PERSONAL HISTORY - A VISIT TO MADAM BEDI

I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.

- TARA WESTOVER

My friend Sukrit invited me to M'India.

His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn't be there-he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford-but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked.

The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother.

I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it.

I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.

I don't know where the hope lived or what it lived on. I had been estranged from my father for a year by then, but I was still telling myself that the estrangement was temporary, that the breach would heal. My mother was key.

I thought she would convince my father, soften his heart. That's how it happens in the Bible, when two souls fall out of kinship. God softens a heart. I wasn't religious, not the way my father had raised me to be, but I believed in the softening of hearts. So I waited.

For a letter. A phone call. I imagined my father saying, "Come home." Of course I could not go to India. When my father called, I had to be ready.

Months passed. The seasons changed.

I wrote my mother every few weeks and she answered. She wrote as if everything were all right, as if we were not estranged. She told me about her days, her shopping trips with my sister, the steady expansion of her herbal business. From these lines of text, I extracted the sensation of being a daughter.

Then another year had passed with silence from my father. It was difficult, then, to keep believing that we would reconcile, but equally difficult to give up that belief. I did not know how to live with the loss of my parents, or the bitterness that the loss was introducing into my life.

I must have seemed bewildered.