Throughout my life, I have always been very lucky to have strong female influences. Beginning with my amma and my grandmothers, but I never realized just how many amazing women I had in my life until this morning. Nothing in particular happened, but it was a nice, quiet morning which allowed me the time to sit and reminisce. If I were to write about my amma or my two grandmothers in detail it would go on forever.

The list is bountiful, powerful, and everything in between, and when talking about people who have the maternal role in check these three ladies are truly the ones I place emphasis on, but I’m also very blessed to have my various aunts -- ladies who are not quite like mothers to me, but fill every gap in between.

I just spent a month with my mother’s twin sister, my uchamma, who I had not seen in a very long time, and while I was there I came to love her like I had never loved her before.

Sometimes, you need people who wake up and make you coffee (with a little extra sugar, sweet just like her), buy you loads of butter (seriously, the butter in England is no joke), and are there to send you paragraph texts full of love on the day you leave for the airport, and my mom’s twin fulfilled all those roles like nobody else. She’s so full of life, and so so full of love, and I just can’t seem to get enough of it.

I like to think of life as a garden, and people as the flowers, so since my uchamma is a sunflower, my Ammu Apachi (dad’s cousin), would be a daisy.She’s my avant-garde soldier aunt, the fearless one, the one who’s shoulder I cry on the most, and I love her for it.

My life is quite frilly, and a lot of the people I admire are just as, “in the clouds,” as I am, and sometimes I need that anchor back to reality, and she is always going to be there with her many anecdotes and much-needed advice. Not to mention, she’s actually the greatest dance/song/tattoo partner-in-crime in the whole world. I’m very proud of her for facing her fears and getting tatted up twice on the same day. My idol.

And since we’re talking about idols, I must mention my apachi (this means aunt by the way), the alpha apachi. Dr. Devi, the other English professor in my life, and someone who I’m compared to a lot. Those are large shoes to fill -- on my part-- but my Apachi is someone whom I admire for her many talents.

Talk about a woman who can make baskets out of raffia, jewelry from the most beautiful beads, and do this all in her barely-there off time. She’s amazing, but the one thing I am constantly in awe of is how forward-thinking my Apachi is. I’m not sure why, but I always thought of my Apachi as a delphinium.

Then there is my cactus that gets nourished with Moscato instead of water, my Kunji Apachi. She’s small, all over the place, and just all around such a fun person to be with. Fun fact: she lived with me for a while, and those were some of the best years of my life, and I’m constantly nostalgic about it.

Kunji apachi is the embodiment of perseverance, and I can’t do her justice through a short paragraph, but let’s just say if I were skydiving off a plane and the 8x5 glossies of my life started appearing in front of my eyes, most of them would contain snapshots of the stupid things we have done together.

Life with her is adventurous and fast-paced, and somehow we managed to get into dumb fights about breakfast, but if she had a superpower it would be her forgiving nature. It takes a strong person to forgive so wholeheartedly and in that sense, I have never met anyone stronger than her.

There are so many people I could keep on listing, but when one is sitting in a cafe, wondering what she should write about these are the first people that came to mind, and so this one is for them, my aunts, some of the greatest people I know.