it requires long, slow, painstaking work. Effort. Faith. Doggedness and determination. One little baby at a time.

And then the change will happen.

We can help these children. We know that in our bones. If we can get to them soon enough, through mothers who have not been terrified into seeking our help but who are asking us to be partners with them on the journey, we know that we can change the course of their lives. We know it!

I visited the NICU this morning. I saw those babies with my own eyes – those tiny little birds, those minute little scraps of humanity, fighting for their lives. I can’t tell you how excited we are to be on this road with them, to be helping them overcome, to be part of this journey.

It is incredible. It is real, fundamental change, by little and by little.

Paula used to do the same thing. She would come by in the afternoon to ask Moy if she had the time to join her for a walk. I would help Moy Moy get into her stroller and the two of them would march off to the Forest Research Institute or the Tea Gardens or just around Vasant Vihar. Paula always made it seem like Moy was doing her the favor.

Lately, however (and you know I hate to complain), Moy doesn’t get many requests for her company.

Maybe people think she’s too busy. (She’s not.)

Maybe people think taking her out is complicated. (It isn’t.)

Maybe people think we’ve got it all under control. (We don’t.)

The fact is: everyone needs a social life. Everyone needs friends who aren’t controlled by their parents. Everyone needs something to look forward to and everyone – EVERYONE! – likes a little fun.

Routine is not fun. Predictable is not fun. The same damn thing, day in, day out, is not fun.

So call Moy Moy up on the phone. Ask her when she’s free. If your house is on the ground floor, I can drop her off and pick her up. If you live on a first floor or above, she’s got an amazing stroller. You can go for a walk together. She’s sitting right here and she is waiting for someone to arrive.

But maybe you don’t live in Dehradun. Don’t worry. There is – I guarantee it – someone else like Moy Moy in your neighbourhood. Maybe right on your street. She may be an elderly woman whose children live too far to visit or a teenager with autism and no friends. He might be an alcoholic who needs company every afternoon to stay sober. Or a young adult with Down Syndrome who just wants to connect with someone his own age.

Look around! Reach out! We are all so shy, so diffident, so worried about protocol and manners. We think we can’t introduce ourselves to strangers; we think we can’t just walk up to a person we don’t know and try to make friends.

But the thing is: we do know these people. We just don’t know that we do. Think it right through. All the way to the end. You know you know somebody with special needs. Remember what they look like. Try and come up with their names. Call. Make a date.

Moy Moy will say yes.

Call. She’s waiting.

So when my sister suddenly got VIP tickets to the Boston Marathon last year, the one and only reason I agreed to go with her was because her husband was running and I thought it would be fun to see him lope in over the finish line. I thought it would be even more fun to watch her watching him.

But the reality was different. My Goodness, what a thrill it was to be there! The excitement was contagious, even for non-sporty me. What were all these people doing? Running down a street! Nothing more than that, yet there we all were cheering them on. Go! Go! Go!!!!!

They had all worked so hard, trained so long. They were ready, they were primed, they had only the finish line in mind.

And suddenly, seeing them, I was swept into another world myself – a world of passion and drive and unbelievable fortitude: you had to see these people. You had to be there to understand the commitment, the josh, the joy they took in the run itself. It was overwhelming and amazing. It was inspiring.

So I’m angry today that terrorists took this moment and tried to sabotage it. I’m angry that they took the finish line of what was for some people a lifetime of devotion and resolve and then tried to squash and pummel it into something ugly and painful and small.

Because it was never that.

But I am also angry at my own country. Because my grief over what happened at the Boston Marathon is complicated and diminished and cheapened by what America has done around the world to people no less devoted, no less determined, no less resolved.

Drone attacks on little children. Explosives set off at weddings. Car bombs in Afghanistan. We think we have reasons, justifications, but in fact, we are no different from the terrorists who set a pressure cooker full of nails and shrapnel near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In the eyes of the parents who lost children, the friends who lost friends, the children who lost parents, what possible difference do our strategies and rationalizations make?

Living outside of America, I don’t have the luxury of mourning the people who were killed and injured in Boston two days back. I was at the Boston Marathon one year ago, at the exact place and the exact time this year’s events took place, but much as I want to, I cannot give in to my desire to weep and to be angry. I am too aware of America’s role in similar tragedies in Afghanistan, Iran and Yemini.

