Shalini Kaul has spent a lifetime caring for a mother who may never acknowledge the cost. From a divided household in Srinagar to displacement in Jammu, from a marriage shaped by duty to decades of caregiving through dementia — this is the story of a daughter who inherited not wealth or property, but responsibility. And who stayed when everyone else had a reason to walk away.

20min reading
In Focus
Editor's Desk

The rain made the heat bearable but not the mosquitoes. I tried sprays and roll-ons; finally I lit the tortoise green coil and watched its smoke curl towards the fan. In the morning only a curved grey line of ash remained, a shape that stayed whole until it did not. Three family photographs, taken across decades, registered a similar disappearance: carved latticework and lawns, then an emptied house and finally only steps where a home once stood. The coil’s slow spiral seemed the right image for what time does to memory and to the land left behind.

13min reading

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