Dhruv Saxena

There is a photograph on my parents' shelf that has always confused me.

It's my mother. Clearly. Same face, same smile. But everything else is wrong. She's wearing a yellow kurta I've never seen before. Her hair is different. She's standing somewhere that isn't our house, laughing at something that isn't visible in the frame, with an ease that I can only describe as unbothered.

She looks like a person who has nowhere to be.

I have never, in thirty-one years, seen my mother look like she has nowhere to be. She always has somewhere to be. Usually somewhere that involves feeding someone or fixing something or finding out why nobody told her about the plan earlier.

I asked her about the photo last month. We were sitting at the table, she'd put out Mom's Magic biscuits the way she always does, and I picked up the photo and said, "Who is this person?"

She laughed. "That's me."

"I know it's you. But who were you?"

She looked at the photo for a moment. Then she said, "That was before you."

She said it completely normally. Like it explained everything. Which, I suppose, it did.

The Before

Here's what I knew about my mother's life before I existed: almost nothing.

I knew she grew up in Lucknow. I knew she had two sisters. I knew she studied economics, which I only found out recently and which genuinely surprised me because nobody in our house has ever once discussed economics. I knew she used to ride a scooter, which my father mentioned once and my mother immediately denied with the energy of someone who absolutely used to ride a scooter.

That was it. That was the entire file I had on a human being who has been the central figure of my entire existence.

I decided, looking at that photo, to actually ask.

What I Found Out

She wanted to be a journalist.

I did not know this. She has never mentioned this. She has spent thirty years asking me if I've eaten and making sure I have clean clothes and I had no idea she once wanted to be a journalist.

She said it casually, the way you mention something that stopped being relevant a long time ago. She'd done some writing in college. For the university newsletter. She enjoyed it. She thought maybe that was the direction things were going.

And then life, as she put it, went another direction.

I asked her if she regretted it.

She thought about it properly, which I appreciated. She didn't just say no immediately the way parents sometimes do when they don't want you to feel guilty about existing.

She said, "Not regret exactly. But I wonder sometimes."

She wonders sometimes. My mother, who I have never once seen sit still for longer than ten minutes without finding something productive to do, wonders sometimes about the version of herself that went a different direction.

I ate a biscuit and didn't know what to say.

The Person in the Photo

My friend Nikhil had a similar experience. He found a photo of his mother from her college days. She was at what looked like a cultural programme, on stage, in a costume, mid-performance. He had never known his mother to perform anything. She is, by his description, one of the most reserved people he's ever met.

He asked her about it. She lit up immediately. Apparently she did theatre all through college. Lead roles. She loved it. She stopped when she got married and moved cities because there wasn't really a setup for it anymore and then the kids came and then it just never came back.

She hadn't thought about it in years, she told him. It was nice to be asked.

That last sentence got him. It was nice to be asked. As if being asked about her own life was a small unexpected gift.

The Gap We Don't Think About

Our mothers existed for a significant amount of time before we arrived. My mother was twenty-six when she had me. That's twenty-six years of a full, complete, ongoing life that I know almost nothing about.

She had opinions and friendships and ambitions and bad days and good days and embarrassing moments and private jokes and at least one phase that involved a scooter she now denies. She was a person navigating the world entirely independently of me, because I didn't exist yet.

And then I arrived and became, more or less, the main character of her story. Which is lovely. But it also means the previous chapters just sort of disappeared from the conversation.

My other friend Ananya sat her mother down last year and asked her to tell her about her twenties. Just that. Her twenties.

Her mother talked for two hours.

Ananya said she learned things she never expected. Her mother had a best friend she'd lost touch with after marriage and still thought about. She'd wanted to travel but never got to. She'd had a falling out with her own mother once, a serious one, and they'd repaired it but it had taken years.

She was a full person with a full story. Ananya had just never thought to ask.

Back to the Photo

I put the photo back on the shelf. My mother watched me do it.

"You should ask her more," my father said, from behind his newspaper, apparently having listened to the entire conversation.

My mother waved her hand like this wasn't a big deal. But she was smiling.

I'm going to ask more. Not all at once, not in a formal sit-down way that would make her suspicious. Just gradually. The way you'd want someone to be curious about you. In small, genuine questions that say I want to know who you were before you were mine.

She wanted to be a journalist. She rode a scooter she now denies. She stood in that yellow kurta laughing at something off-camera, unbothered, with her whole life still open.

I wish I'd known her then. I'm glad I'm getting to know her now.