I still remember the smell of my mother’s kitchen.
Mustard seeds crackling in hot oil. Curry leaves. The steam off a pot of rice. I was a little girl then, sitting on the floor of our home, watching her hands move like she’d done it a thousand times — because she had. That kitchen was the warmest place I knew. It was where our whole family gathered, where the day’s worries got smaller, where love didn’t need words. It just needed food.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was learning the most important thing I’d ever learn.
Life took me far from that kitchen. I studied, I worked, I built a career in IT — solving problems on a screen, meeting deadlines, chasing the next thing. I was good at it. And then I moved to Ireland, thousands of miles from the smell of my mother’s cooking, and I built a new life here.
When my family came, I made a choice. I stepped away from my career to be at home, to raise my daughter, to hold everything together. People don’t always understand that choice. They ask, so quietly, “but what do you do now?” — as if a woman at home stops being someone. For a while, if I’m honest, I asked myself the same thing.
But something was happening in those years that I couldn’t see at the time.
I was back in the kitchen.
I was cooking the food I grew up with, chasing that smell from my childhood, trying to give my own daughter the warmth my mother gave me. And here, so far from home, that turned out to be the hardest part. The ingredients I needed weren’t there. I’d drive from shop to shop. I’d ask friends to bring things in their suitcases. I’d stand in an aisle in a foreign country, homesick for a spice packet, of all things.
And I realised I wasn’t the only one.
Everywhere in our community — Tamil families, Indian families, all of us who’d made Ireland home — I heard the same quiet ache. “I just can’t find the things from back home.” We were all a little homesick, and a lot of it lived in our kitchens.
So one day I stopped just wishing someone would fix it. I decided it would be me.
That’s how One Place Bazaar was born. Not in a boardroom. In my home, out of my own homesickness, out of love for the food that raised me. I started small — so small — surrounded by the very people I wanted to help. And slowly, order by order, family by family, it grew. Today we deliver a little piece of home to families all over Ireland. Over a thousand of them now. Every single order still moves me, because I know exactly what’s inside it. Not just groceries. A memory. A mother’s kitchen. A way to feel close to home when home is far away.
I want you to know it hasn’t been easy.
There are nights I pack orders long after my daughter is asleep. Mornings I answer messages before the school run. Days when she is unwell and the deliveries still have to go out, and I feel that guilt every mother knows — am I enough, for my daughter, for this, for myself? If you feel that pull too, please hear me: you are not failing. You’re carrying more than most people will ever understand.
But here is what those years taught me, and what I want to leave with you.
The time I spent at home was not a gap in my story. It was my story. That’s where the whole idea came from. Nothing was wasted — not the career, not the cooking, not the caring. I use all of it, every single day.
And you don’t have to feel ready. I certainly didn’t. I started scared, I started small, I started before I knew what I was doing. If you’re a woman sitting with an idea and a hundred reasons it’s “not the right time” — it will never be the right time. Start anyway. Start where you are.
I did. And it led me all the way back to that little girl on the kitchen floor, watching her mother cook, learning what love smells like.
I just get to share it now.
— Kalaivani, Founder, One Place Bazaar