My grandfather is 93 years old as I write this, and I genuinely don’t know how to feel about him anymore. The stories we grew up hearing were the kind you don’t forget. He came from royalty, in a village sense. His parents were landlords. There was land, there was money, there were elephants—the kind of life that sounds almost made up when you say it out loud now. He was living in a hostel in a nearby city when someone called to say his father was unwell. He went back home, and within three or four days, both his parents were gone. Some kind of plague, diarrhea, whatever it was that moved through the village at that time. Just like that, everything his family had built was now his to either keep or walk away from. He walked away.
He could have stayed, claimed the land, lived off what was already there. Instead, he moved to Delhi, got married to a woman several years younger than him, sat for railway examinations, saved whatever he could, and slowly, quietly built an entirely new life from scratch. He made a house. He put four sons through Delhi College of Engineering, one by one. He did all of this on a government salary, through sheer stubbornness and discipline. I have spent years being inspired by that version of him. Then there is the version I have watched for the past two decades.
Somewhere along the way, he stopped being the person who made decisions and became the person decisions are made through. The house runs entirely according to his wife, who manages everything based on the whims of their eldest daughter and one son who never married and never really left. These two or three people run everything. He just signs off on it—or doesn’t even do that. He just exists in the middle of it, nodding. Nobody actually cares for him. That is the honest thing to say, and it took me a while to be able to say it plainly.
He is so lonely that he would rather be used than be alone. So he lets it happen. He lets himself be managed, positioned, pointed in whatever direction serves whoever is pulling the strings that week. My family—my parents, my sister, and I—genuinely wanted good for him. We still do, somewhere underneath the exhaustion of it all. But he bought the narrative they sold him, that we were the problem, that we were not worth his time or resources.
Once, I reached out to him for help with something. He told his wife and daughter about it. They used it against us. Made things harder, not easier. After that, I stopped expecting anything. What gets me is not the politics of it. What gets me is the waste. This man survived losing both his parents within four days. He rebuilt from nothing in a city he had no roots in. He educated four children on discipline alone. He had the spine for all of that. And now he is a pawn. Willing, even. A soldier who stopped asking which side he was fighting for.
I think about what he will feel—if he ever lets himself feel it—when he realizes that half the people around him are just waiting out his last years for whatever comes after. And the other half, the ones who actually cared at some point, have just gone quiet. Not out of cruelty. Out of something more tired than that. I don’t know what to do with a person like that. You can’t save someone who has decided, at 93, that this is just how it is. You can only watch and feel the particular sadness of seeing a genuinely remarkable life end like this. Used up. Surrounded. Alone in every way that matters.
He is going to go one day and meet his parents, maybe. I wonder what he tells them. That he had everything and handed the keys to the wrong people? That he built a legacy and let it be hollowed out while he was still alive to see it? I really don’t know what else to say about him. I just know that I think about him more than I probably should.
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As a mom of three busy boys, I know how chaotic life can get — but I’ve learned that it’s possible to create a beautiful, cozy home even with kids running around. That’s why I started Cultivated Comfort — to share practical tips, simple systems, and a little encouragement for parents like me who want to make their home feel warm, inviting, and effortlessly stylish. Whether it’s managing toy chaos, streamlining everyday routines, or finding little moments of calm, I’m here to help you simplify your space and create a sense of comfort.
But home is just part of the story. I’m also passionate about seeing the world and creating beautiful meals to share with the people I love. Through Cultivated Comfort, I share my journey of balancing motherhood with building a home that feels rich and peaceful — and finding joy in exploring new places and flavors along the way.
