“Earlier, my life was primarily managing the house and raising the children. My husband is an auto driver. We managed, but it was tight. There was not much room for anything extra,” says Nandini, a production staff member in Bengaluru, recalling a time when every day felt like stretching limited means across endless responsibilities, where even small changes in routine had to be properly thought out.

There are homes where mornings begin before the day even feels like it has started. Where the first thoughts are not about breakfast, but about time, money, and what can be managed within both. 

In such homes, cooking is not a shared experience. It becomes something squeezed between work, fatigue, and responsibilities that do not pause. Over time, meals begin to happen separately, or not together at all, and what once felt like the natural centre of family life slowly fades into the background without anyone consciously deciding to let it go.

In one such home in Bengaluru, Nandini remembers years where stability meant getting through the day without falling behind. Work outside the home was not something she could easily step into, not due to lack of ability, but because the structure of life itself left very little room for anything beyond what was already being managed. It was a life built around duty, where personal growth felt like a distant thought.

It is within these ordinary realities that a different story slowly started to form elsewhere in the same city, where Saainirmala Raghunathan Perumall began noticing that what looked like small household struggles were, in fact, part of a much larger shift in how families were beginning to live, eat, and relate to one another.

When home stopped feeling like a shared table

Saainirmala, now 58, was born and brought up in Chennai and trained as a mechanical engineer at a time when very few women entered technical fields. Her early professional life took her from engineering into the automobile sector after she moved to Mysore in 1991, where she worked for several years in automotive roles before shifting to Bengaluru in 1996 as India’s IT industry began to expand rapidly.

“I moved from machines to software, but I carried the same logical way of thinking with me,” she says.

In Bengaluru, she worked with companies such as Sonata Software and later Yahoo India, building a long career in software testing and eventually becoming a group manager leading teams. It was a fast-paced corporate life, guided by deadlines, systems, and precision.

“I was always solving problems, and over the years, that became my comfort zone,” she tells The Better India. In 2007, she stepped away from corporate work, initially thinking it would be temporary.

“I thought I would go back, but life does not always return you to where you started,” she says.

‘I........

© The Better India