Amma was also an extraordinary person. She was a fighter to the core, wouldn’t give up, and she had a very strong will to live, and which expressed itself right till the end. In fact, when COVID came and she fell ill and we took her to the hospital, she tested negatively twice for COVID, and—but they placed her in a special room which later I understood was a room where they expected the person to pass away in two or three days. They didn’t expect the person to live for longer, and she lived there for 15 days, and even on the 14th day she looked at the doctors and she said, ‘When am I going home?’ And the fact that the doctors gave evasive answers didn’t deter her will to live. She lived strongly right till her last breath.

She was a woman of excess, and her love language was food, and the entire family knows about this, not just the three of us who benefited immensely from her daily cooking, which was just sublime, absolutely sublime. And but the extended family—she was known for her extraordinary skills at cooking, but also the generosity of it. She would want to fulfill a desire before it was expressed, and if it did get expressed, that was it—you could expect truckloads of it coming your way.

She ran the kitchen like a modern-day factory single-handedly. It’s just extraordinary what she did in that kitchen of hers and what came out of it, through illness, through bad knees, it never stopped her. She just went at it. This was before the days of cloud kitchens, and I remember urging her, ‘You just start something and I will go sell it for you,’ but she never wanted to go the commercial route. She never did that. She was just happy producing large amounts of food every day for her family and whoever else visited her.

The excess would also get expressed in terms of how she used water in the house to clean it, how she spent money, the size of the kolams that she drew outside our gate. Everything was large for her. And she really should have lived in America, I think the size of that country would have—is something that really appealed to her. But that didn’t come to pass.

She had a magic touch when it came to living beings. Plants especially grew beautifully with her. Animals, stray cats that came by were taken care of. Well, we as children obviously, and anybody else who would come would be well-fed and well taken care of.

And she had a way. For instance, with one of our children, we were struggling to get them to take to the bottle, and she did it, and she found a way to get them to take to the bottle. And it was a huge relief for us when that happened.

She lived alone in that house of hers for more than 30 years—well, she lived in it for more than 30 years, but she lived alone perhaps closer to 20 years. And it was the child that would not leave her, or the child that would not abandon her, in some sense. She refused to sell the house till she passed away, and we did manage to bring her back, though it was COVID, back to her home, and we cremated her from there.

She had a very contagious laughter, and it was a very generous laughter. And in many ways, her life was sad, tough, tragic, but also she found joy much later, and even in pockets through the many years. And a lot of the joy came from doing things for her children, her grandchildren, her siblings, her nephews, nieces.

She almost died during childbirth with me. Mine was a difficult birth, and I’ve written about it in the blog, and she survived it thanks to the doctor who came along to save both of us. But the first two, three weeks were as excruciating for her as it was for me because my lip was cut and I couldn’t feed.

She felt the pain of others easily, and she would cry a lot when she saw people in pain, people that she loved particularly in pain. It really hurt her. But man oh man, could she be stubborn as hell.

Oh, I wish I’d just told her that, you know, I understood why she cried and that it’s okay. I think some of the frustration of mine had built during those times when I was caught between my parents where we would have these family meetings that my father would call and he would want to discuss something and he would explain—I don’t know, it’d be something either related to finances or something else in the house—and then he would say something which would sound all so rational. And then my mother would sit there quite silently, sullen, surly, and I didn’t understand then what it was. That was the anger that had welled up from years of living together in a sense of resentment about the decisions that my father had taken which had hurt her.

Principally the one that brought her back to India from Doha. We had gone there, in very difficult initial years of marriage, living in very, very poor circumstances until my father got a break to go to Doha. And four years, there was a kind of sudden wealth that came into their lives, and she was just getting used to it when my father one day decided, ‘Enough is enough, we’re going to go back home. The kids are getting spoiled.’ He got into Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings and he said, ‘Okay, we’re going to go back to India and we’re going to put the kids in a Krishnamurti school.’ And she had no say in the matter at all.

And we came back to India and he decided to build this massive house beyond his means—taking loans, pawning her jewelry, ending up in the red—and then saying, ‘I will not work, I’ve worked very hard all these years, I want a break.’ And then the reality of the financial situation catching up. Two young children to be sent to what were then not particularly cheap schools compared to the other ones, and all income—all savings—gone, in debt, and saying, ‘You know, I don’t think I want to work now.’

And my mother was not somebody who would—who took to work on her terms—on her from her end, saying, ‘Okay, if you won’t go to work, I’ll go to work.’ She went the other way. She said, ‘My domain is the home, I will take care of this, your job is to get the money.’ And so she dug her heels very hard into the ground. And a lot of her anger and resentment came from those kinds of decisions. There were a few others prior in the early stages of the marriage, but this one was the real deal breaker for her.

