Two days before I flew back to the UK, I needed to give something real.
I wanted to bring something for my closest friend. Him and his boyfriend. Two people who have been part of my life for years, and who I owe more than I will ever be able to say. Whatever I gave was always going to feel like less. I knew that going in.
So I went looking. And everything I found looked the same. The markets, the shops, the exhibitions. Nothing spoke. Nothing carried any weight beyond its price tag. I was running out of time, running out of space in my luggage, and quietly running out of hope that anything on those shelves deserved to be given to people like them.
I couldn't get them something big. Something with an expensive tag on it. And a part of me hadn't fully made peace with that, even as I kept looking.
Then I thought of Tirupati.
On a visit to one of the most sacred pilgrimage sites in India, a place people travel thousands of kilometres to reach, I had picked up two small die-cast horse keychains. One for each of them. I had stood there and thought of them. Later I wrote on each one by hand. Ami on one. Amigo on the other. A private word. A quiet way of saying, you are my people.
From an exhibition, I chose a dining mat woven from water hyacinth, a grass that grows across Indian wetlands. Handwoven, rooted in this soil. Not to be displayed. Not to be stored away. To be used. Every single day. So that somewhere in an ordinary morning in the UK, a small piece of India would be on their table. A small piece of me would be there, even when I wasn't.
Together the two gifts were one thought. The horses carrying a blessing and a name, the mat carrying a whole country's worth of quiet presence.
I wasn't sure he would like it. I was just hoping. I kept telling myself it didn't need an expensive tag to mean something. A part of me hadn't fully believed that yet.
When I gave them the gifts, I explained everything. Where the horses came from. What that place felt like. Why I had chosen a horse. Focus, ambition, the momentum of moving toward your own greatness. What I had written and why. And the mat, that I wanted it on their table, not on a shelf. That I wanted to be present in the small, ordinary moments, not just the big ones.
That changed everything. What could have been accepted as a polite formality became something they actually received. And in that moment, after all the self-doubt, the meaning finally made it across.
He still uses that dining mat today. The horse keychains, honestly, I'm not sure where they are. But that's the thing about meaning. You don't always get to see where it lands. You just have to trust that when it left your hands, it carried everything you wanted it to.
And sometimes, years later, you find out it did.
For most of my life, people called me too emotional. What I have come to understand is that it was never a flaw. The ability to step into someone else's experience, to sense what they need before they say it, is a real skill. Every time I picked something for a person, I watched how much it landed. Not because of what it cost. Because of what it said.
The generic market could never replicate that. It sold objects. It never sold the feeling of being known.
Untosa exists because that gap is real, it is everywhere, and no one had quietly set out to close it.
