When Peter Handke’s mother committed suicide, he took it on himself to record her life. When you go back to Bombay, I will write”. She usually waves it off with a smile: “when you are with me, I will talk. I bought her a diary: write anything that comes into your head, about your life, about your childhood, about your health, anything. But what is going on in her head when she puts aside her usually cheerful self on such rare occasions? I have asked her to write. It could be due to her body already feeling spent in her mid-fifties. But when it is pronounced it makes her look sad. But once in a blue moon, when in a reflective mood, mostly when I visit her in our hometown and when we sit at the dining table after everyone in the family sleeps, she allows a hint of regret or something of its ilk to drop during our conversations. She has always been what I was supposed to fill on innumerable forms over the years: a housewife. Mine has spent a better part of her life in the kitchen and managing our daily routines, limiting the many possibilities life could have offered. Having lived my formative years in a middle-class family, I look at mothers in a certain way.

You need not call her “aap” and often use “tu”, more intimate in comparison, and it removes the gap that “aap” presupposes. In Gujarat, where I grew up, it is a common practice to not use a respectful address for one’s mother. She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them: Marquez writes in Love in the time of Cholera.

Em and the big hoom by jerry pinto