My mother, the family's memory-keeper

Sometimes I wonder if my mother, the dancer, did not dream of the life not led. I might be the writer, but she's the storyteller

- SANDIP ROY

After a great-aunt died, my mother read a little tribute I wrote for her and said wistfully, "You're the writer in the family. Perhaps you'll write something like that for me after I am gone. Why don't you write it now so I can read it?"

I rolled my eyes and said, "The feeling won't come now."

In the last few weeks as my mother struggles with a slew of sudden health issues, the feeling still hasn't "come" but when I see her lying in a hospital bed, confused and shrunken, I feel perilously close to it.

I didn't grow up in a family that said "I love you" easily. That was too western, like in a Hollywood movie. "Have you eaten?" is the way we said "I love you." When I lived in America, my mother would call and ask if I had eaten. Sometimes I made up dishes to avoid telling her I had cereal for dinner because I had been too tired to cook. It was a love lie.

Years later when I returned to India, a middle-aged man, my mother still decided the household's daily menu. She watched cooking shows on television and wrote down recipes "in rough" on pieces of scrap paper. The ones that got passing grade were transferred to her "fair" recipe book. At dinner, if we failed to appreciate the dish adequately, she would be miffed. Just as she showed love through food, she expected to be shown love through our appreciation of it. In her own ill health though, she is liberated from the need for such niceties. After my sister made chocolate pudding for her, she asked grumpily, "Is this pumpkin?"