B(ha)rat

Dear Avi,
It's been another year since I last wrote. I still don’t know if these letters reach you, but I write anyway.

You were taken from me when I was too young to understand why borders were being drawn. They said you could not walk, just as I cannot now, and I’ve always wondered if we would have wheeled through life together had history been kinder.

She is still the same girl you loved: stubborn, loud, full of heart. Only now she is taller, wiser, dressed in a hundred new colours. Her crown of peace sits steady, and people come from far and wide to see her smile.

I’ve seen her everywhere- Ladakh’s stillness, Kerala’s roaring coasts, Chandigarh’s straight roads, Kohima’s switchbacks, deserts that swallow shadows, and rice fields that mirror the sky. Her bangles in the east shine bright with bridges, markets, and ports. Down south, her roots run deep, where literacy blooms and new ideas grow without losing the old.

She stands taller. Women walk into boardrooms, farmers trade with apps, young people build companies from bedrooms. She has sent rockets to the moon, wired villages to the internet, and lit streets that once slept in darkness. Yet she still dances at harvests, laughs in the rain, and tells stories by the fire.

But shadows remain. Floods, droughts, choking cities, tempers flaring over language and land. She’s still learning unity takes more than borders.

You couldn’t walk with us the last time we crossed. Today, I can wheel across ramps and pavements that once kept people like us out. Not perfect, but freer than the world you knew.

I’ve seen quiet victories- solar panels glittering in Jaisalmer, daughters of fishermen pushing classrooms higher, a first mobile tower in the northeast that felt like magic.

Sometimes, I think of parallels. My first motorised wheelchair came the year Chandrayaan went to the moon. The year I learnt to navigate a market alone, her Paralympians brought home medals. We keep pushing boundaries, she and I.

I don’t know if we’ll ever meet again, Avi, but I hope you can see this Bharat of ours. Scarred, stubborn, surprising. Next year, I want to tell you every ramp is smooth, every girl in school, every voice heard.

Until then, we keep wheeling forward.

Your Kudiye.