I know some people are not pleased about me writing my truth.
Some are close to my family, or knew my father, or knew one version of him, and I do understand why this may feel uncomfortable, confusing, hurtful or even disloyal to them. If someone has only ever shown you kindness, humour, charm, generosity or warmth, and then another person comes along and says, “Yes, and this also happened,” the mind does not always know where to put both things at once.
But families are not simple places, are they?
A person can be loved by many and still have caused harm. A house can be full of food, music, guests, laughter and religious songs, and still have fear moving through it after the guests have gone. A daughter can love her father, fear him, resent him, serve him, forgive him and tell the truth about him, all in one lifetime.
I wish we lived on a planet where these conversations were not necessary; where violence, male control, entitlement and the quiet suffering of women had not been normalised for so long that when a female voice finally says something out loud, the voice itself is treated as the problem. But we do not live on that planet yet, and in many South Asian families, as in many families everywhere, staying quiet has been mistaken for peace for generations.
The problem is that not speaking about something does not heal it.
It just teaches the next child that pain must be hidden too.
Before I started writing publicly about my family, I asked for permission. I did not do this lightly. I knew that my story was not only mine, because families are woven things and when one thread is pulled, everyone feels it. My brother thought about it for weeks before answering me. At the time, he was doing much better. He asked me questions about my trauma and then told me I could write whatever I wanted, even about him. A couple of years later, my sister-in-law said the same.
That does not mean it is easy, or that everyone will always feel the same way about it, or that I do not worry each time I write something that may affect people I care about. I do worry. I worry about being misunderstood, about causing pain, about being judged, about the old accusation that I am being dramatic or attention-seeking or ungrateful or whatever other word is used for a woman who refuses to remain quietly convenient.
But I am not writing these things to shame anyone, punish the dead, or make myself look good. I write because I hope it may help someone who needs it. I write for the daughters yet to be born, so they may not have to spend half their lives proving they were worth as much as the sons. I write for the sons of our world too, in the hope that at least one boy, one man, one father, one husband, one brother, may be inspired to see the living Goddess in the women in his own home before he goes looking for Her in a temple.
And I write for the women who still think forgiveness means keeping the truth hidden.
It does not.
When I left my mother’s house that chilly Friday morning in January to be with my father at the care home in North West London, I had no idea that for the next three days I would be wearing clothes other than my monk’s robes, and that there would be no vermillion and sandalwood markings, no tilaka, adorning my forehead.
My white clothes and tilaka had marked my identity as a brahmachari, or as I sometimes call it for people who do not know these things, an entry-level monk — although “entry-level monk” does make it sound like there should be a training badge, a clipboard and someone assessing whether I have folded my robes correctly. I had been initiated into the sacred and ancient tradition of the Vedas by my revered Guru, Om Swami ji, and that outer identity had become, in many ways, the safest and truest home I had ever known.
But for those three days, I was someone else.
Someone who, for decades, I thought I never wanted to be again.
I was his daughter.
In the two years leading up to that day, I had been living in England, serving my parents. My brother was dealing with his mental health challenges and could not help them in the way they needed, while my father was dying slowly and required more and more care. There was no question in my mother’s mind: she wanted to look after him to the best of her ability, right to the end. And because she is my Mother Divine in human form, I knew I would support her every step of the way, no matter what.
No matter what.
I have repeated that phrase because it sounds noble until you ask what the “what” actually was.
While my father was alive, I did not write too much detail about the violence in our home. I did not want people to alienate him or retaliate against him. That is not the kind of person I am, and even now, after everything, I still have no desire to turn anyone into a villain for public entertainment. But if I am going to write about serving him, about being beside him as he died, and about what his death taught me, then I cannot pretend that the story began in a care home with a frail old man and a dutiful daughter.
It began much earlier than that.
One of my earliest memories is from when I was around five years old. I am sitting upright on my bed, frozen in fear, and I can see my mummy’s upper body, arms and head as she tries to crawl from her bedroom towards mine. She is trying to get away from my daddy. He is beating her with one of those old metal carpet-sweeper thingys from the seventies, bringing it high above his head with both hands and slamming it down on her back again and again, while her body buckles under each blow and she drags herself forward on her elbows.
