I have been wanting to write about her for years.
Not because her story is dramatic — though it is, in ways that would break most people. But because she is one of those rare human beings whose presence makes you quietly examine yourself. The kind of person who, without meaning to, holds up a mirror.
Her name is Sunita. She worked in my home for six years. She works in other houses in the same apartment building, so we still catch up sometimes. And every time I see her — cheerful, unhurried, arriving with a smile that has no business being there given everything she carries — I think the same thing. When we are drowned in worries, how Sunita wades through her life gives us the courage to overcome it.
Would I have her grace to overcome the problems like she does?
I genuinely do not know. I suspect the answer is no.
What She Carries
Let me tell you what Sunita’s life looks like. Not the version that gets sanitised into inspiration. The actual version.
She was married young; into a match she did not choose. Her husband drinks — not occasionally, not socially, but with the kind of devotion that leaves nothing for anyone else. When he drinks, he turns suspicious and ugly, the way he spews out words no one should have to hear in their own home.
He used to hit her. A police complaint stopped that, at least. Even after all this she put all her efforts and prayers to make him survive suicidal attempts.
She still loves him. I do not fully understand this love — it is not the kind I would be capable of — but I have stopped questioning it. Some things in a person’s heart are simply theirs.
I am sometimes exhausted by my own life — the mental load, the familial worries that stack up when you are not paying attention. On those days I think of Sunita. Not to guilt myself — guilt is not useful — but because thinking of her restores some proportion. And she is still standing. Still smiling. Still thinking of how to help anyone who needs it.
The Cash She Did Not Have
Last night I called her. Times when everything is paid online, there are moments you need physical notes and do not have them. Sunita was who came to my mind immediately because there are times she carries cash and wants it to be credited to her account. Knowing her, I called.
She did not have it. She told me this clearly and without fuss.
But I also know Sunita. So I was not entirely surprised when the cash appeared at my door this morning. She had arranged it somehow — from where, I did not ask. From some corner of her small, carefully managed financial world where she has a savings fund for her daughter’s eventual wedding, a separate account she is trying to keep fair between her son and daughter, a wine she makes and sells, plastic woven baskets she crafts as gifts.
She earns twenty thousand rupees a month doing other people’s housework. The way she manages this money — the savings, the planning, the fairness, the generosity that still finds room to give even when there is barely enough — puts me to think in ways I sit with quietly.
What She Does Not Buy
Not once. Not a single thing she mentioned wanting and then got. Anything donated to her — clothes, household items, things we were clearing out — she would sort through carefully, take what was needed, and distribute the rest among her neighbours. Nothing wasted. Nothing hoarded. Everything moving.
She makes wine. She makes baskets. She finds ways to generate something from nothing, then gives most of it away. I have always made a point to buy her wine. Not out of obligation — because it is genuinely good, and because I know what it took to make it.
She does not buy things for herself. This is not a figure of speech or an exaggeration. I mean it literally. In six years, I cannot recall a single time she mentioned something she wanted for herself and went and got it. Everything she earns, everything she saves, everything she makes — it flows outward. Toward her children. Toward her husband. Toward the neighbours. Toward whoever called the night before for help.
What She Said When I Was Struggling
Sunita was with us during COVID. She saw the twins when they were small and the days were long and the emotional weight of that period — the isolation, the uncertainty, the exhaustion of managing everything inside four walls with no help and no end in sight — was something I could not always hide.
She would look at me on the hard days with understanding that comes from someone who has seen far harder and survived it.
God is watching, she would say. He will help. It will not go unseen.
I am not always sure what I believe about God. But when Sunita says it — with that quiet certainty that comes not from theory but from evidence, from a life in which she has watched God show up in the small moments when there was nothing else — I believe her. The words land differently when they come from someone whose faith has actually been tested. Not faith as comfort. Faith as the thing you hold when everything else has been taken.
Not once has she ever blamed God. This is the part I find most remarkable. With all the familial worries, a body that works without rest, a life that has given her more difficulty than ease — she has never once, to my knowledge, looked up and asked “why me”. She looks up and says thank you for getting me through.
I do not have that. I aspire to it. I am not there.
The Mirror She Holds
House Maids are our next best friends — I say this without any condescension, because I mean it as the highest acknowledgement. They see us in our homes, in our unguarded moments, in the daily reality that we present to nobody else. They understand things about our lives that our closest friends do not, because they are present for the texture of it — the mornings before we are ready, the evenings when we are undone, the ordinary days that make up most of a life.
Sunita saw my struggle. She saw it without judgment and with the kind of practical warmth that asks nothing in return. She showed up every day with a smile that I used to find baffling — how, I would think, does she manage that — and slowly I understood that the smile was not in spite of her life but somehow grown from within it. A decision, made daily, to meet the day as it was rather than as it should have been.
She is not educated. This fact pains her in a way she does not fully articulate but that shows in everything she has done for her children. She wanted them to have what she did not. She has worked and saved and sacrificed to give them an education. I pray — genuinely, with feeling — that they understand what that cost her. That they take care of her the way she took care of everyone else, without being asked, without calculating what was returned.
She deserves that. She deserves more than that.
What I Learnt
I have more than Sunita in every measurable way. More education. More stability. More options. More of the things the world calls advantages.
And yet there are things she has that I am still working toward.
The grace to arrive smiling at a day that has not earned it. The faith that holds without needing proof. The generosity that gives even when the hand is nearly empty. The love that stays loyal to people who have not always deserved it. The ability to find happiness in small achievements — a batch of wine that turned out well, a basket finished, a family member who said something kind — without needing the happiness to be large.
I think of her whenever I am overwhelmed. Not to compare suffering — that is never useful — but because she reminds me that the human capacity to endure, to remain kind, to keep going with dignity, is far greater than I tend to assume on my hardest days.
She is one of the most remarkable people I know.
I have been wanting to write about her for years. I had told her once when we shared our worries that I would love to write an autobiography for her. I may someday but for now this is a small glimpse.
I hope she knows — somehow, in whatever way these things travel — that she is seen. Properly seen. Not as a function or a role or a category.
As herself. As Sunita.
To the people in our lives who carry more than we know and smile anyway — this one is for you.