cares

My grandmother's letters arrived yellowed and worn, her Tamil script dancing across thin airmail paper. She wrote about monsoons flooding the streets of Madurai, about selling jasmine flowers at dawn. I was building my career abroad, earning enough to matter, yet her words made me ache. She never asked for money, only stories of my life. Last summer, I returned home, sat beside her in our ancestral kitchen, and she taught me to make sambar the way her mother had. Her hands guided mine through each spice, each whispered prayer. I understood then that the greatest wealth isn't what we earn, but what we preserve and pass forward to those we love.