Farming fairytale: LOSHNI'S HAPPY ENDING

A Southland mum reveals how she found purpose in helping other rural women

- Michele Hewitson

Here’s the thing about fairy tales – they end happily ever after, but we never get to see what the ever-after actually looks like.

But Loshni Manikam knows. She was the second of three daughters in a “very traditional” Hindu family growing up in Durban, South Africa. She was a tomboy. She preferred helping her dad fix the car to joining her mum and sisters in the kitchen.

“I didn’t want to be the girly girl,” she recalls.

Still, Loshni read the fairy tales. She knew she should have been living happily ever after, especially after finding her “prince”, her husband Donald, and immigrating to New Zealand to be with him.

“I had love and fresh air, which was awesome,” she shares. “He loved me, respected me and wanted me to be happy – and that’s pretty cool, right?”

They had three “healthy kids who are sometimes quite lovely”, named Lukesh, now 20, Suri, 18, and Karminee, 14.

They lived in a beautiful old farmhouse and had plenty of home-grown food. They had a successful sharemilking business. What was there not to be happy-ever-after about?

Loshni didn’t know. But she knew something was missing and that something was herself. She’d lost her identity, even though she was what she thought she wanted to be – a wife, mother and farmer who, with Donald, share-milked 600 cows in the tiny Southland town of Winton.