Grounded

Ten blogs. Decades of friendship. Half a century of living.

I did not set out to make the tenth one a celebration. But when I sat down to write, five faces arrived before the first word did — and I understood that everything I have ever built was standing on them.

Let me take you back to 1991.

A Karachi classroom, thick with afternoon heat. Grey kurta, white shalwar, white dupatta — the uniform that dressed us all the same, though not one of us ever was. There were five of them. I have loved them so long their names have softened into something truer; now I call them only by what they are.

Bright. Beautiful. Positive. Sensitive. And the Leader — the force that gathered us, the glue that held us when everything else came loose.

They answered the phone at any hour. Midnight, and someone was already awake, already mine. They brushed my hair when it was a mess and I was a bigger one. They danced to any beat I drummed on a table — no music needed, only my restless hands and their willingness to move with me.

And always, the floor. Pepsi going warm in the glass, chili chips staining our fingers, a plate of samosas between us like an offering. We solved nothing on that floor. We solved everything.

They were the hands that steadied my spine so it would not break. When I began to sink — and I did, more than once — they became my float, my breath, my reason to rise. Not the friends who arrive for the photographs. The ones who wade in for the flood.

And here is the part that still undoes me.

When I married and left, they did not drift the way friends are meant to. They stayed. They became daughters to my parents. Elder sisters to my younger sister. They did not simply love me — they gathered up my whole world and refused, ever, to give it back.

That is what grounded means. Not loyalty to a person. Loyalty to a life.

And now, at this turn of my years, that same grounding wears another face. My husband of more than three decades — the one who accepts me exactly as I am, no performance required. My fiercest critic, never once my enemy. The one who holds my hand through every storm, steadies me when I forget how to stand, and tends my oldest wounds long after the world has looked away. If the five taught me what grounded meant, he is where I have lived it every day since.

People ask where Cheekyda began. They imagine a rooftop — a boy, a Walkman, a wave across the evening air. That was the story.

These five were the soul.

They were, and always will be, my grounded ones. My core. My foundation. My Cheeky Dame Amore.