All her names

The same woman answers to more names than anyone counts.

Somewhere she is a maa. Somewhere a daadi or a naani. A maami, a chaachi, a taayi. A behen. Later a bhanji, a naatin, a poti, a granddaughter who will grow into all the names above her.

Each name sounds like love. And each one quietly asks the same thing of her. Want less for yourself. Give more to us.

The aunt who feeds the whole family and eats standing in the kitchen. The grandmother who raises a second set of children. The sister who holds everyone together and is thanked by no one.

Through all of it, the question stays the same as before. Almost no one ever asks her what she wants. They ask what she can give.

And then comes the part that catches in my throat. The woman in her seventies.

She gave fifty years to caring for others. Then, slowly, the others go. The children grow up and move away. A husband passes. The house turns quiet.

More than half of older women here outlive their husbands. Many of them live alone. And for the first time in a lifetime, no one needs anything from her.

You would think this is freedom. At last, time that is only hers. At last, she can want things again.

But here is the cruel twist. The muscle that knows how to want has not been used in fifty years. It has wasted away. She sits in the quiet and cannot remember what she likes.

She was finally free to want something. And she realised, sitting alone, that she had forgotten how.

People who study older widows have found this again and again. When the caring ends, what arrives is not rest. It is an empty kind of loneliness, and the quiet ache of a self that was set aside so long ago that it can no longer be found.

She is not a figure from an old photograph. She is alive right now, in 2026, in the next lane, in the quiet flat one floor up. We pass her every day and call her sweet, and never once think to ask what she used to want.

I have been describing what we can see, if we choose to look. There is one room left. The one we walk past on purpose. I have to open it.

References

• "Old, Frail, and Poor: The Story of India's Elderly Women," Observer Research Foundation (ORF), 2025.
• "Lonely Twilights Among Older Women in India," The India Forum, 2024.
• "Social networks and their impact on access to health care: insights from older widows living alone in Kottayam, South India," Ageing & Society (Cambridge University Press), 2021.