Happy
Birthday,
Vaish.

The first time your dad held you, you gave him a wet surprise — and the whole room burst out laughing.

He still calls it one of his most cherished memories: the first grandchild in both families, fussed over by every aunt and uncle in the room. It wasn't all easy going, though. A brutal colic in your third month had you in real pain for weeks, "very paavam" , the kind that frightens everyone around a newborn. You got through it quietly, the way you'd get through most things later on, and went straight back to wanting to play.

That kind of care ran in both directions. As a baby in Saudi Arabia you had a cough that only ever came at night, so your dad recorded it on a tape player and made the doctor listen, just to be believed.

And at two and a half, it was you doing the noticing. Your mum was sick and alone at home one day, and you walked over, put a banana in her hands, brought her water, and sat with her until she felt better. "I can't forget that loving gesture," she still says.

Five years old, travelling to cities and being independent.

Trichur to Kochi, then Mumbai, then Jamnagar, then back to Mumbai, then Saudi Arabia. Your dad still calls these his "crazy moves," and somehow you kept pace with every one. At five, he put you on a flight to Kochi by yourself, to stay with your grandparents. "It breaks my conscience now," he says. "Were we proving that a bold child was in the making?" Looking at you now, the answer was always yes.

Through all that moving, you were also a slim, picky eater, curd rice or plain dosa and not much else, which gave your young mum real grief at mealtimes, the kind new mothers get from elders and other mothers watching a little too closely. Decades later it still makes her laugh: some things never moved, even while everything else did.

You said nothing in the interview. Then you walked back in alone and got the admission anyway.

The principal asked you question after question. You wouldn't open your mouth, not even for the chocolate he offered to coax you. He nearly turned you away. Your mum took you outside and asked, gently, if you'd try once more. You agreed, walked back in by yourself, and this time you spoke, beautifully apparently. You got in, with nobody having coached you on a single word in between.

You'd been asking for a sibling for a while. Then Achu arrived.

You were eight, and your dad remembers how you used to leave for school excited just to come home to her again. "I don't think I could ever survive a family outing without her," Achu says now. "She is truly just a ball of joy and the cure to my boredom." Decades on, that's still exactly right.

Mid-term of fifth class, and you moved again.

Walking down the hill to school in Muscat with your friends, your bag weighing more than you did. Your dad still calls one particular night unforgettable and dreadful in equal measure: a drive home through flooded roads in pouring rain, with Achu and your mum in the car. Six months later you packed up again and went back to Qatar. Another adventure, another move, another school gate to walk through like you'd done it a hundred times before.

Eight years in one place after that, the longest stretch you'd ever had, and you loved it. In class 7, or maybe 8, a group of classmates ganged up on you. You didn't run to anyone. You stood your ground and handled it yourself. "That is something I am proud of," your mum says. "You were brave." By class 11, something had shifted: you'd become vocal, talking to everyone with an ease that your mum says only a few people ever really have.

Off to engineering school in Bangalore. You became a mechanic for one summer, more or less by accident.

You built a go-kart in university, for reasons nobody has ever fully explained. You tested pepper spray on a public bus and made the whole carriage cough. You asked your dad to detour to malls just to use the toilet so often that, years later, he still asks "are you still?", already knowing the answer.

Achu would drag you to paint, certain this would finally be the time you'd refuse. You'd grumble, sit down anyway, and produce something that made everyone stop and look. Reluctant to try, brilliant anyway, every single time. It might be one of the most Vaish things about you.

Surprises ran in both directions in your family. Your dad once kept it secret that the three of you already had tickets to Baku, only telling you after you'd landed back from Tbilisi. More than once, you and Achu turned the tables and surprised your mum the second you walked in the door from Bangalore, just to watch her face. Nobody in that family could ever resist a good surprise for long.

The mall toilet stops had a less funny cousin. When your dad couldn't reach you at college, more than once he called the police, or campus security, just to make sure you were alright. You responded, eventually, by changing his ringtone to an ambulance siren, so at least the panic would sound the part. Years later you'd do the exact same thing to Achu, for the exact same reason. It runs in the family now, officially.

One ordinary day you walked your mum into a shoe shop and bought her a pair of shoes she still calls the best she's ever worn. No occasion, no reason, just noticing something and acting on it. It's the same shape as the banana at two and a half, just grown up.

Achu says annoying you is her favourite pastime, refined over nearly thirty years. You'd call it a fair trade for being the ball of joy of every family outing.

You cannot pass a photo without intervening, hers or anyone else's. Airports, wind, freezing weather, none of it stops her. And you never once leave, not really, because it turns out you love the chaos exactly as much as she does.

Your last year in Bangalore, you got your own place, a maid called Lakshmi Bai, and a Zomato Gold membership you fully intended to get your money's worth from.

You roamed that city like you'd roam every city after it, restless in the good way, always somewhere new to be. Lakshmi Bai kept the house running while you experimented in the kitchen, ambitiously and not always successfully. The legendary case: Soya Biryani, cooked in a pressure cooker you forgot to add water to. It came out black. Lakshmi Bai, without a word of judgement as far as anyone remembers, cleaned the whole thing up. It was right after that year that you left for Canberra.

