From Numbers to Heartbeats: Kashika Maggu's Journey into Motherhood
A Tale from Parents | Janitri Club
There is a particular kind of silence that only a new mother knows.
It is not empty. It is the opposite of empty. It is the silence of a house at 3 a.m. when everyone is asleep but you, when your whole body is begging for rest, and your mind refuses, because somewhere in the next room there is a small chest rising and falling, and you cannot stop yourself from listening for it.
I never knew that silence existed until I became a mother. For most of my life, I had been a numbers person, and numbers, as it turns out, prepare you for almost nothing about love.
A Girl Who Loved Numbers
I loved Maths the way some people love poetry.
Not the theory - the theory bored me to tears. But the moment numbers turned into something I could play with, something I could turn over in my hands and solve, I was completely, helplessly in love. That love grew up alongside me. It became accounting. Accounting became finance. And finance became a career I was proud of - by 2019, I was working, building something that was entirely mine.
I had my life arranged like a balance sheet. Everything in its column. Everything is adding up.
And then life handed me the one equation that never balances, and never needs to: a daughter.
The House That Was Never Quiet
To understand me, you have to understand the house I grew up in.
My father is one of four brothers, and we all lived together - a big, loud, beautiful joint family. There were cousins in every room. There was noise from morning to night, the good kind of noise: arguments over nothing, laughter over everything, a dozen people who felt less like relatives and more like my own limbs. We never needed to look outside our home for company. We were our own festival.
So when I married in December 2023 and moved into a nuclear home, the quiet nearly undid me.
I would stand in my new living room and wait for a sound that never came. No cousins thundering down a corridor. No aunt is calling everyone for tea. Just two people, and a stillness I didn’t know how to fill. It was the first time in my life I had ever lived in a quiet house, and I grieved that quiet a little, the way you grieve anything you love.
I didn’t know it yet, but that silence was only a pause. Life was simply taking a breath before it filled my home with the loudest, most wonderful chaos I had ever known.
“Let’s Just Capture Everything”
Our story of becoming creators began with something almost embarrassingly small. We were running out of phone storage.
My husband and I had started making little videos soon after the wedding - silly reels, comedy, the kind of thing two newlyweds make when they are still giddy with each other. But every time we tried to save a memory, the phone would groan and tell us there was no space left. We’d shuffle photos to a hard drive, then forget the hard drive existed. Our moments kept disappearing into folders we never opened again.
So one day we thought: why not just put our life where we can always find it?
That was the whole idea. We started vlogging not to be seen, but to be remembered - by ourselves. We weren’t building an audience. We were building a memory box. A place we could open in two years, in five, in ten, and say to each other, “Look. Look how much we loved this.”
We had no idea that the memory box was about to hold the biggest story of our lives.
Two Surprises, One Spring
Surprises, when they came, came in pairs.
The first was my husband’s. For years, he had been writing government exams, clearing them, and then waiting - endlessly waiting - for results that never seemed to arrive. He had nearly made peace with the private sector. We were both working private jobs, coming home tired from our offices, telling ourselves this was simply our life now.
And then, a few months into our marriage, the results came all at once. Not one selection - three. Finance, Education, Health. Three ministries are asking him to choose. Everyone said I was his lucky charm, and I let myself believe it, because some things really do feel like destiny, deciding it is finally your turn.
The second surprise was ours.
We were pregnant.
We had not planned it. We had promised ourselves the honeymoon years, first - time to travel, to be foolish, to simply be a husband and wife before becoming a mother and father. We thought we had time. Life thought otherwise.
I remember the evening we found out. We had just come home from the office. We checked, and checked again, and then we just sat there, stunned - and then, slowly, the stun melted into something warmer than I have words for. Our little niece had grown up partly in our arms; we already knew how a child could light up a whole house. If a niece could bring this much joy, I thought, what would my own daughter bring?
That was the night our pregnancy journey began. And I filmed every step of it.
