‘It ends with us’

THEY step into festivals with hearts already bruised, carrying silence instead of joy.

- NIDHARSHANA RAJU

From homes where love was conditional, chaotic or never available, they still learnt the art of holding themselves together, not because they are healed, but because someone else needs them to be. Old wounds almost always resurface during celebrations: laughter feels rehearsed, prayers feel heavy, and memories tend to haunt. Yet they stay. They choose not to unravel. They swallow the ache so the room can feel lighter for someone else. That someone is sometimes their child waiting for reassurance or a younger sibling looking for steadiness, and some other times, it is their own frightened reflection asking not to be abandoned.

So, as the holiday season’s lights grow brighter, these ‘they-s’ tell stories — ones that revolve around boundaries gently held, new traditions carefully built, and festivals redefined. But above all, they speak of learning to steady their emotions before the season arrives, and giving grief the permission it needs to heal themselves, too.

For Arulmozhi V, a domestic abuse survivor who raised her son alone, the nights leading up to the holidays posed the biggest challenge. “I would feel so alone, and I'd cry myself to sleep every night. My pillow was almost always soaking wet. I allowed my-self to cry, hoping that there would be no tears left to shed when my son would wake up because I would have to put up a happy front for him,” she says. Recalling the first holiday season after her violent husband abandoned them, she adds, “The doctors said that since I cried a lot, a nerve in my eye had torn a little and was causing my vision to blur. I had to undergo treatment.” Allowing space for grief also came with the pressure of making ends meet. She admits to the intense stress of figuring out how to afford a Christmas that felt enough, how to make the celebrations appear grand, and how to place a gift in her son’s hands, hoping that material joys might compensate for the dysfunction he was growing up around.