I am Aditi, a mother, a widow, and lately... someone learning how to breathe again.
Two years ago, a drunk driver took my husband. His name was Raghav. He made the best chai in the mornings and hummed old bhajans while watering the tulsi plant. I was ironing his kurta when the call came. The world turned silent, as if time itself bowed its head and looked away.
At the trial, the man who drove the car—it felt wrong to even call him a man—couldn’t look me in the eyes. His name was Suresh. Young. Barely more than a boy following a foolish night. I remember gripping the edge of my seat so tightly the skin split on my thumbs. I remember wanting his pain to mirror mine.
But it didn’t.
And that made me even angrier.
I carried that rage like a burning coal. At first, it fueled me. I used it to get through the loneliness, the paperwork, the monotonous grief of mornings without Raghav’s song. But slowly, I stopped eating the sweets I once loved. I couldn't feel the softness of rain or the laughter in my daughter’s voice. One day it struck me: I hadn’t smiled in fourteen months.
One evening, I sat beside the Ganga — our sacred river — and whispered Raghav’s favorite verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Do your duty, abandon all attachment to success, and to failure. Such evenness of mind is called yoga” (2.48). I stopped at the word “evenness.” My heart felt anything but even—it was coiled like a snake inside a cage.
Later that week, my daughter Meera, only six, returned from the temple and said, “Amma, I lit a diya for the man who hit Papa.”
I stared at her.
“He must be hurting too,” she said simply, then skipped away.
That night, I broke. Not from grief this time—but from the awful weight of holding my pain too closely. I sat in front of Raghav’s picture and cried harder than I had at his funeral. Not because I missed him—I always would—but because I was ready to stop punishing myself by refusing to forgive.
In the Upanishads it says, “He who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, never turns away from it” (Isha Upanishad 6). Somehow, I'd stopped seeing others as part of the same Self. I’d built walls.
I went to see Suresh. I brought him ladoos. He stiffened when he opened the door, his guilt crashing into the kindness he didn’t expect.
“I forgive you,” I said softly. “Because I want to live again.”
The power in that felt like a quiet sunrise inside me.
In the Ramayana, even Lord Rama—for whom righteousness was everything—softened for others, smiled with compassion despite betrayal. How could I not try?
Forgiveness didn’t make the loss smaller.
It made my soul larger.
And in that space, I could finally hear Raghav’s voice again—soft breeze, humming a bhajan.
I am Aditi, a mother, a widow, and lately... someone learning how to breathe again.
Two years ago, a drunk driver took my husband. His name was Raghav. He made the best chai in the mornings and hummed old bhajans while watering the tulsi plant. I was ironing his kurta when the call came. The world turned silent, as if time itself bowed its head and looked away.
At the trial, the man who drove the car—it felt wrong to even call him a man—couldn’t look me in the eyes. His name was Suresh. Young. Barely more than a boy following a foolish night. I remember gripping the edge of my seat so tightly the skin split on my thumbs. I remember wanting his pain to mirror mine.
But it didn’t.
And that made me even angrier.
I carried that rage like a burning coal. At first, it fueled me. I used it to get through the loneliness, the paperwork, the monotonous grief of mornings without Raghav’s song. But slowly, I stopped eating the sweets I once loved. I couldn't feel the softness of rain or the laughter in my daughter’s voice. One day it struck me: I hadn’t smiled in fourteen months.
One evening, I sat beside the Ganga — our sacred river — and whispered Raghav’s favorite verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Do your duty, abandon all attachment to success, and to failure. Such evenness of mind is called yoga” (2.48). I stopped at the word “evenness.” My heart felt anything but even—it was coiled like a snake inside a cage.
Later that week, my daughter Meera, only six, returned from the temple and said, “Amma, I lit a diya for the man who hit Papa.”
I stared at her.
“He must be hurting too,” she said simply, then skipped away.
That night, I broke. Not from grief this time—but from the awful weight of holding my pain too closely. I sat in front of Raghav’s picture and cried harder than I had at his funeral. Not because I missed him—I always would—but because I was ready to stop punishing myself by refusing to forgive.
In the Upanishads it says, “He who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, never turns away from it” (Isha Upanishad 6). Somehow, I'd stopped seeing others as part of the same Self. I’d built walls.
I went to see Suresh. I brought him ladoos. He stiffened when he opened the door, his guilt crashing into the kindness he didn’t expect.
“I forgive you,” I said softly. “Because I want to live again.”
The power in that felt like a quiet sunrise inside me.
In the Ramayana, even Lord Rama—for whom righteousness was everything—softened for others, smiled with compassion despite betrayal. How could I not try?
Forgiveness didn’t make the loss smaller.
It made my soul larger.
And in that space, I could finally hear Raghav’s voice again—soft breeze, humming a bhajan.
