The Day I Was Reborn: A Tribute to Nerkar Taai

Some people enter your life not as visitors but as lifelines. One such name, forever etched into the fabric of my existence, is Nerkar Taai. I owe my life to her — not in metaphor, but in the most literal sense. This post is not just a recollection of the past; it is a bow of gratitude to the woman who stepped in when everything else collapsed.

With Nerkar Appa & Taai in 2005

The incident dates back to the early 1980s. I was just a baby — barely a few months old, too small to fill a pair of arms, fragile and helpless. My father had just started his career as a banker in Mumbai. With limited means and even more limited financial planning, he had managed to secure a modest one-room-kitchen home for himself and my mother. While that may sound like a humble yet hopeful beginning, the reality was anything but.

Papa, driven by a sense of duty to his own father in the village, would money-order most of his salary home. What remained was barely enough to keep our own home running. Groceries were a challenge. Medical emergencies? Unthinkable.

And then, the unimaginable happened.

One blurry afternoon — a memory more like a faint shadow in my mind — I fell. A hard fall on my head. I had fainted. Blood loss, panic, the kind of silence that fills a house louder than any scream. Both my parents were home. And yet, no immediate action was taken. There I lay, a baby in critical condition, while my father stood frozen, his eyes speaking what his lips couldn’t — I don’t have the money.

Time became a cruel joke. Seconds dragged like hours, minutes like days. My mother, a homemaker with no resources of her own, looked into his eyes and saw no hope, no plan, no lifeline. In that moment of raw maternal desperation, only one name surfaced in her mind — Nerkar Taai. With no slippers on her feet and me bleeding in her arms, she ran. Ran to Taai’s door. She didn’t knock — she cried. Placed my tiny, bloodied body on the floor and pleaded, “The life of my child is now in your hands, Taai.”

What followed might seem harsh, but it was the spark that reignited hope. One tight slap. Taai slapped my mother — not out of contempt, but out of frustration, anger, urgency. “It’s not the money, it’s the time that matters right now,” she snapped. And without another word, she scooped me up and ran to the hospital.

I was saved.

I was reborn that day, not just by medical intervention but by the sheer will of a woman who chose action over excuse. Nerkar Taai and her husband, late Aapa, were my saviours. Their courage and instinct gave me a second chance at life — one I continue to live with a heart full of gratitude and a mind full of unanswered questions.

Even today, I struggle to reconcile with that moment in my father’s life. Was his hesitation a sign of helplessness or apathy? Is it ever justifiable for a parent to freeze — to let worry about money outweigh the instinct to protect their child? These are questions I may never be able to fully resolve.

But what remains crystal clear is the weight of gratitude I carry for Nerkar Taai. When I visited her in 2005 to express my heartfelt thanks, she responded in her usual understated way:

“I just did the right thing.”