So we would have these meetings over there and she would be, you know, like I said, surly and silent, and then she would say something and she would start crying. And so here I was trying to translate two languages. One, my father’s seemingly rational language to my mother to say, ‘Okay, this is what he’s saying, what do you think? You know, can we do something like this?’ providing a via media maybe, an in-between kind of a solution that will take us forward. And then listening to her tears, translating that into emotional language to my father, hoping that he can empathize with it. Oh man, was it a mess.

Like my father, my mother also wished that she had a daughter, and I think it was lucky enough for both of them for very different reasons, but I think the common reason would have been that they would have had a different bond with a daughter than with their sons. There was one particular instance when I was much younger, I think about 12, maybe 13, 14, maybe slightly older maybe even 15, 16, and she said, you know, she expressed this, that I wish I had a daughter, and that cut me quite sharply because I looked up at her and I didn’t tell her that, but I thought to myself, you do have a daughter here, you just don’t recognize it. And that remained an unspoken sadness between the two of us.

There was a large age gap between my parents, uh, 11 years. Um, similarly, there was a largish age gap, not as much, of eight and a half years between me and my ex-wife. And, uh, I think that played a role because I think, um, the life stages we found ourselves to be was a little bit out of sync. And, uh, when I was in my early 30s, she was in her 20s and so on, right? And so the kinds of things that, uh, we came to, uh, want or understand came at different times of our lives. And I felt that perhaps, um, it was hard to grasp what I was going through at a later stage, uh, when she was younger. Um, I don’t think eight years is too much of a gap, let’s say when you’re in your 50s as when you’re in your 20s. Um, she did marry very young and so, uh, all of that played a role. Um, but the dynamics between my parents was very different than the dynamics between me and my wife. I don’t think it was the same dynamics.

Much later, I think I came to, uh, understand that I or I began to express the sense that I didn’t feel understood, but that wasn’t part of my early, at least articulation of it. I think we just got so busy with, uh, life itself. Um, and there were many things that happened in the initial years which just needed our attention. And so it was outward-facing, a lot of it. And there was a lot of teamwork actually during our marriage, which was, we worked well together in several phases, which I didn’t see too much of in my parents’ marriage, but I believe that, uh, there were maybe patches of it in their marriage as well, it just didn’t happen in during my growing years. I don’t think the ending of my marriage brought any new insight into my parents’, uh, to answer your question.

If anything, uh, all our decision-making was collaborative. We discussed everything together and it was always a joint decision. And, uh, in fact, people used to make fun of us a bit saying that, you know, what do you guys have so much to talk about even the smallest of things? So I didn’t see a pattern that repeated in that sense. Um, a pattern is repeated in my own life, not necessarily my marriage, I don’t know, uh, of how my father left the house, um, at some point in time when, went on to live alone by himself. The same thing happened to my brother after his divorce, and the same thing has happened to me after my divorce.

I think he would have understood and accepted where I am today. He was always somebody who, from a very early age, trusted that each of us could make our decisions for ourselves. And this translated from which college to go to, which country to live in, what kind of work to do. There were times when he would offer his suggestions if asked, but otherwise, he was absolutely non-interfering. He would leave it be to each of us to figure out what was right for us at from a very, very young age, 16, 18 onwards. He wouldn’t have seen it as a stigma or a failure in life, and maybe he might have encouraged doing, finding something that would make one’s life feel more valuable at this stage. That’s perhaps a conversation maybe we might have had. My mother, on the other hand, would have been deeply saddened. I’m so glad that she didn’t get to figure out Rajesh’s divorce. He kind of kept it little quiet for a long while, and so she kind of hinted at it, but she was not sure if it had happened or not, and I wouldn’t confirm it for her either before her passing away. And thank goodness that neither of them were alive to see him take his life. I think that would have been really tragic for both of them.

Here is the verbatim transcript of the audio provided:

I would tell her three things. First, I would thank her for the unconditional love and support that she gave through everything, through, oof, it was just, it wouldn’t flag, even at times when she was angry with me, it wouldn’t flag. I remember the time when I didn’t get into my favorite college just after my school, and I was quite distraught. My brother was angry with me for not having planned better. My father tried helping practically, he contacted his brother who he thought might be able to support me in some way. And when I got to hear of it, I said, no, I will have none of that, and that upset my father, that I wasn’t taking the help that he was offering and that I was being too idealistic. And it was my mom who had complete, unconditional support for me. She didn’t berate me, she didn’t try to fix the situation. She just stayed up with me through that night because I couldn’t sleep. And that’s all she did. And she said something will work out. And that was the support that she gave me.

She had this tendency to take my pain as her own and live through it. And I understand that now as a parent as well, that regardless of whatever my children might feel about me, this kind of love for one’s child is absolutely unconditional and it can’t go away regardless of whatever happens.

The second thing I would tell her was what I said right at the beginning, which is that I would say, I understand your tears, and it’s perfectly fine, and I know you’ve been sad, and I’m sad that I couldn’t make you, bring you more happiness in your life.

The third thing I would say is that she did an awesome job as a mother and one couldn’t really ask for more, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, and that I am glad I was born to her.