For much of my life, I was searching for a place where I felt I fully belonged.
I grew up carrying many questions I did not yet have the language to name, questions about identity, family, love, and whether there was a place in the world where I could be fully myself and still be deeply loved. As a gay Indian man raised with strong cultural expectations, I often felt caught between different parts of myself. Later, as an immigrant, a nurse, and eventually a single father, those questions about belonging and home only deepened in different ways.
I wrote The Family I Built Alone because I wanted to tell the truth about that journey.
This memoir begins long before fatherhood. It begins with a boy who felt different before he had a name for it, a young man trying to build a life while carrying questions he could not easily share, and an adult who spent years searching for belonging through work, achievement, relationships, and the expectations of others. By the time I made the life-changing decision to become a father on my own through IVF and surrogacy, I had already spent years building a life in America, working as a nurse, and quietly carrying the hope that I might still have a family of my own.
At its heart, this is not only a story about becoming a parent. It is a story about what happens when life does not unfold the way you imagined and how, sometimes, you have to stop waiting for permission and begin building the life your heart has been asking for all along.
I wanted this book to be honest about the harder parts of that path: the loneliness, the cultural tension, the heartbreak, the fear, the financial weight, and the emotional uncertainty that can come with building a family in an unconventional way. But I also wanted it to be a hopeful book, because despite all of those challenges, this story is ultimately about love, resilience, and the quiet ways a life can come together when you keep going.
Today, I am the father of twins, and fatherhood has changed me in ways I never could have predicted. It has brought joy, exhaustion, healing, perspective, and a kind of love that made sense of so many years that came before it. Becoming a parent did not erase my past, but it helped me understand it differently. It showed me that sometimes the family we spend our lives searching for is not something we simply find. Sometimes, it is something we build.
I hope this book reaches readers who have ever felt out of place, unseen, or uncertain about whether the life they long for is truly possible. I hope it speaks to people navigating identity, cultural expectations, grief, loneliness, family-building, or the long road toward self-acceptance. I especially hope it offers encouragement to anyone who has had to create hope for themselves before they could fully see the outcome.
More than anything, I hope readers come away from this story feeling less alone.
If The Family I Built Alone offers anything, I hope it is this reminder: there is no one right way to build a meaningful life, there is no one right way to create a family, and sometimes the most beautiful parts of our lives are the ones we had to fight the hardest to believe were possible.
Check out the full memoir available for purchase on Amazon.
