For Sana

For Sana Today, I received a sweet message from my cousin. He spoke about how much he appreciated my blogs and praised the writer behind them. The writer he admired wasn’t me — it was Sana. I smiled while reading it, holding both gratitude and ache at the same time. This trip to Mumbai has come wrapped in contradictions. There is joy in seeing family, in familiar faces and shared laughter. And yet, there is sadness stitched into everything. Too many memories of Sana live here. Every street, every shop, every routine feels like walking through Colaba again — except this time, she isn’t beside me. There is an unassuming ache that follows me everywhere. A quiet loneliness. I can’t do the things I once did when Sana was alive. Even the simplest moments feel altered, as though the world has shifted slightly off its axis. I feel disconnected from many people here. Not out of judgment, but observation. They are evasive when it comes to Sana. They don’t ask about her. They don’t ask how I am. Maybe they are scared — scared of reopening wounds, scared of saying the wrong thing, scared of my pain. But Sana was my reality. Speaking her name doesn’t break me. Silence does. The world moves on, they say. And maybe it does. But the immediate family stays exactly where it is — suspended in the moment everything changed. My mother was once my biggest support. Today, because of her age and early-stage dementia, she doesn’t know about Sana. Sometimes I wish I could put my head in her lap and cry the way I once did. But that comfort, too, is no longer available to me. So I hold it all inside. This feeling — this quiet accumulation of love, loss, and longing — is what inspired my LinkedIn post: Home is where your children are, not where you were brought up. Maybe, silently, I was hoping for acknowledgment. Not sympathy. Just recognition of the pain that travels with me. That acknowledgment didn’t come on this trip. And that’s okay. Grief doesn’t always need an audience. Sometimes it just needs a place to rest. This blog is that place. For Sana.