In our house there are eleven people and no doors that truly close. I am the one who holds it together. The meals, the medicines for my husband's parents, the school runs, the endless small needs of a joint family. For twenty years I have been the still centre that everyone else turns around.
So when the flashes started, and the nights when I could not sleep, and the days when I felt I might weep into the daal for no reason, there was nowhere to put any of it. There was no room that was mine. There was no hour that was mine. There was always someone in the kitchen, someone calling my name, someone needing.
A hot flash would rise in me in the middle of cooking for everyone, and I would stand at the stove with sweat running down my back and my heart pounding, and I would simply keep stirring, because eleven people were waiting to eat.
In our family, a woman does not sit down in the afternoon. It is not done. My mother-in-law never did, and her mother never did. To rest is to be seen as lacking. So I did not rest, and I did not speak, and I told myself that whatever this was, it would pass if I just kept going.
It did not pass. It got heavier. And the heaviness started to show as sharpness, in my voice, in my hands, in the way I began to resent the very people I loved.
The one who noticed was my younger sister-in-law. She found me sitting on the back step one evening, which I never do, and she sat down beside me without a word. After a while she said, you are not yourself. And for the first time in months, someone had left a small opening, and I told her.
She did a simple thing. She began taking the kitchen from me for one hour each afternoon so I could lie down in the one empty room, with the fan on, and simply be a body that needed rest and not a woman who was needed. One hour. It changed more than I can explain.
I am learning, slowly and against everything I was taught, that I am allowed to be a person who is going through something. That holding the family together does not mean I have to disappear inside it. There is still nowhere in the house that is fully mine. But there is one hour. And for now, that one hour is where I am putting myself back together.