Another time, my dad held my mum by her neck against the downstairs washroom door, shouting at her, before finally punching a dent into the door so hard that it broke through the wood.
These are not easy things to write, and I know they are not easy to read. But they happened.
And because they happened, they shaped us.
Children in homes like that learn the weather of a room before they learn the language for it. We learn footsteps, cupboard doors, the weight of things not being said, the small changes in a voice. We learn when to become invisible and when to step in. We learn how to comfort the parent who should have been comforting us. We learn, without anyone teaching us, that love can live beside fear and that a person can be laughing with guests one minute and terrifying after they leave.
My father was not only one thing. That is what makes the truth difficult for people who prefer their stories tidy. He could be funny, sociable, hardworking, charismatic and generous. He could also be frightening, controlling and violent. There were people who knew him as one man, and there were those of us who lived with another.
Both things are true.
I loved him. I feared him. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to get away from him. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted never to need anything from him again. This is the strange confusion of being a child in a home where the person who is supposed to protect you is also the person you sometimes need protection from.
And still, I served him.
When I was younger, service did not look spiritual. It looked like watching moods, stepping between adults, sitting with my mother when she cried, doing what needed to be done, and trying to make the house a little less dangerous by being alert all the time. Later, it looked like hospital visits, errands, practical help, food, appointments and the ordinary labour that daughters so often do without anyone naming it as labour.
I do not say this to sound saintly.
Please. I am far too fond of biscuits, Netflix and occasional dramatic sighing to be saintly.
I say it because service is one of the threads of my life, and it is important to understand that service does not mean the harm did not matter. Service does not erase truth. Compassion does not require amnesia. A person can care for someone and still say, “What happened was wrong.”
In the final period of my father’s life, after one tearful call from my mother saying it was all too much and she could not cope, I flew from the ashram in the Himalayas back to London. My mother and I moved through those days the way women often move through difficult things: by doing the next task, and then the next, and then the next, because dinner still has to be made, medicines still have to be checked, appointments still have to be attended, and bodies, however difficult their histories, still need washing, feeding, dressing and comfort.
My mother’s devotion to him was extraordinary. I did not always understand it when I was younger; in fact, for a long time I mistook her endurance for weakness, because I had not yet understood that women survive in the ways available to them. My mother had been with him since she was seventeen. He was her husband, the father of her children, the man she had crossed continents with, the man she had suffered beside and served for most of her life. There were things between them that I may never fully understand, because every marriage has rooms even the children cannot enter.
But I do know this: she served him to the end.
And because I loved her, I served him too.
After my mother and I moved in together, I made it my mission to make her life as stress-free and comfortable as possible. I cooked, I cleaned, I helped with practical arrangements, and I supported her so she could spend as much quality time with him at the care home as she wanted. Our mornings began gently, with silence, meditation, sadhana and, when we could manage it, exercise to give us enough mental and physical strength for the emotionally draining days ahead. There was something beautiful in that time too, though it was not easy. My mother and I were learning how to live together, how to breathe, how to care for our bodies, how to keep going.
Near the end, I asked my father the questions I had carried for years.
Why had nothing I did ever been enough?
Why had he treated me and my brother so differently?
Why had he taken so much from me and given so much to him?
From somewhere near the end of his life, he cried out, “Because he’s my son.”
There it was.
The sentence I had known without knowing I knew it.
In that moment, something in me understood what my life had been trying to tell me all along. I had lost before I was born. My mother had too. Not because we were less loving, less loyal, less capable or less worthy, but because an old story had reached into our family before any of us arrived.
Sons mattered. Daughters served. Men commanded. Women endured.
The story was older than my father, older than our house in Edgware, older than the carpet sweeper, the broken door, the blood and the truth pushed out of sight.
But old does not mean sacred.
Conditioning is not truth.