Nine Months, Frame by Frame
I am, after all, a woman who hates to lose a memory.
So I recorded all of it. Month by month, I filmed my changing body - the first faint curve, the second, the third - until I had stitched together a full nine-month playlist of my own bump growing into a person. We did a maternity shoot even though, by then, simply standing for photographs felt like an act of endurance. We laughed our way through it anyway.
People sometimes ask why I bothered. Here is why: even a thirty-second reel becomes a flashback you can hold forever. The storage in a phone fills up and gets wiped. But those small recorded moments - they don’t just survive. They become the place you return to on hard days to remember that you once did something this brave, this beautiful.
But not every night of those nine months made it onto camera. Some nights I have only in my memory. One of them I will never forget.
The Night I Couldn’t Move
It was a Saturday, somewhere in my eighth or ninth month.
My husband loves cricket - he would go every week for a match - and that night he had gone again, leaving me home alone. I didn’t mind at first. And then, without warning, my body simply stopped obeying me. I couldn’t move.
I reached for my phone and called him. No answer. I called again. Nothing. The match, the noise, the distance - he couldn’t hear me. And I lay there, enormous and frightened, straining to feel my daughter shift inside me, terrified by the stillness, my mind sprinting toward every worst thing a mother can imagine.
When you have carried a baby this long, fear does not knock politely. It breaks the door down.
When my husband finally walked through that door, hours later, I didn’t even speak - I just held onto him and cried until I had nothing left. “Take me to the hospital,” I kept saying. “Please. I can’t move. I need to know she’s okay.” We went. We got a sonography done that very night, in the dark, just so I could breathe again.
This is the part of my story I most want another mother to hear. In those hours, I did not need more information. I had already read everything the internet had to offer, and all of it only made me more afraid. What I needed was certainty. Just one true thing I could hold onto: she is alive, she is fine, you can rest.
It was only later that I learned about Janitri’s fetal Doppler - a small device that lets a mother simply listen to her baby’s heartbeat at home, any time the fear creeps in. I think about that night often. How different it might have felt to press a device gently to my belly and hear that steady, stubborn little heartbeat - proof, in my own hands, that everything was alright. And if it hadn’t been alright, that same heartbeat would have told me to run to the hospital, instead of leaving me to lie there in the dark, guessing. No mother should have to guess.
Singing My Daughter Into the World
My delivery was a C-section at Max Hospital. The doctor had flagged a complication, and we agreed it was the safest way.
I was terrified - and not in some vague way. I had never been admitted to a hospital in my life. I had never even had a glucose drip. So the needles, the belts strapped across me to read her heartbeat, the cold operating room, my husband sent outside to finish the paperwork while I was wheeled in alone - all of it pressed down on me at once. That fear of going in alone is something I still feel in my chest when I remember it.
Through my whole pregnancy, I had kept myself calm with two things: Achyutam Keshav and the Hanuman Chalisa. I had sung them so many times that they had become my heartbeat’s rhythm. So when the moment came, lying there on that table, I did the only thing that steadied me. I sang.
I was still singing when they lifted her into the world. And then I heard her — and I broke completely, sobbing on the table. The doctor laughed, gently, kindly, and said, “Why are you crying now? You were singing such a beautiful song. Everything is fine. Your baby is here.”
Here is the truth no one tells you: every report had been perfect. Every scan, every number, flawless. And still, until the moment you actually hold your baby, the fear never truly leaves you. It is only when they laid her against me, face to face, that the fear finally let go - and with it went every sleepless night, every wave of nausea, every ache of those nine months. I forgot all of it. You simply forget. That is the mercy of it.
The Hardest Night, and the First Steps
That first night after the surgery was the hardest of my entire life.
I could not turn over on my own. My back screamed at me. I had to lie flat and still for twenty-four hours, and I counted every one of them — asking, every fifteen minutes, is it morning yet? Will the doctor come now? My whole family was there, surrounding me with love. And yet I had never felt so dependent, so helpless. I would ring the bell for the nurse and cry, and when she asked why I was crying, I told her the truth: “I just need to cry. Otherwise, I can’t get through this.”