I feel cheated. Honesty compels me to point out the obvious, but my real desire is to lie down on my bed and sob into a pillow. I can’t do that because I know how many children my country has orphaned, how many parents are bereaved because of us, how many hopes we have shattered, how many lives we have destroyed.

I want to sit down and weep over what happened to my country at the Boston Marathon. But I am too busy trying to make sense of what my country is doing to the rest of the world.

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative – a UK based think tank dedicated to reducing poverty – recently published a study on the multi-dimensional aspects of poverty and it’s more important than its bureaucratic description might lead you to believe.

Because two families can have the same income but drastically different standards of living, depending on education or health, just to name two critical factors.

And academics can try to tease out which factor may be more important in reducing poverty overall: does improving access to water make more of a difference or does it make more sense to educate children well?

The “Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index” is a list of just ten very specific questions, grouped in three categories. Education and Health get two questions each while Living Standard gets six.

In Education, the indicators for poverty are that no one in a family has completed more than five years of school and/or that a school-aged child (6-14) is currently not attending school.

In Health, a married woman or a child under three being malnourished or a child under five having died are predispose to poverty and in Living Standards, the predictable lack of electricity or drinking water are side-by-side with “Lives in a kacchaa house” or “Cooks with cow dung or crop husks.”

I was curious to see where disability came into the picture and was surprised (yet not) to find that it appears only obliquely. Since most children with disability do not go to school in India, their existence does figure as a factor in the education question, yet without awareness or analysis; similarly, since many are malnourished, they would be counted as factors in the health questions too.

But this doesn’t even begin to do justice to the tumbling into poverty which disability almost guarantees for all but the most secure families.

My family is secure. In fact, I consider us reasonably well-off. Both Ravi and I have good jobs, we own a house (and it’s pucca), our kids have all attended school for years and years and no one is malnourished.

Yet Moy Moy’s disability consumes more than 2/3 of my salary and most of my free time. Were it not for the medicines, the tubes, the special feeds, the nebulizer, the wheelchairs, the diapers, the extra household help, the frequent illnesses her condition creates and the lack of spare time for me to pursue my writing as a second career, we might be rich.

We are lucky enough to be able to afford all that Moy Moy needs to live a life of comfort and dignity while still maintaining our own health and well-being. For most people, especially in countries like India, that simply isn’t possible.

Poverty is hard on everyone who lives in it, but for people with disability it is much, much worse. Think about toileting when you physically cannot get to a bathroom, no matter how close it is to where you are sitting. Imagine hunger when you cannot feed yourself or if you cannot swallow? Try to picture yourself thirsty, in a hot room, with water in a jug on the table but with arms that don’t have the strength to lift that jug and pour it out.

We are incredibly lucky not to ever have to imagine these scenarios for Moy Moy. But when I am dealing with a tube-feeding crisis (a simple bout of coughing sends her lunch flying all over the kitchen) or a case of constipation, I think about how it would be if – on top of all that we are already coping with – we were also poor.

The Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index should include disability as an indicator. 15% of the world’s population – according to the WHO – live with special needs and are, by definition, predisposed to being poor. They need more resources to achieve the same standards as typical people, yet they have fewer, if any, ways to earn. And they get very little understanding, let alone sympathy from their better-off fellow citizens.  My friend Nicola reminded me of Amartya Sen’s insight: ”It is amazing how smug and inactive most societies are about the prevalence of the unshared burden of disability, from which purely income-based views of poverty … only distract attention.”

The MDPI is not purely income based, and that’s a promising step. But clearly we still have a lot more to do before we can understand the true nature of poverty.

Just think it all the way through. It’s bad if you are poor. But if you are poor and disabled? Do the math.

We all carry them around with us, especially at conferences, and we hope they convey – in a tiny little nutshell – who we are and what we believe in, what we think is important, why we are here and for what reasons we are passing our cards around.

I realized one day that my card wasn’t quite living up to my own expectations. My work, my passion, is people with disability. But my card was only useful if you could see. What would a blind person do with my little scrap of card?

So, with some difficulty (see link above), I got my visiting cards printed in Braille.

The guy who did it ran a home printing press in Bangalore and the process couldn’t have been simpler: send 100 cards, along with 150 rupees cash (100 for the printing; 50 for the courier) to the address given. Ten days later, they are returned: inclusive, accessible, money-where-mouth-is.

