An old colleague called me a few days ago, inspired by my video she’d seen. I’ll call her Prisha, though that isn’t her real name.
This is a story about what usually gets called the sandwich generation, though by the time the call ended, I wasn’t sure the term quite fit her at all.
She’d known me since long before Dehradun, back when I was still deep inside the version of my life she still recognizes in herself. She told me, the way people sometimes do when they’ve been quietly watching from a distance, that she admired what I’d done. “You are brave,” she said. “I am not. I can’t resign from my full-time job and leave the monthly income.”
Then, unprompted, she started talking about Nashik. She said that if I ever wanted to retire there instead of in Dehradun, I could live very well on twenty-five thousand rupees a month. She knew this precisely, the way you only know a number when you’ve already run it for yourself more than once.
I asked her the only question that seemed worth asking. What’s stopping you?
She answered in Marathi, a phrase I’ve been turning over ever since. Paisyacha song nahi anta yet. Roughly, you can’t fake having the money. Money doesn’t answer to pretending.
I recognized the shape of her answer before I understood what was actually underneath it. It sounded, at first, like a textbook description of the sandwich generation, squeezed between a child’s needs and a parent’s, with nothing left over. It took me longer than it should have to notice that her version of that story didn’t have the one thing the term usually assumes: an actual shortage of money.
I want to sit with that sentence for a moment because, on its own, it sounds like a story about constraint. A woman who wants something and genuinely cannot afford it yet. That is the story she told herself, out loud, to me, on the phone. It is also, once you look at the actual numbers, not true.
Prisha and her husband together earn upwards of one and a half crore rupees a year. They own two properties, one of which they rent out, generating income neither of them touches. Their combined savings are, by any reasonable measure, well beyond what they would need. Their monthly expenses, even living generously, would not cross one lakh rupees. Twenty-five thousand a month in Nashik is not a stretch for her. It is a rounding error.
I asked her a second time, more specifically, half expecting her to correct herself once she heard the numbers said back to her in that light. She didn’t. She repeated the son’s competitions, the mother, the sisters, and the timing in almost the same order, the way people do when they’ve told themselves a story often enough that the sequence itself has become the proof, independent of whether any single piece of it actually withstands being questioned closely.
“Paisyacha song nahi anta yet” is a sentence built for a person without money. Prisha has money. What she doesn’t have is a sentence for the actual thing stopping her, so she reached for the nearest one that sounded acceptable to say out loud, to herself as much as to me.
What the Sandwich Generation Actually Looks Like When Money Isn’t the Constraint
The term “sandwich generation” usually describes people caught between two genuine, simultaneous demands: aging parents who need care, children who still need raising, and a person in the middle with neither the time nor the money to fully meet either obligation. It’s a real phenomenon, and for most people who live inside it, the constraint is precisely what it sounds like: too little of both resources, spread too thin, with no honest way out yet.
Prisha gave me the shape of that story. Her son is ambitious. A robotics competition is the kind of pursuit that costs two to three lakh rupees every time he enters one. Her mother and her sisters are all still working, and they have no time to spare. If she went to Nashik now, she told me, who would be available? So she’ll do it later. Maybe at sixty, when she retires properly, which is the way the sequence is supposed to go.
Every element of that story is true. None of it is actually about scarcity. This group is the sandwich generation with the money removed from the equation and something else quietly filling the space where the money used to be the honest excuse. It’s not a shortage of resources. A surplus of being needed, arranged so carefully that leaving would require her to explain to herself first what she would actually be leaving to go find.
I think about the robotics competitions more than anything else in that phone call.
Two to three lakh rupees, repeated, for a pursuit that is, by every account she gave me, genuinely her son’s own ambition, not something imposed on him. I don’t doubt that.
What I noticed instead is how much funding it so readily costs her, quietly, in a currency that never appears on a bank statement. Every rupee that flows easily toward her son’s competitions is a rupee that could, with the same ease, have gone toward a life in Nashik that she’s already priced out to the last digit. She isn’t choosing between the two because she can’t afford both. She’s choosing, without naming it as a choice, to keep fueling someone else’s forward motion instead of building her own.
There’s a version of the story that looks entirely like love, and mostly, I think, it is. But I’ve come to believe that funding a child’s ambition and building a life of your own aren’t actually in competition for money in households like Prisha’s. They compete for something else: attention, permission, the sense of being the reliable one whose own wanting can wait, indefinitely, because everyone else’s wanting is more urgent and more visible and easier to justify spending on. Robotics competitions have a clear, defensible purpose.
A woman moving to Nashik to have quieter mornings does not, yet, in the story she’s currently telling herself. So the money goes where the justification already exists, and the harder, less defensible want gets filed under ‘someday.’
I asked her, gently, whether the real obstacle might not be Nashik or the money or even the family’s schedule, but something closer to not yet having an answer for what she’d actually do there once nobody needed her to be available.
She didn’t answer that one the way she’d answered the first question. She went quiet, the specific quiet of someone recognizing a question they hadn’t let themselves ask directly before, not the quiet of someone thinking of a comeback.
I don’t think Prisha is unusual. I think she is describing, with more honesty than most people manage, a pattern I watch constantly in women specifically, in the particular Indian family structures I grew up inside and have coached inside of for two decades: the assumption, rarely spoken, that the most capable, most flexible person in a family is the one who quietly absorbs whatever slack the rest of the system produces and that her own wanting is the appropriate thing to defer, because deferring it costs the family the least, on paper, in the short term.
It is not usually cruelty. It is usually love, organized badly, running on a script nobody consciously wrote and nobody has yet felt entitled enough to rewrite.
I have sat across from enough versions of this situation to notice a specific detail that repeats almost every time. The person carrying it rarely frames it as a complaint. Prisha didn’t sound resentful on that call. She sounded, if anything, mildly proud of how well she was managing all of it, the son’s competitions funded without hesitation, her mother’s needs anticipated before they were asked, and her sisters never once let down.
Competence, in households built this way, becomes its own trap, because the better someone is at holding everything together, the less anyone around them, including the person doing the holding, thinks to ask what she’d actually choose if holding everything together stopped being the job description she’d quietly assigned herself.
I don’t know if Prisha will actually go to Nashik at sixty, the way she’s told herself she will. I suspect, if I’m honest, that sixty will function the way most someday dates function once they arrive, as a new, equally defensible reason to wait a little longer, because by then there will likely be grandchildren, or her mother’s care will have shifted rather than ended, or some other genuinely real, genuinely loving obligation will have quietly moved in to occupy the space vacated by this one.
The sandwich generation, lived this way, doesn’t really end at a fixed age. It just keeps finding a new pair of hands that need her more than she has ever let herself need anything for herself.
What I keep coming back to is the phrase itself, because I don’t think it was really about money at all, even though it used money’s vocabulary to say itself. Paisyacha song nahi anta yet. You can’t fake having the money.
Maybe the truer, harder version of that sentence, the one underneath the one she actually said, is closer to this: you can’t fake being ready to matter to yourself as much as you matter to everyone currently depending on you. That sentence doesn’t have a number attached to it. It doesn’t have a bank balance that could, in a single conversation, prove it false. Which might be exactly why the money version was easier to say out loud, to a friend, on an ordinary phone call, than the real one underneath it.
The sandwich generation meaning most people reach for is a story about not having enough. For a woman like Prisha, sitting on more than enough, it might actually be a story about not yet having permission, one she is, as far as I can tell, the only person in her entire family with the standing to finally give herself.