I remember thinking, in a small panic, when I go home, which bell will I ring? In the hospital, a sister came running every time I needed help. At home, there would be no bell. I would have to ask someone for everything - even to be handed my own daughter, because I couldn’t yet lift her myself.
But slowly - so slowly - the pain began to make room for something else. On the second day, my nurse helped me take my first few steps. How will I ever do this, I thought, shuffling, terrified. And then I did it. And the day after that, a little more. The journey that felt impossible became, one tiny movement at a time, simply my life. Now I have to do this for her. Now I have to make this for her. That refrain became the sweetest rhythm I have ever lived by.
What Carried Me
People talk about postpartum depression, and I know now how real and how heavy it can be. I want to be honest about why it didn’t swallow me: I was never left alone.
My husband held me through moods I couldn’t even explain to myself - the days I turned anxious for no reason, the days I turned sharp, the days I simply wept. He never once made me feel like a burden. My in-laws were beside me for everything; I healed in their home, wrapped in their care. They say the first two months are when a woman needs the most support, and when she is most at risk if she doesn’t get it. I got it. Every bit of it. And that, more than anything, is why those fragile early months felt like joy instead of drowning.
She is six months old now. I breastfed her exclusively, and we have just begun the wonderful, messy adventure of solids - a whole new world of today I’ll make this for her, tomorrow I’ll make that. I’ve recently returned to work from home, too, and I will not pretend it is easy. Finance, the household, our content, and my daughter - all of it asking for my hands at once. Some days, the juggling defeats me. Most days, somehow, I manage. And every single day, she makes it worth it.
What I Would Tell a Mother Reading This
If I could sit beside a woman who is pregnant right now and hold her hand, I would tell her only a few things - but I would mean them with my whole heart:
Stop hunting on Google, Instagram, and Facebook. I promise you, the endless scrolling of this will happen in your first trimester, this in your second, eat this, never eat that, will not protect you. It will only frighten you into believing the worst is coming for you specifically. Whatever has to happen, will happen. Don’t rehearse your fear before it has even arrived.
Choose reassurance over speculation. Trust your doctor. And lean on tools that tell you, plainly and truly, that your baby is fine - instead of leaving you alone with your imagination at 3 a.m.
If you’re going back to work, arrange your support first. Make sure there is someone to share the load of caring for your child. You cannot do it all alone, and the bravest thing you can do is admit that before you’re drowning.
I spent my whole life learning to make numbers balance. Motherhood taught me that the most precious things never balance at all - they only multiply.
The most important number I ever counted wasn’t in any ledger.
It was a heartbeat. Hers.
About Kashika Maggu
Kashika Maggu is a finance professional, a daily vlogger, and - most recently and most proudly - a new mother to a baby girl. A self-confessed lover of numbers since childhood, she turned that passion into a career, working as an Assistant Account Manager at an NBFC since 2019. Alongside her husband, she documents the everyday joys of family life through daily vlogs on Instagram and YouTube - a habit that began simply as a way to never lose a precious memory. Having recently returned to work from home after six months of maternity leave, Kashika now balances her career, her content, her household, and her daughter’s every new milestone, and shares her motherhood journey in the hope that it brings comfort and courage to other parents walking the same path.
About Janitri
Janitri is built on a simple yet powerful mission: to save lives by supporting women and newborns through the critical 1,000-day journey from pregnancy to early motherhood. Every solution we create is rooted in care, early detection, and the belief that no woman should lose her life while giving life.
With this same spirit, we introduce Janitri Club, a space where we celebrate not designations, but the people behind them. The caregivers, doctors, parents, and supporters who quietly hold this journey together.
Through real stories of emotions, challenges, and victories, Janitri Club brings these voices to life, honouring their experiences and building a community that uplifts everyone who stands beside a woman in her journey.