But cards run out. You give them away because that’s why you got them in the first place. And when I went to have new ones made- two years ago! – the email address I had no longer responded.

Today – by a lucky chance – a woman named Nidhi wrote to me:

The thing is, this is not our current email id, so i only saw this message today. (Murphy really is our patron god. (The new id is: eshabraille@gmail.com . We had to abandon the old id because of spam)

But the thing is, I like being old. I’m proud of my grey hair and I like being able to speak with authority about some of the great things that have happened in the world in the past fifty years. Martin Luther King was an icon of my childhood. Mother Teresa shaped my life. The women’s movement made  me who I am. I am a witness to so much, simply by virtue of my years on the earth. Each year contained struggles and triumph; each year is precious and adds to my being.

So I don’t want to be seen as younger than I am and I don’t like it when it happens to anyone else, either.

This is a real conversation I had on email yesterday.

I was discussing how to make a large payment with a man I do business with. He needed the payment urgently and I was short of ready cash.

Me:

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) are women selected by their own community to be trained and supported to function in their villages to improve the community’s general health. There is approximately one ASHA per thousand people in the rural areas. In the usual cascade-training approach the government employs, there is another group called ASHA facilitators – these are senior, more experienced women who mentor, guide and counsel individual ASHAs. Each facilitator is responsible for 20 ASHAs, for a population of about 20,000. 

Through the Sight Savers funded Gubbara follow up project, 18 ASHA facilitators from Vikasnagar, Doiwala, Raipur, and Sahaspur blocks of Dehradun district have been chosen after careful deliberation with the state ASHA Resource Centre and the block program managers.

These facilitators are now being intensively trained as master trainers on how to identify kids with special needs. It’s not enough just to be able to identify kids themselves, however! These trainers need to learn how to train effectively and creatively: we want them to get out there and INSPIRE the ASHAs in their posses. We need them to catch the passion, to feel the urgency and to be able to convey it to others.

TALL ORDER!

Two of the challenges of working with ASHAs?

1. Everybody with a message wants them to deliver it.
2. Yet no one really takes them seriously.

Our trainings are a four part series and each session builds on the last. So it’s vital that the same women attend all four trainings. But at our most recent one – the second – many women were there for the first time.

And though we had given plenty of notice, most had been told about the training only a day or two in advance.

I’m not blaming their supervisors. They’re under tremendous pressure. We aren’t the only ones wanting to train their staff. There’s the polio campaign, the safe birth initiative, the immunization team, the breastfeeding promotion, the AIDS prevention effort – it’s endless.

But we really, really need to figure it out. Because ASHAs are like farmers. Both are absolutely essential for the development and survival of the country, but we forget them except when we need them.

And the group we trained this week? According to them, if they aren’t all sent for the next session, “They’re going to have to lathi charge us. We’re all coming back!”

Sam’s time with us was a turn-around point for me as a fund raiser: I had never met anyone so confident about asking people to donate money nor so certain that she was actually doing them a favor by giving them the chance to do so.

She made me see my role differently. I began to take more risks, to lay myself open in ways I wouldn’t have dreamed of pre-Samantha. I didn’t realize it then and I’m only slowly understanding it even now, but she showed me a different way to be in the world. Her down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, practical approach to fund raising made me think – perhaps for the first time – that all our dreams were actually achievable. That if we set targets, we could reach them. That if we needed a crore of rupees, we could come up with a plan to get it.

Samantha sees fundraising as a vital part of social change, an honorable, exciting part – not something to apologize for or to feel awkward, servile or abjectly grateful about. I had thought that’s what I felt too – but seeing Samantha’s wholehearted embrace of the challenge, her eagerness and her passion for promoting our mission, I realized I had been timid and nervous till now.

No longer.

When I read her post this evening (Oh, do please read it! she says such amazing things about us!), I realized that I’ve changed a great deal since meeting her back in 2011. I’m in her camp now. I think it’s a privilege to give. I think people want to contribute to good work and that they are just waiting to be asked. The excitement of imagining a world where children with special needs are included and valued and given the chance they deserve is unparalleled. But it’s meaningless if we aren’t serious about achieving it.

Samantha convinced me to get serious. We are here to change the world for kids with special needs. I am so excited. And so ready. You can join us. Anytime.

