A Thousand Hands

Thresholds series no. 4 | Alikhan Street

I TOOK A SMALL STEP back from showing up here on schedule because my life has been too full — steeped in the last drops of this monumental return to my motherland. With my flight from Mumbai to Mexico City via Istanbul in two days, I’d be lying if I said I even know what to write.

A week ago, I was considering cancelling my return because of cartel violence erupting in my little corner of Pacific Mexico. Tonight, I found myself on chat with Expedia trying to confirm whether my route would still pass through Iran. The world feels like it’s rearranging itself around me. I have a sneaking suspicion the gods want me to stay in India.

If I’m honest, I do too.

The last few weeks — aligned with the Year of the Fire Horse — have been nothing short of combustible. In no particular order:

• total upheaval in my partnership

• solo parenting in India

• my first solo journey with Aramara to Kerala

• I cut half my hair off

• my first professional portrait session

• my first formal interview — and the soon-to-be launch of the TLRH podcast

• depositing my book in the Connemara Library in Chennai—Connemara, Ireland, being where my Irish Flaherty ancestors hail from

• turning 44 today :)

  

  

MAMA INDIA ALWAYS BRINGS BIG MEDICINE.

She is the kind of mother who whoops you first and feeds you sweets after — once you’ve finished protesting. And if we’re honest, you probably needed it.

She has broken me down and rebuilt me more times than I can count, but she has always been generous. I think she knows I tend the line. I sit with the ancestors in ways the modern world has forgotten. I feel them near — guiding, correcting, celebrating. I do the work of breaking patterns that were never meant to be inherited. I speak where silence was expected. I choose pride where shame was taught. I write poems to the dead. I archive photographs. I draw the branches of our tree. I pass the stories to my daughter.

Love, in this lineage, is reciprocal.

My poem, “A Thousand Hands,” from my recently published poetry collection

A PILGRIMAGE TO ALIKHAN STREET is a return to origin — the narrow corridor where my family still lives in rooms smaller than some people’s bathrooms. It’s where my grandparents once sat cross-legged on woven mats. Where my grandfather would stand at the threshold, gazing down the passage toward the road. Where my cousins grew into men. Where my grandparents sold their house to pay for my mother’s wedding — a house that would have made them wealthy today instead of patching monsoon leaks that turn their bedroom into a shallow lake each year.

This morning, Alikhan Street welcomed its newest generation.

We lit the lamp at the ancestral altar. We bowed. We spooned sweet, milky payasam into our mouths in remembrance. Aramara followed our gestures as if her body knew them already. Once, back in Mexico, as I dried her after a bath, she looked toward the dim rafters above us and said what sounded unmistakably like, “Grandma.” I thought immediately of Vimla — my mother’s mother — whose quiet insistence seemed to usher us here without hesitation.

And so we came.

Now that this chapter is closing, all I can do is bow in gratitude to the thousand unseen hands that lift me higher than I could ever rise alone.

I am one daughter,
forever caught
in the hunger of return.

The whole tribe standing at the threshold

UPDATES

You may have noticed that The Long Road Home is shifting.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve changed the publication colours, refined the logo, and updated the welcome page image. I’ve been quietly rewriting the About page and subscriber emails too — not just polishing language, but clarifying vision. India has a way of stripping things down to their essence. What remains is truer.

If you’ve been walking this storykeeping path with me for a while, you already know where my heart lives: ancestry, heritage, culture, reclamation. Since my earliest blogging days, I’ve felt called to transmit the wisdom of the places and people I’ve encountered across continents. Over time, that outward gaze turned inward. I began examining my own cultural inheritance — the gifts, the fractures, the patterns that shaped me, and the ones I am determined not to pass on.

We are the living endowment of everything that came before us. And I believe one of our most vital tasks is to heal what we can, honour what deserves reverence, and become authentic within — not in spite of — the cultural forces that formed us.

So the writing here is evolving. It is becoming a clearer pathway for lineage repair — my own, and perhaps yours. Through storytelling, archiving, documenting, remembering, and celebrating, I hope to offer both transmission and invitation. This is not nostalgia. It is active reclamation.

And perhaps the most exciting unfolding: The Long Road Home Podcast is on its way.

I recorded my first interview in the Western Ghats of Kerala with dear friends — an intercultural couple who homestead, steward land, and are raising four wildly beautiful children between languages and worlds. Since then, I’ve been lining up music, mapping future conversations, and learning everything I can about this new medium. With everything else in motion, I can hardly believe I’m adding a podcast to the mix — but the Fire Horse energy is very real, and I seem to be galloping with it. When the ancestors start clearing the path, you don’t walk — you ride.

There is much ahead.

Thank you for being here — for reading, listening, witnessing. This community may still be small, but it is rooted. And roots, as we know, are where the real power lives.

Yamuna x

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