The man who rooted me didn’t wear medals. He didn’t speak of his battles like legends. He sat quietly, with his spine straight and eyes sharp, a cup of chai in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
My grandfather, my mother’s father had once gone to jail during India’s fight for independence, standing shoulder to shoulder with leaders who would later shape the future of a nation. By the time I came along, the fire of rebellion had simmered into embers, but it still flickered in his presence in the stories he told, the poetry he recited, and the unwavering dignity he carried in every breath. I was a curious child, always listening. Always watching. I would sit with him for hours, drawn not just to his words, but to his pauses, the silence between sentences, where truth often hides.
It was he who gave me my first copy of Reader’s Digest, its pages soft from being passed through generations. He introduced me to Shakespeare, to poetry that danced on the tongue and stories that lingered long after the last word. He saw the way I devoured words and quietly fed me more sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly guiding me not just toward books, but toward becoming a writer, a thinker… a witness.
I grew up in a home that taught girls how to shrink before we were ever taught how to dream. There were rules, rigid and sharp. Be home by six. No sleepovers. No talking to boys. Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t laugh too loudly. Don’t question. Don’t wander.
It wasn’t just cultural, it was constriction. Decisions weren’t ours to make. They came from uncles who spoke in absolutes, from adults who used silence like a weapon, from a household where physical control and emotional compliance were mistaken for discipline and love. I learned early what money could do to people. I learned how anger can live in walls, how love can disappear overnight, and how words, once spoken, never quite return to softness.
And yet within that confinement there was a world that nobody could police: my inner world. My escape was quiet and creative. It came in the form of chess boards and cricket commentary, poetry on lined pages and games played alone. I wandered where my mind was free even if my body was not. I found freedom in thought long before I ever found it in life.
Maybe that’s why, to this day, I prefer the solitude of my own space to the noise of social obligation. The outer world never quite gave me the permission to exist fully, so I built my own sanctuary within.
And then came the departure.
I was twenty-two. Three weeks before I was set to leave India for my Master’s degree in America, the home that raised me turned into a battleground. No one agreed with my decision. No one supported it. Their fears arrived in shouting matches, in withheld blessings, in silences that stretched across rooms like invisible fences.
Except him. My grandfather didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t protest or plead. He simply stood with me wordlessly, but fully. He didn’t have the money to fund my education, but he gave me something far more valuable: his blessing, his belief, and the courage I hadn’t yet learned to name. He looked at me the way he must’ve looked at his comrades decades earlier, as they marched toward jail cells and revolution.
As if to say: Your freedom is worth it. Go.
And I did. With $250 in my pocket and a one-way ticket, I boarded a plane and stepped into my future not because I knew what was waiting, but because I knew what I could no longer tolerate.
I landed in Grand Forks, North Dakota in August of 2002. It was night. Cold. A different kind of cold than I had ever known. Not just in temperature, but in solitude. I stood outside the airport, under unfamiliar stars, with nothing but two bags and the echo of everything I had just left behind. That moment didn’t feel brave, it felt raw.
But looking back now, I see it for what it was: a sacred rebellion.
It was the kind of courage that doesn’t shout. It doesn’t even breathe loudly. It just moves, instinctively, toward the place where the soul says yes.
That courage came from him. Not just in the stories he told me, but in the life he lived.
A life of quiet strength. A life of resilience that didn’t perform itself.
My roots aren’t just inherited. They’re embodied. They were alive in jail cells and tea-stained books, in forbidden daydreams and handwritten poetry. They were planted in me through struggle, through survival, and through the sacred act of choosing myself, again and again.
And yet what we leave behind doesn’t always stay where we left it.
Since that day, I never returned home as it once was.
I became estranged from the very people who raised me.
Distance wasn’t just geographic it became emotional, spiritual, ancestral.
Something broke when I left, and I chose not to return to the version of myself that once fit within those walls.
I grieved that. Still do, sometimes. But I also know: I found home in me.
Not out of rebellion, but because I finally understood what belonging feels like when it doesn’t ask you to shrink.
Now, when I speak of roots, I don’t mean lineage. I mean the unseen things that keep me standing. Courage. Resilience. Depth. Fire. Tenderness.
Even when I’ve been uprooted physically, emotionally, culturally, spiritually these roots find new ground. They replant themselves in the quiet. They grow.
Because they are not just what I came from. They are what I returned to, every time I was lost. I live now not only because of them but – for them. To give strength back to the roots that once held me, and to become the human who will do the same for others around her.
Not everything about our roots takes root when we are uprooted. But the ones that matter, the ones that root for us they weather every storm. They bend, they sway, but they never let go.
They’re the reason I was unmade. And they’re the reason I still behold.
Thank you for staying with the story!
Love,
Jyo.