Some families are connected by blood. Others are built by a single decision that changes everything. For Surashree Karekar, that decision was made before she was even old enough to remember it.Today, Surashree is an interior designer living a life full of purpose and gratitude. But her story didn’t begin that way. “I don’t remember being abandoned,” she says in a conversation with TOI Women. “I was only a newborn when I was found near a drain in Dahisar. Nobody came looking for me.”
6 May 2026 | 16:56
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The infant was rescued and handed over to the police. When weeks passed and no one claimed her, she was sent to an orphanage, where she would spend the next five years of her life. Yet when Surashree looks back now, there’s no bitterness in the way she describes those years. “Life there was simple,” she recalls. “We made flower garlands, played on swings, cleaned our own plates, folded our clothes, prayed before every meal, and learnt never to waste food. I didn’t know I was missing anything.”She had no way of knowing that everything was about to change.
The day one man made a life-changing choice
Surashree Karekar in childhood with her parents. (Image Courtesy: Instagram/@ _suruuuuu)
One afternoon, a couple walked into the orphanage hoping to adopt a child. “My mother wanted a son,” Surashree recalls. But her father had other plans or perhaps no plan at all. “My father looked at me, smiled, and quietly said, ‘She’s coming home with me.’ “That one decision changed everything,” she said.What she learned years later made that moment even more remarkable. The legal adoption process took time, and until it was complete, Surashree had to stay at the orphanage. Her father couldn’t stand the distance.“Years later, I learnt that while my adoption paperwork was still being processed, my father travelled from Goregaon to Matunga every week just to make sure I had eaten,” she says.He wasn’t even allowed inside. “He would simply stand outside, watch me finish my meal, smile… and leave.”
“He never let me feel adopted”
Growing up, Surashree never once felt like the odd one out in her own home. “He never let me feel adopted. I was his princess,” she says, and it shows in the way she talks about her childhood, full of birthdays, photographs, and a father who showed up.“He celebrated every birthday, captured every milestone with his camera and encouraged everything I wanted to do.” One memory stays with her more than most. Plenty of parents fumble through conversations about puberty, if they have them at all. Surashree’s father didn’t flinch. “He even sat beside me to explain my first period when I was too scared to ask anyone else.” It’s a small detail, but for Surashree it says everything.
The goodbye that changed everything
Then came the heartbreak she wasn’t ready for. Surashree was just thirteen when her father died of a skin infection. His last words to her mother have stayed with her ever since: “‘Take care of my Suru.'” “For years, I felt lost,” she admits. The girl who’d once been chosen with so much certainty now had to figure out how to stand without the person who’d always been her ground.
The mother she discovered through loss
Surashree Karekar with her parents. (Image Courtesy: Instagram/@ _suruuuuu)
In the years after her father’s death, Surashree and her mother found their way to each other. “The woman I once struggled to understand became my biggest strength,” she says; a relationship that had always existed in her father’s shadow now had room to grow on its own.When Surashree became a professor, her mother couldn’t stop telling people. “She proudly called everyone she knew just to say, ‘My daughter is a teacher.'” It was never really about the job title. It was a mother watching the child she’d raised become someone whole.Then, in 2024, she lost her mother too.People sometimes ask how she’s still standing after losing both parents. “People often ask me how I stay strong. The truth is, I don’t think I had a choice,” she says with honesty.
“Every day, I carry two people with me”
These days, Surashree carries her parents with her: not just in photographs, but in the values they left behind: kindness, dignity, resilience, love that asked for nothing back. “Every day, I carry two people with me, the man who chose me when nobody else did, and the woman who stood by me until her very last breath.”Her story is proof that family isn’t something you’re simply born into. Sometimes it starts with a man looking at a little girl in an orphanage and deciding, without needing a reason, that she belongs with him.Surashree doesn’t measure her life by where it began. She measures it by the people who rewrote it. “My parents didn’t just give me life,” she says. “They gave me something even greater, a life filled with love, dignity, and a place where I truly belonged.”
The message Surashree has for everyone
Surashree Karekar. (Image Courtesy: Instagram/@ _suruuuuu)
In a conversation with TOI Women, Surashree says, “If life has taught me anything, it’s that everything happens for a reason, even when we don’t understand it at the moment.” “I could have spent my life asking, ‘Why me?’ Instead, I choose to ask, ‘How can I honour the life I’ve been given?’”I’m grateful for everything I have, because I know love is never something to be taken for granted. My biggest fear isn’t failure or losing success; it’s forgetting the values my parents raised me with. Their kindness, humility, courage, and compassion are the only inheritance I never want to lose.She says, “This is my third life now, God has given me so many lives, different experiences. One life was while I was in an orphanage. The second life was with my parents and the third life without them.” “Every decision I make, every dream I chase, and every stand I take for myself is with one purpose: to make them proud without ever changing who I am. If I can stay true to my values, then I know I’m already living the life they wished for me.”
