I'm Satlaj Sachan.

I have spent twenty-five years in engineering and technology, and I am still in it. Most weeks my calendar belongs to a software company in Bengaluru, where I run programmes.

The other thing I do, and have done for ten years, is sit with people while they work out what is going on with them.

Rafiq means companion. What made it the right word is buried in the root: the same three letters that give Arabic rafiq also give it rifq, which means gentleness. So a companion, in that language, is not someone walking you toward a destination. It is someone being gentle with you while you get there.

The other words available said other things. Sadiq is a friend defined by truthfulness. Dost is a friend in general. Rafiq is the one that makes a claim about how you are treated.

Which is the closest I can get to describing what I actually do. I am not going to correct you. I am not going to tell you who to be instead. I will sit with you while you work it out, and be useful when being useful is what is needed.

It is also, in some places, the word for comrade, and it turns up in the Quran describing good company in the next life. Neither is what I meant by it, but a word this old was never going to mean only one thing.

I studied Civil Engineering at IIT Roorkee and graduated in 2001. Then two and a half decades of testing, quality, delivery, operations and programme management, across a few companies. I am good at it. I like the part where a tangled thing becomes a clear thing.

Somewhere in the middle of that I joined a Toastmasters club, in 2010, to get better at speaking. I stayed for fifteen years. I ended up as club President, and before that VP Education, VP Public Relations, VP Membership, across two clubs. What kept me there was watching people stand up week after week and slowly become willing to be seen.

I started running workshops. Self-awareness, leadership, inner motivation, relationships. Then corporate sessions on stress, on goal setting, on the art of balancing a life. And the useful part turned out to be the conversation afterwards, when somebody stayed back to tell me the real thing.

So in 2015 I certified as a counsellor, and started seeing people.

That was ten years ago. The counselling has run alongside the engineering the whole time, which I used to think of as a compromise and no longer do. Sitting with someone at six in the evening is different work when you have spent the day in the same kind of week they are describing.

People roughly between twenty-five and forty-five. The years where a life is supposed to be settling and often is not.

What comes up: work that has stopped meaning what it did. Anxiety that has become the weather rather than an event. A relationship that works on paper. Parents who have started to age, and the particular guilt that comes with that. Wanting something and not being able to say what.

I am interested in patterns. The way a person keeps arriving at the same place by what looks like a different road each time. Naming that is usually where it starts to move.