There are people who shape you by what they say. And then there are people who shape you by what they do, quietly, without announcement, in the small unremarkable moments that turn out to be the ones you carry forever.

Iqbal and Harcharan were the second kind.

My mummy, Iqbal, was a descendant of Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh Guru, who centuries ago spoke with clarity and conviction about the need for women to be educated, to be heard, to be seen as equal. That belief did not stay in history. It lived in her.

She was one of the first women in Ludhiana to leave home and study in Sangrur, living in a hostel at a time when such a thing was simply not done. A young woman, alone, in another city, pursuing her education while the world around her considered it unnecessary, even improper. She did it anyway. She went on to teach at St Bede’s in Shimla, one of the finest institutions of its kind, carrying that same quiet determination into every classroom she entered.

She refused to marry despite the pressure of her times, until she met my daddy and decided for herself. She continued working after marriage, after her first child, until she made her own conscious choice to step back, not because anyone told her to, but because she felt her children needed both parents and that was her decision to make.

She was always a woman who decided things for herself.

Harcharan

And then there was my daddy, Harcharan. He came to India after partition, arriving with nothing except everything that mattered. Values. Intellect. Dignity. He built a long and distinguished career as an IAS officer but that is not how I remember him first. I remember him in the second year of my college, when I sprained my foot just as my examinations began. Every day without fail he came to pick me up. Not because there was nobody else. But because that is who he was. And every night he would sit with me, fill a basin with hot salted water, lower my foot into it gently, and then with complete patience and complete tenderness, wrap the crepe bandage around my ankle.

An officer of the Indian Administrative Service. Wrapping his daughter’s foot. Every night.

Nobody who knew his public life would have been surprised. Because the man I knew at home was the same man he was everywhere. Consistent. Caring. Unconventional in the most quiet and radical way. He cooked. He helped with the children. He supported my mummy’s career without ego or condition. He filled our home with books and music and the belief that a daughter could do anything. Sing. Debate. Play sport. Study. Think. Speak.

He taught me what a good man looks like. And I learned that lesson so completely, so early, that I have never stopped believing such men exist.

Loss, and What Followed

I lost him when I was nineteen.

My world fell apart in the way that only a nineteen year old’s world can. Completely. Without warning. Without any preparation for the size of the absence.

And then my mummy stepped forward.

She did not make a speech. She did not announce her intention to hold everything together. She simply did it. Without saying anything. Without asking for recognition or gratitude. She became, overnight and without visible effort, the rock that the rest of us stood on.

She decided to make sure I completed my education. She decided to make sure I became financially independent. She stood between me and every societal voice that suggested marriage was the more urgent priority. She came and held me through difficult pregnancies. She was there when I needed her in ways I could not always articulate and she understood without my having to.

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I lost her three months before my younger son was born.

There are losses that leave a specific kind of silence. The silence of someone you wanted to show something to and never got the chance. My younger son never met her. She never saw what I would become. And I never got to place my child in her arms and say, look Mummy, look what we did.

The Lineage

But here is what I know now, from a distance that only time creates.

I am her. And I am him.

The books in my home are their books. The singing is their encouragement made permanent. The belief that a woman should be educated, independent, and self determined, that is my mummy Iqbal, living through me. The conviction that a man can be tender, that partnership means showing up with your hands as well as your heart, that is my daddy Harcharan, living through me.

AboutHer, the platform I have spent nine years building, the conversations about women and work and power and possibility, those are not just my ideas. They are the logical extension of two people who lived those ideas decades before anyone called it a movement.

My PhD, which I have just submitted, in Corporate Governance and Gender Diversity, is dedicated to many things. But underneath all of it, it is dedicated to a mother named Iqbal, a descendant of a Guru who believed in her right to learn and to be heard, who lived in a hostel in Sangrur when women simply did not do that, who taught at St Bede’s in Shimla, and who never once stopped moving forward. And to a father named Harcharan, who wrapped his daughter’s foot every night and never once made his wife feel that her ambition was inconvenient.

I used to think I was building something new.

I understand now that I am continuing something they started.

The lineage runs deeper than I once knew. From Guru Amar Das, who centuries ago insisted that women deserved to be heard, through a young woman named Iqbal who lived in a hostel in Sangrur and refused to accept the limits her world placed on her, through a father named Harcharan who stood by a rushing river holding his daughter and filled her world with books and music and boundless belief, to me.

I am the daughter of Iqbal and Harcharan.

And every single day, in everything I do, I am trying to be worthy of that.

Not just about her. It takes all of us.