The Girl Who Built Herself

Coimbatore hums differently in the early morning.
The mills start first — that low, steady rhythm that has lived in this city’s bones for generations. Then the tea shops, then the temple bells, then the autorickshaws, then the schoolchildren in neat uniforms walking in twos and threes through streets that smell of eucalyptus and diesel and fresh idli.
I grew up inside that hum.
It held me on the days nothing else did.

I was in 5th standard when Appa left.
Ten years old. Still small enough that my school bag looked too big for my body. Still young enough to believe that fathers were permanent things — like temple towers, like the Nilgiris on the horizon, like the smell of Amma’s cooking filling every corner of home.
He left for another family.
Not dramatically. Not with a storm. Just a slow disappearance, and then one still evening, Amma sitting across from me with folded hands and a very steady voice telling me something that rearranged the entire furniture of my world.
I remember nodding. I remember the ceiling fan. I remember thinking — I should cry — and finding nothing but a strange, hollow quiet inside.
I didn’t cry that night.
I don’t remember when I finally did. Sometime much later. Alone. The way girls like me learn to do things — quietly, privately, without making it anyone else’s problem.

The colony noticed quickly. They always do.
Aunties spoke in hushed voices. Neighbours looked at Amma with that soft, pitying expression that sits somewhere between sympathy and satisfaction. Girls at school became careful around me in that uncomfortable way — like I was a cracked vessel they weren’t sure how to hold.
I decided very early that I refused to be something people handled carefully.
So I ran.
Literally.
The school had a sports day in 6th standard and something in me just moved — toward the field, toward the whistle, toward the feeling of the ground under my feet and the wind against my face and my lungs burning clean and honest. Hockey found me the way purpose sometimes does — not with announcement, but with quiet certainty.
This. This is yours.

Amma never asked me to be strong.
That’s the thing about women who carry everything — they don’t demand that their children carry it too. She just woke up before the sun, made sure my uniform was pressed, made sure the fees were paid, made sure there was a hot meal before I left for school even on the mornings I later understood she hadn’t eaten herself.
She never said a bad word about him.
Not once.
So I took all the words she swallowed and I put them into my hockey stick. Into my studies. Into every exam I walked into with something to prove — not to him, never to him — but to the version of myself that deserved better than abandonment.
85 percent and above, every single time.
Not because it came easy. Because I sat under the single light in our small house long after Amma slept and I worked. Because I learned that excellence was one thing nobody could take from you. Not absence. Not poverty. Not the quiet shame of being a girl from a broken home in a city that notices everything.
My marks were mine. Fully, completely mine.

The hockey field became my other home.
There is something about a team sport that repairs things in you without announcing it. Eleven girls moving together, reading each other without words, protecting each other, fighting for each other. I had sisters on that field I hadn’t been born with.
I played for my school. Then for my district. Then for the state.
The first time I stood on a state level field in my Tamil Nadu jersey, stick in hand, the anthem playing, I thought of that ten year old girl with the oversized school bag and I wanted to reach back through time and hold her hand and tell her —
Look. Look where we are. Look what we built from the rubble.
The medals came. The trophies came. Coaches spoke my name with respect. My photograph went up on the school notice board.
Amma cried at every single award ceremony.
I pretended not to notice so she could cry freely.

But success on the outside doesn’t always quiet the inside.
There were nights — even through the wins, even through the marks, even through the applause — when I lay in the dark and asked the question every abandoned child eventually asks.
Was I not enough to make him stay?
It is an unfair question. I know that now. A man who leaves his child for another life is carrying his own brokenness that has nothing to do with the child’s worth. His leaving was never a verdict on me.
But at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen — I didn’t know that yet.
So I ran harder. Studied longer. Smiled bigger. Became the girl who needed nothing from anyone because needing felt like a door that led to the same place every time.
Loss.
It took me years to understand that my hunger — for achievement, for recognition, for more — was not ambition alone. It was a girl filling a gap that no medal could fully reach.
That understanding didn’t break me.
It freed me.

Coimbatore gave me something I didn’t expect.
This city is not glamorous. It doesn’t announce itself. But underneath its quiet, industrial surface runs a current of people who build things. Textile mill owners who started with nothing. Women who turned home recipes into businesses. Young people who looked at empty hands and decided to fill them.
I watched them. I learned from the city itself.
By the time I was twenty I knew — I was not made to work inside someone else’s dream. I was made to build my own.
The idea for my brand didn’t come from inspiration. It came from necessity, from observation, from all those years of noticing what was missing and believing I could be the one to fill it.
I am twenty-one now.
I am just beginning.
The road ahead is uncertain and that used to scare me. Now it feels familiar. Uncertainty was my first home. I grew up navigating it every single day — in a house where one parent became everything, where money was careful, where the future was not guaranteed but we built it anyway, morning by morning, meal by meal, mark by mark.
I know how to build in hard conditions.
He taught me that. Without meaning to. Without being there.

I don’t hate him.
I visited that feeling many times over the years. Picked it up, turned it over, set it down. Hatred is too heavy to carry while building something. And I have things to build now.
I heard through someone that he sometimes asks about me. Casual, distant, the way you ask about weather in a city you no longer live in.
I don’t send word back.
Not out of bitterness.
But because the story of who I became is not his to read. He didn’t stay for the struggle. He doesn’t get a front row seat to the victory.
The front row belongs to Amma.
Who pressed my uniform every single morning.
Who sat in plastic chairs at every prize ceremony.
Who worked without complaint so I could dream without limit.
Who never once let me feel like half a family was not enough.
She is the architecture of everything I am.

My brand is just beginning.
One day it will be something. I believe that the way I believed I could score on a state level field. Not arrogance. Just a girl who has already survived the hardest thing — growing up feeling like she wasn’t chosen — and came out the other side still standing.
Still soft enough to feel. Still strong enough to build.
I never try to remember him.
I never forget about him.
But the woman I am becoming —
She is entirely, completely, mine.​​​