There is a box that arrives at my door every year, a few weeks before Raksha Bandhan.
It is never very big. It does not need to be. Inside, wrapped in ivory tissue and packed more carefully than anything I have ever posted in my life, is a rakhi made by my sister Dhara — sitting at the same kitchen table in India where we both learned to make them, using threads from our father’s shop down the road, tied the same way our mother taught us when we were small enough that the knots were still difficult.
I have lived in the UK for a few years now. The distance between me and Dhara is somewhere around 4,500 miles, depending on how you measure it. But every year, when that box arrives and I open it and hold that rakhi up to the light and see the exact shade of dusty rose thread she picked because she knows it is my favourite colour — the distance collapses completely.
That is what a handmade rakhi does. That is what no shop-bought version has ever managed to do for me, no matter how beautifully it was packaged.
Our father’s shop
We grew up around craft materials the way some children grow up around books or music. Our father has run a craft materials shop in India for decades — silk threads, Kundan stones, gold beads, findings, ribbon. He knows every supplier, every material, every reason why one thread will hold a knot better than another.
As children we were not particularly interested in the business side of it. We were interested in the drawers. The ones full of tiny gold beads that caught the light like something precious. The silk threads in shades we did not have names for. The stones that looked ordinary until you held them a certain way and then suddenly looked like something a queen might wear.
Our father let us play with all of it, and while we played, he quietly taught us things. That quality in small details is what makes something last. That the material you start with determines everything about what you end up with. That if you do not understand what you are working with, you cannot make anything worth keeping.
We did not realise at the time that we were receiving an education. It felt like we were just in dad’s shop.
The kitchen table education
The other half of our education happened at home, with our mother.
Every Raksha Bandhan, she would sit us down — Dhara and me, side by side — and we would make rakhis together. Not from a kit. Not following a YouTube tutorial. From materials brought home from dad’s shop, and from watching her hands and trying to make ours do the same thing.
It took years before our rakhis looked like hers. She never seemed impatient about this. She just kept showing us, kept adjusting our knots, kept saying — tighter here, looser there, feel the thread, do not force it.
When our father would come home and see what we had made, he would pick each one up the way he picked up materials in his shop — with genuine attention, turning it over, checking the work. Occasionally he would suggest a different bead, a finer thread. Occasionally he would just nod quietly, which we both knew was the higher compliment.
Those rakhis were made for brothers, for cousins, for family friends. They were received the way handmade things always are when they come from someone who genuinely made them — with a warmth that a purchased gift rarely produces.
What happens when a sister moves countries
When I moved to the UK, I assumed I would find rakhis here. And I did find things called rakhis — in Indian grocery shops, in online marketplaces, in festival gift sets that arrived in plastic packaging with synthetic thread and a centre stone that fell off before Raksha Bandhan was even over.
Nothing felt right. Not because I am difficult to please, but because I knew what a rakhi was supposed to feel like. I had spent my childhood learning it.
So Dhara kept making them and posting them to me. And I kept wearing them and being stopped by people asking where they came from. And after enough times of explaining the whole story — the father’s shop, the mother’s kitchen table, the sister in India, the tissue paper — it started to feel like perhaps the story itself was something worth sharing more widely.
That is how Rera Craft started. Not with a business plan or a launch strategy. With a box in the post, and a thread that refused to acknowledge that 4,500 miles was any kind of obstacle.
What we make and why it is different
Every rakhi that leaves Rera Craft is made by hand. By Dhara in India, using materials from a family that has spent decades understanding them. Shipped to me in the UK, checked, wrapped, and sent to you with the same care that has gone into every rakhi this family has ever made.
We do not make in bulk. We do not compromise on materials because a cheaper bead would save us pennies. We offer gift wrap and a handwritten personal note on every order because we genuinely believe a gift without words is only half a gift.
We make things the way we were taught to make them. Slowly. Carefully. With full attention.
No two rakhis are quite alike. We think that is the point.
Shop the collection at reracraft.co.uk
Follow along at @craftbyreshu