When she first walked in, she was carrying a child — and she took the front bench anyway.
When she first walked into a DHRUV session, she was pregnant, and Pune was deep in the heat of summer. Most would have taken the season off. She took the front bench instead — for DHRUV and for Garima, every class, without exception.
Attendance is an ordinary word until you watch someone earn it. Carrying a child, in forty-degree afternoons, she was there for the fundamentals of DHRUV and the skills of Garima — taking notes, asking questions, practising what she learned. Determination like that is rare. What surrounded it was rarer still.
A little support from everyone is all it takes for a person to grow into the fullest version of themselves.
When she needed rest, her colleagues stepped in. They arranged the permissions she needed, covered the sessions she couldn’t attend, and later sat with her to teach back everything she’d missed. No one let her slip behind. Growth, here, was a team sport.
Every two hours, her five-year-old son walked in with a one-litre bottle of water — making sure his mother stayed hydrated through the summer heat. He didn’t know the word for it, but he understood exactly what care means.
Today she stands where her trainers once stood. She is a trainer herself now — guiding other women through the very programs that lifted her, and proving, class after class, what becomes possible when a community decides to hold someone up.
Her story isn’t about extraordinary strength in one person. It’s about ordinary kindness from many — a permission arranged, a class covered, a bottle of water carried up the stairs — adding up to a transformation.