Rooted, Still
From My Heart, To Yours
Dear Readers,
There are seasons in a writer’s life when the stories she tells turn inward. When instead of chronicling the world — its crafts, its music, its quiet marvels — she begins, almost unconsciously, to trace the fine cracks within herself.
These past months, my writing has wandered away from looms and craftsmanship and found itself in the soft, fragile terrain of the human heart — my own. I have written not of artisans and their worlds, but of silence, loss, longing, and the small, stubborn hope that survives them.
I owe you an apology for that detour — for not bringing you the cultural stories and fragments of India that Rooted Narratives once brimmed with. But perhaps this, too, is part of our shared narrative: the ebb before the return of the tide. Words, after all, are all I have — the only clay with which I can make sense of both the world outside and the one within.
To those of you who have stayed — reading, commenting, writing back with such kindness and grace — I want to say this, as plainly as I can: thank you. Your words have been like gentle hands steadying me when I have faltered. You have made this space not a publication, but a sanctuary — one built on empathy, on the quiet understanding that stories of the self are not so different from stories of culture; both, in the end, are about what it means to be human.
I am, truly and deeply, grateful.
As I begin to find my way back — to the weavers, the folk songs, the scent of indigo and the pulse of hand-beaten metal — I carry with me the tenderness you’ve offered. Rooted Narratives was always meant to chronicle the stories of our land. Now, it also holds the story of one woman learning to begin again.
With love and warmth,
Shruti Sitara Singh
Editor, Rooted Narratives