It would just be Mom’s bowl at first, but eventually it would come to symbolize much more. They would see it, on visits home in their 20s or 30s or 40s, and suddenly their childhoods would come rushing back: the homemade bread! the chocolate cakes! the cookies, the pies, the muffins, the scones, the quiches – a life spent in a happy family, with a Mom who loved to bake and who loved baking for her children.

I thought this way at the age of 26. I dreamed of the kind of mother I would be; I dreamed of the life I would build for my children, even before they were born.

At the time, we only had Anand and money was tight. I already had my oven, acquired miraculously, but I didn’t have a bowl.

Well, of course, I had a bowl. But it was plastic. Or maybe steel. I don’t recall. It was not the stuff of memories. It would not have had a place in the lives my children would create for themselves.

This one would. It had the heft and the weight of an heirloom. I could see that just looking at it.

It cost Rs 400. I remember it, because, oddly, that was the same amount I had spent on my oven, just a few months earlier. I also remember it because I spent that 400 rupees on a very memorable day – 3rd December, 1985.

3rd December, 1984 was, of course, the day that the city of Bhopal experienced what many consider to be the world’s worst industrial disaster. While estimates vary on the actual death toll, the official number is nearly 4000; the more believable one is 16,000 because that one included people who died over the weeks following the catastrophe . . . slow, painful, agonizing deaths the like of which none of us can imagine. And that doesn’t begin to take into account the thousands who continue to suffer – birth defects, cancers, painful, tortured lives.

But I bought my bowl in 1985. That was a full year after the disaster. No matter. I come from a family which remembers dates. I am married to a man who remembers disasters. 3rd December lives on in our minds.

There was day of remembrance in 1985. Anand was one year old. We were as poor as ever. There was a gathering in honor of the Bhopal victims in a hall in Bengali Market and right across the street – at Triveni – there was a crafts mela.

Anand and I rode in on a bus; Ravi was to join us when he could. He was late. We had some time to spare.  We went to the crafts mela and there I saw The Bowl.

I recognized it immediately as heirloom worthy. This was the one I would be able to pass down to children who didn’t even exist yet (the recipient – eventually – would have to be Cathleen. Anand would never be interested enough  in cooking. Moy Moy would always be cooked for.) I bought it.

When Anand and I met Ravi, he was mortified that we had been shopping pre-memorial.  I have to admit, it felt a bit disrespectful to me as well. And yet, at the same time, it felt right.

I had no plans to make anything crazy in this bowl. I was thinking about bread. I was thinking about an occasional cake, or maybe a salad. Yet Ravi felt bad and I felt guilty. In that uneasy situation, we attended the memorial and then went home. I put Anand to bed, dreaming about the bread I would make the next day. A white-grey bowl. A family treasure.

Now, 28 years later, I have made thousands of loaves of bread in that bowl. It is still with me – not yet handed down to the next generation.

But a few days ago, the unthinkable happened. While Sarita (our household helper) was washing it, a crazy thing: the tap fell off its mooring. It landed squarely on the rim of the bowl and broke its lip in two tiny pieces.

“No big deal!” I told her, as she, aghast, tried to fish the two pieces out of the drain. “Don’t worry about it!”

Somehow I knew, somehow I had always known, that this bowl was not meant to survive unscathed. 28 years on, its day of reckoning had finally arrived.

I krazy-glued it back together, but it’s a rough patchwork job. Pick it up from the wrong angle and it will break again, possibly shattering the entire bowl if the break surprises you and you let it slip from your hands to the hard stone floor. It’s got special needs now – this bowl – and it will need careful handling and a strong awareness of which side it can be picked up from.

I have always looked at this bowl with a mixture of gladness (it’s mine!) and regret (it reminds me of Bhopal). Now I look at my family heirloom with tenderness and regard, more aware than before of fragility and the precarious position we are in, as a planet, as people. I think now of our shared disrespect for life, for the terrible suffering an entire city still struggles with and for the collective responsibility we do not want to acknowledge.

I’m still using my bowl. I can’t put it in a showcase to safeguard it for the next generation – always to be looked at, never to be used. I make bread in it twice a week, cakes for birthdays and anniversaries, cookies for Vijay and Lakshi when the whim strikes. When I wash the bowl, I stroke the rim gently. I don’t scrub too hard. We have to move on. We have to remember.