The Feeling

JUL 31, 2026

Dear Babes,

Everyone else called you Ashoo. I called you Babes for as long as I knew you, and I honestly cannot remember why. There was no origin story I can retrieve, no moment it started. It was simply your name in my mouth for over a decade. That gap is where this letter begins, because I have been trying to write to you for most of the nine years since we lost you, and failing for what I thought was the same reason.

Every time I sat down, the specifics would not come. I could not summon the dates or the exact words, and I would stop, ashamed that my memory was failing someone who deserved a library. The date was the first of December, 2017. I am not sure I have ever let myself sit with it, which may be the only way I have found to keep going near it. You were thirty-four. I had just moved back to India, and we had a plan to meet the next time you came to Mumbai to see your family.

One memory never left. San Diego, on one of the road trips we took out of Stanford, the kind that got us to Tahoe and to every national park within tank range. Eight of us drove down, my brother among them, and ended up at the Torrey Pines Gliderport, supposedly to go paragliding, and then everybody found a reason not to. It was too expensive, some said. The rest of us were in two minds, because to get going you had to run off the edge of a cliff. I was still trying to psych myself into it when I looked over and saw you strapped in and ready, smiling. You were fearless. I jumped that day because you did.

For anyone reading this who never knew you, the facts are absurd on their own. We met in 2004, when you arrived at Stanford for the same master's program I was a year ahead in. You had come from VJTI in Mumbai, where you also grew up. Your favorite professor was Tina Seelig, whose course on creativity and innovation you loved so much that you went on to work in her group as a research assistant. You co-founded TeachAids with your friend Piya Sorcar, and the organization you helped start now teaches in more than eighty countries. You built a career at Deloitte in New York and made senior manager. And you did every bit of it at three and a half feet tall.

You were born with achondroplasia. What that meant day to day, beyond the obvious, is that most people needed two or three meetings with you before they stopped seeing only that and started seeing you. I watched it happen in rooms for years, and I never once saw it make you bitter. I could not understand that at the time. Professor Seelig, who wrote about you in her book, managed in one line what I have failed to do in nine years of drafts. You thought of yourself as “a normal person living an extraordinary life.”

Which brings me to the car. For years you got around on rides from friends and on public transport, and then you decided you were going to drive. You bought pedal extenders so your feet could reach, and you made dozens of calls before a driving school agreed to take you on as a student. Somewhere in the middle of all that, my uncle, the one I have written to here before, put you in touch with a friend of his who drove an adapted car. I found that email years later. You got a car fitted. Then you drove in Manhattan. You refused, at every turn, to accept a life at a discount.

My mother has her own story about you, from an Air India flight from Mumbai to New York that my parents happened to share with you. An air hostess came over and offered to help you with your bag. You turned her down, climbed onto the seat, and put it into the overhead bin yourself. My mother still tells that story, and she still sounds a little stunned when she gets to the end of it.

Everybody who knew you seems to have a story like that one. I have fewer of them than I should. I knew about Professor Seelig's book. You told me about TeachAids more than once. I nodded, and I was proud of you, and I never went deeper. I never made you tell me the whole story or asked what it had actually cost you. You were my friend who happened to do remarkable things, and I let the remarkable things sit in the background, the way you do when you assume there will be time. I have been a coach for the last couple of years now, and most of what I have learned is how to ask a second question, and then a third, and then to sit in the silence long enough for the real answer to arrive. I would talk to you so differently now. That is the part I cannot fix.

The facts miss most of you anyway. You loved people and you loved knowing everything about them, and you were the most cheerfully incorrigible gossip I have known. You told some of the worst jokes I have ever heard, and you deployed them with perfect timing whenever somebody in the room had gone quiet.

You danced, and once I danced with you. At Stanford a friend of ours choreographed a full Ramayana ballet for Diwali, and somehow I agreed to be in it, and was handed one of the parts they reserve for men with two left feet. We performed it to a packed hall. You were extraordinary on that stage. If a song you liked came on in the street, you would break into a move on the spot. And you loved a mirror. For years I have described you as vain, always with affection, until I found what I had written at the time: that you practiced your moves every time you found a mirror. You were not admiring yourself. You were rehearsing. The world had spent your whole life looking at you the wrong way. You stood in front of a mirror, liked what you saw, and got back to work on your turns.

