Vik and Sarina Dosanjh

It began in November 2020, on their engagement anniversary, when Sarina found out she was pregnant. A few weeks later, at a scan just past ten weeks, there was no heartbeat. Because of COVID rules she heard the words missed miscarriage on her own, while Vik waited outside in the hospital car park, not allowed in. What followed was five years, three miscarriages and a failed round of IVF. Tests showed Sarina had a low ovarian reserve and Vik a low sperm count, and somehow knowing it sat with both of them made the loss feel shared, not one person's fault to carry.

Naming what the culture keeps quiet

In Punjabi families, infertility and baby loss are often folded into the language of bad luck, or nazar, the evil eye. Couples get quietly left off the guest list when other people's babies arrive. Vik began to talk about something almost no one names: what that silence does to South Asian men, who are expected to hold everyone else up and grieve nothing themselves. Their Sikh faith carried them, slowly, from anger at God toward chardi kala, a state of rising, unbroken spirit. They told the whole of it on national television, in their BBC One documentary, Love, Faith and Me: Married, Sikh and Wanting a Baby.

Building somewhere for others to land

Out of all of it they built The Himmat Collective. Himmat means courage, and the name is the promise: monthly spaces, online and in person, where South Asian couples and individuals going through infertility, IVF and baby loss can say the hard things out loud. They made a room specifically for the men, who so rarely get one. And on their CRADLE podcast they share the quieter, practical side of it all, the parts the clinic leaflets never cover.

Himmat does not mean the fear goes away. It means finding the courage to speak anyway.

They would be the first to say the grief did not simply vanish. But where there was once silence, there is now a room that fills, a message that lands on the hard days, and a growing number of people who no longer believe this is theirs alone to carry. That, in the end, is chardi kala: not pretending the night was not dark, but refusing to let it have the last word.