That is one of the things my Guru’s path has taught me. To understand a person’s conditioning is not to excuse their actions; to forgive is not to deny what happened; to serve is not to say the harm was acceptable. Truth and compassion are not enemies. They only become enemies when we use one to avoid the other.
So I served my father, not because he had earned it and not because he apologised. He never did.
When I asked him why he had beaten my mother and me, he would look away or say very little. At times, he claimed not to remember. At other times, his answer was worse. He said it had been his right.
Still, when he was dying, I served him.
I helped dress him. I wheeled him through the care home. I brought him coffee, treats and his favourite foods. I arranged his pillows the way he liked them. I massaged his legs and feet when he was in pain. I put my hands on his head and blessed him when he was afraid. I stood near him in the smoking area, watching so he would not burn himself. I gave him my tablet so he could stream the programmes he loved. I helped my mother honour him to the end.
People may find that difficult to understand. Sometimes I do too.
But love is not always clean. It does not always arrive after justice, and it does not always wait for apology. Sometimes, if we are fortunate and grace is fierce enough, love arrives when the body is too tired to keep defending the wound.
On that final night alone with him, while my mother slept in another room after days of exhaustion, I was given something I had not known I still needed. My father could no longer say anything hurtful. He could no longer perform, argue, command or defend himself. He could only lie there, frightened and frail, breathing his way towards the other side.
And I could only love him.
Not the public man, not the violent man, not the man who had failed to protect us from himself, and not the man who valued his son above his daughter. Just my father. Just a soul leaving a body. Just another frightened being needing tenderness.
That night did not erase my childhood. It did not make the violence holy. It did not mean the little girl on the bed had imagined anything. She was real. Her fear was real. My mother’s suffering was real. My brother’s damage was real too.
But something in me softened around the story, not because the story was acceptable, but because I no longer wanted hatred to be the final inheritance my father left me.
Shortly before midday, as he took his last breaths, I placed my hand on his head.
My mother was there. My brother and sister-in-law arrived. Two of my cousins were there too. A life ended in that room, but not a simple life, and not a simple grief. I did not feel triumph, relief, sorrow or love as separate things. They were all there together, moving through the same body, the same daughter, the same little girl who had once been afraid and the same woman who now stood praying.
Later, my mother and I did what we could do with sincerity and dignity. We honoured his final wishes. We took his ashes to the Himalayas, near the ashram that had become my spiritual home, and with prayers and love, we released him.
I am grateful we could do that.
I am grateful my mother could give him that ending.
I am grateful I could give him that ending too.
But I will not pretend that the ending rewrites the beginning.
That is not forgiveness. That is falsehood.
What my father’s death showed me is that truth and love can sit in the same room, even when the room is uncomfortable. I can say he hurt us and also say I prayed for him. I can say my mother suffered and also say she loved him. I can say he was wrong and still wish him peace. I can say I forgive him and still refuse to make his violence smaller so that other people can feel better.
This is why I write.
Not because I want everyone to agree with me. I already know that will never happen, and that is perfectly alright. Not because I want to be admired, defended or pitied. I have lived enough lives already: law student, mother, model, actress, party girl, broken girl, seeker, monk. I do not need one more costume called “victim” or “heroine.” I am simply a human being trying to tell the truth without closing my heart.
If you are a daughter, please know you were not born less.
If you are a son, please look carefully at the women in your home and ask whether they are loved, heard and respected, or only depended upon.
If you are a mother who has endured more than anyone knows, I bow to the strength it took you to survive, even if your survival did not look the way others think it should have.
If you are someone who has caused harm, there is still time to become honest.
And if you are someone trying to forgive what should never have happened, please do not let anyone tell you that forgiveness requires you to disappear.
You can forgive and still remember. You can love and still speak. You can serve and still say, “This was wrong.” You can honour the dead without burying the truth with them.
That, for me, is the truth my father’s death left behind. Not a neat truth, not a comfortable truth, and certainly not one that fits nicely into the family photo album, but a real one.
And real truth, when held with love, is where healing begins.