At just a year-and-a-half old, Omer Bin Haq has marked several of his milestones on the campus of IIT Bombay, where his mother, Henna, is enrolled as a PhD scholar. He takes his little steps in classrooms, naps in the study hall and plays around on the campus grounds. "He crawled for the first time on the campus of IIT Bombay," Henna fondly recalls, sharing a core memory with her baby.

For 28-year-old Henna, Omy, as she calls her child, had been a part of every bit of the journey to the IIT. She had decided to go to the IIT when she was just three months pregnant. Her preparations began soon after Omy was born, with the proposal presentation coming when he was just a month or two old. When Omy was four months old, she got the news that she had got into IIT Bombay, but it left the question of how she would wrap together motherhood and student life.

Henna, a native of Kozhikode, moved to Mumbai with Omy in July 2025, when he was just six months old, after she was selected for the PhD programme in Psycho-Oncology. "My husband Nizam and I were planning to relocate to Mumbai after I got selected, but he was offered a role we couldn't turn down," she told Onmanorama. Although this threw her plans off a bit, she was not willing to give up on her dream.

"My husband told me not to let go of the opportunity I worked hard for. So I decided to move there with Omy," she said. It wasn't all in a heartbeat, though. She had two options in front of her: move to Mumbai alone with Omy, or not move at all. "Omy comes first! As a psychologist, I know how important a mother is to a child's development," she said.

While the plans were all neatly laid out to rent a house and hire help to care for the baby while Henna attended classes, it all fell apart when the nanny had to leave due to a personal emergency. Having been living about seven kilometres away from the campus, Henna was out of options. But to her luck, the college, faculty and her fellow students stepped up.

"I temporarily moved onto the campus for two months after the nanny left. Although it was difficult, they arranged an accommodation for me," she said. The next step was to figure out what to do while she attended classes. "I used to mail my professors before classes to check whether it would be okay to bring Omy with me," she said. "They agreed every time," Henna recalls fondly.

The arrangement worked well for everyone, including Omy, who would trot around and do his own thing while the classroom was in session. "He is not a very fussy baby. So I did not really restrict him, and he would just walk around during sessions," she said.

However, the experience wasn't all pleasant from tip to toe. "When I first came here, I didn't have a lot of friends or a good support system," Henna said. "Whenever I felt sick, there wasn't anyone to even make me a hot meal," she recalled.

In fact, during her first end-semester examinations, her husband had to come and stay with her and take care of Omy. However, he couldn't do so for the second semester. Luckily for Henna, by then she had strung together a group of enthusiastic youngsters who came together for her.

Omy's little world, which consisted of just his mother and him, began to turn around after Henna participated in a culinary arts event for a fest in Kanpur.

Henna travelled with her team and even shared a room with her teammate while in Kanpur. This was when she began to make friends with her teammates and got close to them. "Our team captain, Kaushik Mandal, even began changing Omy's diapers and feeding him. He took care of the baby as though it were his responsibility," Henna recalls. "In fact, the two got so attached that Omy would even refuse to leave his side," she added.

It was a completely new experience for Henna, as most of them were several years younger than her. "One of the girls I was closest to, 17-year-old Dhruvi, was almost 11 years younger than me," she said, amazed by the level of support her young friends extended.

From there on, Henna had her own ecosystem of support. "On days when I have early morning classes, if Omy has not woken up yet, my friend Adeeb takes Omy to his room," Henna said. "Other times, when I need to step away for some time, my other friend Farheen takes over and watches Omy," she added. "It's because of all of them that I survived," she recalls.

Although things have settled and she has moved back off campus after her helper returned, Henna does take away with her the pleasant memory of how a village of IITians, who are generally perceived as 'reserved', came together to help raise her child.