With me you were kind and you were straight, which is rarer together than either is alone. There was a stretch when I was hurting over something and behaving accordingly, and you neither humored me nor mocked me. You told me the truth gently, and more than once, until I could hear it. You also understood when I needed a silent friend, which is a harder thing to know and a rarer thing to offer. You cared about my family and my ambitions, and about the insecurities I did not admit to many people. However long it had been since we last saw each other, the moment I spotted you across a room set off something in me I could never quite name.

So when I got engaged, you were one of the first people I wanted Janvi to meet. In 2012 we were flying back from Spain, where I had just proposed, with a five-hour layover in New York before Boston. I spent it taking her out of the airport to have lunch with you. I am so glad I did not wait for a better occasion. There was never going to be one better than a stolen afternoon in your city.

And your magic worked at every age. In 2007 you came with me to the famous Laheri Family Thanksgiving in Maryland. The Laheris are my aunt and uncle's family, who took me in when I arrived in America at fourteen, and that house is where everything in this country started for me. I took a lot of college friends to that table over the years. You were the only one from Stanford who ever made it. What I remember of that day is you on the floor with my niece Nitya, who was around five, laughing the way children only laugh with people who are entirely present.

None of that ever made it into a draft. I started this letter more times than I can count and abandoned every one, because I did not believe what I was putting down. Every version described a superwoman, and I kept thinking that this was just what grief does, that nobody was actually like that. I know now that I was not really trying to find out. I did not want to go back into those memories and look at them honestly, because I liked how I remembered you, and I was not certain the record would agree with me. So the letter sat unwritten, year after year.

Then Gupchup gave me his last evening in Mumbai on Sunday. You introduced us more than twenty years ago, and in 2007 he spent a stretch in the Bay Area while you were in New York, so a good part of that year was hikes and dinners and one rafting trip, the two of us and no you. After that we lost touch completely. We spoke when you died, and then nothing at all until last month, when he wrote to say he was coming to India. His flight home was at four on Monday morning and he gave me the hours before it. We sat for five, and at least one of them belonged to you. Nothing about it felt like catching up with a stranger, partly because he is one of the few people alive who understands what you were to me. And when I admitted my suspicion that I had invented a superwoman, it was the first time in nine years that I had let anybody check my work. He said the thing I could not find on my own. Ashwini was a feeling, he said. You do not remember a feeling in specifics. You remember how she made you feel.

He was right, and it explained a great deal. It explained why the cliff stayed vivid while everything around it slipped, because the cliff is where the feeling was strongest. It explained why his stories from your engineering college matched mine from Stanford exactly, which means you were like this before I met you and after I last saw you. I had been afraid that going back would cut you down to size. It did the opposite.

He also showed me a letter he had written to you a year after we lost you, on your birthday, titled What Ashwini Knew For Sure. It is an attempt to name the code you lived by, and his answer was that unconditional belief in a person can turn their life around. He would know. You turned his.

But he was only half right about the feeling, and I found that out the next night, when I went back to the group your friends built in the days after we lost you, the one that filled overnight with people whose lives you had touched. I had not opened it since that week.

It is still there, hundreds of messages long, and reading it is like walking into a room where everyone is trying to describe the same woman and nobody can finish the sentence. What lifted something I had been carrying alone is that person after person confessed exactly what I have confessed here. They had suspected how remarkable you were, and caught glimpses of it, and understood the size of you only once you were gone. It was never only me.

My own message is in there too, from the second of December, and I have no memory of writing it. Most of it is about San Diego, so the cliff was already doing its work even then. One line stopped me cold, because I could feel the exact hour it came out of. I had written that my heart was breaking as I slowly changed the tense to past. I had been describing you as though you were still in the world, and correcting myself, sentence by sentence, as I went. But near the end of that message there is something I had genuinely forgotten, and it is the reason this letter exists.

