I'm Aisha Ansari, a Pakistani girl, who has lived her entire life abroad, always finding a way back home. These candles are my newest way of doing that. They bring you home.

Lamha started a few years ago, with my sister and her best friend. What set it off was uncertainty. We didn't know if my sister would make it to my wedding in Pakistan. That turned into late-night conversations, and somewhere in them, a question: what if there was a candle that smelled like my shaadi? One that smelled like rose-heavy gajrey a dulhan wears? I wanted to capture those moments in wax, so the person I loved and missed most on my wedding day could still feel a fraction of what it was like.

For the longest time, it stayed just an idea.

Then I got married, and I moved from my childhood home in Dubai to Canada. Everything was different. I was homesick, and for the first time I understood it from the inside: what it feels like to be left out, to miss the moments happening inside your own family. It wasn't until I visited my sister after it all, that we finally made our first candle. She ordered our first candle making kit and some fragrance oils, and the three of us made Khush Khabri together. That was earlier this year. She pushed me to keep going.

Why candles? The simplest reason is that they make a room smell good. I've always loved them. I light them to relax, to unwind. But I wanted to stop burning random scents and start burning familiar ones. The ones that actually mean something to me.

Every Lamha candle is poured by hand in our home, with my husband beside me. And who else helps? Everyone. Friends, my parents, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, cousins. Most of them don't even live here, they might just be visiting, but it never matters to them. My father-in-law has labelled jars. My cousin set up my candles at a cultural event in her non-desi neighborhood in Illinois. My sister in Texas is out there trying to sell them.

Lamha isn't possible without the people in our lives. Moments would be so empty if we had no one to share them with. So this isn't really my story — it's ours.

Lamha is all of us.

— Aisha Ansari
Founder, Lamha