‘It Ends With Me’: From Rural Rajasthan to Urban Delhi, 5 Moms Breaking Generational Cycles

Every year, on the second Sunday of May, we celebrate mothers. We thank them for their sacrifices, patience and love. 

But there is a particular kind of mother we rarely stop to honour — the one who looked at the life she was handed, the wounds she was raised with, and made a radical decision: “my children will not carry this.”

She decides that her children will not inherit poverty, silence, or the belief that a woman’s worth is decided by the family she serves or the suffering she endures.

This Mother’s Day, we look at five women across India who did exactly that — each in a different place, each carrying a different kind of inherited weight, and each finding her own way to courageously put it down and leave it behind.

She stopped at Class 5. Her daughters won’t

Nijara Devi was married at fifteen or sixteen, and her own schooling stopped at Class 5 because the next school was too far. She has six children, and two of her daughters are currently in Classes 9 and 12.

For the last seven months, she has been coming every day to a training centre in Chundi village in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer district, run by an initiative called Thar Ki Udaan. 

She fits it in after the household work is done, and she stitches dresses, earning Rs 250 per piece, up from Rs 200 when she first began.

“I use it for my children’s copies, pens and household items,” she says.

The sentence is quiet, but what it contains is not. A woman who stopped studying in primary school is spending her own earnings — money she made with her own hands — to keep her daughters in secondary school. 

In the Thar, where women’s lives have for centuries been shaped by purdah and early marriage and the particular invisibility of being a woman in a desert where the nearest school is often farther than a girl is permitted to walk, this is not a small act. 

She did not have the education she is now making sure her daughters receive, and she is building it for them, one school fee at a time. 

“I want to educate my daughters so they can do something in their future. As long as I am there, they will always have support to achieve their dreams,” she says.

She left so her children wouldn’t have to learn to survive the way she did.

Twenty-nine years ago, Nirmala was sitting on the floor of her small hut, consoling her daughter of four years and her six-month-old infant son. Her mother-in-law told her through tears to run — that her husband was losing his senses, that he might sell their daughter for liquor money. 

When he threw away the baby’s milk and hit their young daughter, Nirmala made her decision. She picked up her children and left.

She had nowhere to go and no qualifications, so she worked 18 hours a day — at houses, at weddings, at construction sites and godowns — with her young children in tow because she had nowhere to leave them. 

Slowly, she earned enough to rent a small room, and then enough to build something more stable. 

What she was building was not just a home but a different kind of childhood for the two children beside her — one that was not defined by the violence and fear she herself had grown up watching and then lived inside.

Her daughter now lives in Gujarat with her own family. Together, they are saving for the next generation’s education. 

Nirmala did not give her children wealth or ease from the beginning, but she gave them something that took more courage to provide: the knowledge that it is possible to leave, and that love does not have to look like endurance.

From survivor to shield

Roshni Perween was fourteen when she was married to a man three times her age in Bihar, and at fifteen she was already a mother. The years that followed held abuse, abandonment, and the long grinding work of survival. 

But somewhere in the rubble of that experience, she decided that the cycle would stop with her — and then she went further and decided it would stop for others too.

Today, Roshni has prevented over 60 child marriages in her community. She goes door to door, sits with families, and speaks in the language of lived experience, because she knows every argument a parent makes and she has felt every one of them, and she takes each apart with patience and precision. 

In 2023, she became the first Indian youth leader honoured at the United Nations Young Activists Summit in Geneva.

What stays with you about Roshni is not the award. It is the image of a woman who was handed one of the worst possible beginnings and turned it, deliberately, into protection for someone else’s daughter — not after she had fully healed, but while she was still in the middle of healing.

Abandoned at 21, she built something her child could be proud of

When Yangmila Zimik became a single mother at 21 in Ukhrul, Manipur, after being abandoned by her partner and denied alimony, she had no financial support, limited acceptance from her community, and a child to raise entirely on her own.

She started with Rs 500 and a tin of wild fruits — roselle, gooseberries, galho leaves — foraged from the forest her community had always known. She made pickles and candies and sold them locally. 

That small beginning grew into Shirin Products, an enterprise that now sells across India from the Northeast to Mumbai and Delhi, with monthly sales crossing Rs 1 lakh. She did not inherit capital or connections. 

She inherited the knowledge of what the land gives, and she turned it into a livelihood that no one could take from her or her child.

What Yangmila gave her child was not a conventional upbringing, but it was an honest one — built on the proof that a woman alone can build something, that abandonment does not have to be the end of a story, and that the resources available to you, however small, are always enough to begin.

She walked and never looked back

In 1995, Smita Bharti walked out of an abusive marriage in Delhi holding the hands of her two children, with no plan and no safety net. She had been told, as women of her generation were told, that marriage was the destination and endurance was the virtue. She chose to believe neither.

In the years that followed, she returned to the thing that had always steadied her — theatre — and began using it as a tool not just for her own healing but for the healing of others. 

Today, as Executive Director of Sakshi NGO, she works with women in prisons, survivors of domestic violence, adolescents in difficult circumstances, and communities that have long been shaped by the silence she once lived inside. 

She has written and directed over 20 plays, and she has made it her life’s work to give people — especially young people — the language to name what has been done to them and the courage to refuse to let it be done again.

What Smita understood, from the inside out, is that the patterns that hurt us do not die on their own. 

They have to be interrupted, deliberately and repeatedly, by someone willing to be the one who stops. She became that person for her children. Then she became it for thousands of others.

The gift that outlasts everything

These five women live in different parts of India and carry different histories. Nijara stitches in a desert village in Rajasthan. Nirmala built a life in a city she fled to. Roshni knocks on doors in Bihar. Yangmila sells from the forest knowledge her community has always carried. Smita uses theatre in Delhi to help others name what happened to them. 

What connects them is not geography or circumstance or the particular shape of what they endured. What connects them is the decision each made, quietly and without applause, to not pass the wound on.

It ends with me, they say. And with that, something new begins.