Then a lockdown hit, and you responded by building a community out of nothing.

You'd moved again, this time for a master's at ANU, and a pandemic landed mid-semester. Deepthi puts it best: you "cannot sit still or be confined into a small space." So while half the city stayed inside, you organised events, walks, dinners and meetups, went to libraries and cafes just to be near people, and pulled introverts out of their apartments whether they liked it or not. People felt like they belonged before they even knew your name. It was at a CMA cultural event that Deepthi first met you, introduced as "Meet Vaishnavi, a Tamilian Mallu." Around the same time, Mal became one of your closest friends. A whole community, conjured out of a year when nobody was supposed to leave their apartment, because you refused to let anyone feel alone in it.

Around the same time, outside the same library, Mal was cribbing about a stats unit. You never really stopped talking after that.

It started with a shared complaint about impossibly tough stats questions outside the ANU library, and somehow turned into calling each other nearly every day, a habit that's never really broken even now that she's in Melbourne and you're in Sydney. Lockdown made it closer still: she'd come over and the two of you would somehow spend an entire day together, frozen parathas included, an obsession she still brings up. You sat through episodes of Charmed for her. She once woke you up screaming that you were a snake in the bed. You shook your head, unbothered, and went straight back to sleep.

Lockdown eased, you moved to Sydney, and immediately injured yourself in a way nobody could quite explain.

You stubbed your toe on the bed frame so badly you needed a doctor, who was, in Deepthi's words, "equally surprised on how she managed to injure her toes in a manner that seemed abnormal." Your first job after graduating came soon after, in Chatswood, the first of several roles you'd land the hard way: knocked back, then going again until something stuck.

Deepthi graduated and moved to Sydney too, and not just for the opportunities. "Since Vaish was in Sydney and I had someone I could trust, rely on, and hang out with," she says. On Deepthi's first day, you offered to walk her to the station, and somehow that turned into a shady car park, across The Rocks, under the Harbour Bridge, into a dead end, in the rain, with no cabs anywhere in sight. You got there eventually, the long way, together. She double-checks every route now.

That April you called and asked if she wanted a holiday, just the two of you, her first ever all-girls trip. A week around Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where she watched you walk up to a total stranger and have a friend by the end of the conversation. Two thousand photos taken that week; three or four ever made it anywhere. You introduced her to deep-tissue massage, and she complained about the pain for the rest of the trip, then booked another session anyway.

Then came the hardest year. You didn't let anyone see the full weight of it.

You gave up a nice apartment in Ryde, with no train access, for somewhere closer to people, closer to Parramatta. You kept hosting dinners, events, outings, all while carrying more than almost anyone around you could see. "I came across a different version of Vaish," Deepthi says, "one where she was impatient, sceptical, a little scared and a little withdrawn. But this was also the year I recognised her strength, her persistence, the work she would put in to get to her goal. I admire her."

And then, slowly, things fell into place.

"Vaish was happier than I had ever seen her," Deepthi says. "More at peace. More settled. She'd found her home." Deepthi moved back to India that same year, and even from a different continent, you made sure she stayed looped in on everything that mattered.

Late in 2025, Aishu found you through a Bumble BFF swipe, both of you having somehow missed that the other had already swiped right first. She was in a new country, going through a low phase, badly needing real friends. "I never imagined I would find my best friend here," she says. "But I did." Evening walks, Saravana Bhavan runs, game nights that turned into more talking than actual playing, a Vishu properly celebrated in a new country because you made sure of it — the friendship built itself out of all the small, ordinary things.

Last year, on a family trip to Rajasthan, a waiter looked at the two of you and landed on Chinky and Minky. It stuck immediately.

Thirty years old and a nickname still finds you. This one didn't need decades to become part of the family vocabulary, just one trip and one waiter with a good eye.

And then you became Australian.

A citizenship ceremony, the end of a journey that started with a newborn who gave her father a wet surprise, who was carried through cities she never chose, who flew alone at five, who got knocked back and walked straight back in, more times than anyone could count. Suhas was there. So was Aishu, invited in a phone call she never expected: "The day you called and asked me to be part of one of the most important days of your life made me feel so special. I never expected to be invited, and I'm so grateful I got to celebrate such a huge milestone with you."

Your dad wrote from afar, the same man who once recorded a baby's cough on a tape player just to be believed by a doctor: "Proud of you Ammu, always, for every step, all your way up to being an Australian citizen. Keep up the great work, success will follow." He still remembers being delighted, almost startled, the day you told him you'd chosen your partner: "What a great surprise! May God's grace always keep you shining bright. You still have that innocent loving smile and look since your childhood that keeps us all ignited. Spread that smile and the loving glance always, that brightens everyone around you."

For the first time in your life, the place you call home is one you actually chose. Every move before this one was somebody else's decision. This one was entirely yours.