I had told everyone about a conversation the two of us had once, during one of our more drunken evenings, about life and friendship and companionship. You were honest about what a life partner would probably mean for someone like you, and how unlikely you thought it was. And then you told me what you wanted instead. A party. One day a year, all your friends in one place, and there were so many of them, having a kickass time. One day, every year, that was about you.

So I guess my memory had not been random after all. Out of everything, it kept two things. The jump and the party. The moment you made me brave, and the only thing you ever asked anyone for.

And it already has a date. Your birthday was the twenty-ninth of December, and you died twenty-eight days short of it. The one day a year you asked for has been sitting there on the calendar the whole time, waiting.

I have wanted to throw you that party since 2017. Here is the part I have been carrying around for nine years without looking at directly. At Stanford, and for a couple of years after, I was the one who threw the parties. The dinners, the get-togethers, the nights that got completely out of hand. If anybody was ever going to give you one day a year, it was always going to be me. You did not ask for something difficult. You asked for the one thing I was good at.

I have had nine years of reasons. Distance, work, small children, the feeling that a thing like this should be done properly or not at all. Then I read a paragraph in Professor Seelig's book that took every one of them away from me.

Notice something before I even tell you what it says. I know your deepest regret because a professor asked you the question I never thought to ask, wrote your answer down, published it, and I am reading it nine years too late. She asked you once what problems you ran into, and you struggled to name a single one, because you did not see them as problems. When she pressed, the best you could offer was that driving schools would not take you. And when she asked what you regretted, you told her you wished you had taken more risks when you were younger. You thought you had played it safe.

You. Three and a half feet tall, alone on a plane to California, first off the cliff at Torrey Pines, driving yourself around Manhattan. You thought you had played it safe. I have read that page a dozen times since Sunday and I cannot get past it, because if that is what playing it safe looks like, I have no idea what to call nine years of not throwing you a party.

Already, in the days since, I have caught myself saying I should do it properly, that I need the right room and the right list, that next year would be a better year for it. Too expensive. Not today. I recognize that sentence twice over. Eight of us were saying it in different words at the top of that cliff, and I hear it for a living now. People sit across from me every week and say it in their own vocabulary. They will do the thing when the timing is better, or when the children are older. I always know exactly what to say to them. Knowing what to say and being able to say it to yourself turn out to be different skills entirely.

So, I am not going to wait for the right year. On the twenty-ninth of December, I am going to put something together in Mumbai, and whoever can come will come. If it is a handful of us raising a glass to you on your birthday, then that is what it is, and we will do it again the following year. You never asked for a spectacular party. You asked for one day a year that was about you, and that much I can manage.

That is also why I am writing this now, nine years late and a few days after a conversation, instead of waiting until I have found the right words. If I wait, I will lose my nerve again. I have the evidence that I do.

At Torrey Pines you strapped in and went first so that the rest of us would follow. You are not here to do that for me this time, so the running at the edge is mine. I will be slower than you were, and the crowd will be smaller than you deserve, and I am going to do it anyway.

I do not remember why I called you Babes. I remember the feeling, and it arrives every single time I need it. I am going to need it on the twenty-ninth of December.

Nine years ago, I wrote about you for the first time in the past tense, and I felt something break while I was doing it. That evening I am going to put you back in the present for a few hours, in a room in Mumbai, with whoever shows up.

Save the date, Babes. Wear something you can dance in.

Love,

Rumit

---

A note, outside the letter.

Ashwini Doshi died on 1 December 2017. She was thirty-four. She once told me the one thing she really wanted was one day a year with all her friends in one room.

I am doing it this year. On 29 December, her birthday, in Mumbai. It will be simple, and I am not counting heads. If you knew her, or loved her, or worked beside her, you are invited, and so is anyone who would have been.

Write to me at partyforbabes@gmail.com, and I will send you the details as they come together. If you are travelling from further away, this is the notice I can give you.

She wanted all of us to have a kickass time. That much I can manage.

Rumit