I grew up in a house where the door was never closed. Not to people who needed somewhere to go, and not to animals who needed the same. My mother never turned anyone away: a neighbor in crisis, a stray that followed someone home, a family that needed a table to sit at. I learned what care looked like before I had a word for it. Animals were part of that from the beginning.
I loved animals so much I couldn't go to veterinary school. The idea of seeing one in pain, even in the service of helping them, was more than I could hold. So like a good Indian daughter I went into medicine instead, learned to hold human pain, and told myself that was enough. I've always been the girl who stopped on the street for every dog, who couldn't watch a sad animal video without carrying it for days, who would absolutely pull over for an animal hurt on the side of the road and be late to wherever she was going. I never apologized for any of it. But I also understood, having lived in more worlds than medicine, that there was a version of caring that was considered appropriate, and a version that wasn't. The version that wasn't was the one that cost you something. The stray outside the restaurant when everyone is waiting on you. The animal hurt on the side of the road when you're already running late. The foster drop-off that falls on a weekend someone has plans. In every one of those moments, the cultural instruction is the same: keep moving. It can wait. Someone else will handle it.
It was COVID. The world was falling apart in slow motion and everyone inside medicine was holding their breath. It didn't matter what corner of medicine you occupied. Everyone was feeling it. Everyone was called on. The weight of that time had a way of finding you wherever you were.
And in the middle of all of that weight, I came across a post online that I have not stopped thinking about since.
A man's family was in crisis. His loved one was battling respiratory distress, her COPD made catastrophic by the virus. Yet he had found a bunny abandoned outside in the cold and simply could not leave her there. No rescue had space. So he brought her inside. A week later she gave birth. He hadn't even known she was pregnant. Suddenly he had a mother and her newborns to care for, in the hardest chapter of his life.
The hay and dander were making an impossible situation worse. He couldn't keep them inside. He couldn't put them out. So he went out to his garage and built them somewhere safe. He insulated it. He set up heat. This was COVID. Like so many people, he wasn't working. They were barely surviving. And still, every day, he went out there quietly, without anyone watching, without anyone asking him to, and made sure those animals were warm, while his family fell apart and held together at the same time.
Only two of the litter survived. By the time I reached out, there was one left. When he told me the date they were born, I went still. It was my late father's birthday. I don't know how to explain what that felt like, only that I knew, in the way you sometimes just know, that he was meant to come home with me.
His name was Shiva. He was born on December 16, 2019, my late father's birthday. I brought him home in March 2020, and he was with me until October 14, 2025.
He changed everything. Not dramatically, not all at once. But slowly, in the way that only an animal who has decided to trust you can change you. He made me look honestly at something I had carried my whole life: how much I loved animals, and how carefully I had learned to keep that love at a manageable size. Strategic. Appropriate. Small enough not to inconvenience anyone. Shiva made me stop keeping it small.
He made me look at a culture with the most dedicated people. Fosters who rearrange their lives around a frightened animal. Shelter teams running on empty. Volunteers who show up without applause. Adopters who say yes to a story that isn't perfect but is worth saving. They deserve a culture that celebrates them. So we built one.
When someone fosters a child, the state recognizes that work. There is support, compensation, structure. I kept asking why the same logic didn't apply to animal fosters. The emotional labor is real. The commitment is real. The lives saved are real. Nobody was compensating these people. Nobody had even built the infrastructure to recognize them properly. That felt less like a market gap and more like a systemic oversight. And that is what Rescue Rituals was built to address.
In a world that keeps asking us to move faster and care less, the people who stop for an animal on the side of the road are not the problem. They are the answer. They have full lives, real lives, and they deserve a platform that meets them there. Not just with gratitude. With something that actually shows up for them the way they show up for animals.
This is why rescue deserves a rebrand. One that leads with pride instead of grief, with community instead of obligation, with celebration instead of guilt.
Shiva didn't get to see it finished. But every foster who gets rewarded, every adoption that happens over coffee, every shelter that feels a little less alone, that's him. That's his legacy.
