My Mother Has Opinions About My Friends She Has Never Met

Dhruv Saxena

My mother has formed a complete assessment of my friend Nikhil.

She has never met Nikhil. She has heard about Nikhil across approximately seven years of phone calls and visits. She has heard about things Nikhil did, things Nikhil said, situations Nikhil was involved in that I mentioned because they were interesting or funny or relevant to something I was explaining. From these fragments she has assembled a comprehensive portrait of a person she has never been in the same room as.

Her assessment is detailed and confident. She knows which of his qualities she finds admirable. She knows which of his qualities she has reservations about. She has specific opinions about a decision he made three years ago that she heard about through me and has not forgotten. She has a view on how he handled a situation I mentioned once, in passing, in a call that I do not even remember having.

I mentioned Nikhil last month. She immediately said how is Nikhil doing with the thing. I asked which thing. She said the thing from a while back that he was dealing with. I had to think for a moment to work out which thing she meant. I had mentioned it once. She had filed it and was following up.

I was home at the time, at the kitchen table, chai out, Mom's Magic biscuits on the plate, and she asked me whether Nikhil had sorted out the situation. I said yes, it was fine. She said good, because she had felt that the approach he had taken was the right one even though it had looked difficult at the time. I said she had never met him. She said she did not need to meet him to have an opinion about the approach.

She is right. She has opinions about all of them. Karan and Priya and the others I have mentioned over the years. Each one has a file.

The File System

The file on each friend is built from mentions.

Every time I mention someone in a phone call or a visit, the mention goes into the file. The file contains: what they have done, what they have said, how they handled things I described, what their circumstances are, what my relationship with them seems like, and her assessment of all of the above.

The file is not neutral. It is opinionated. She forms views. The views are based on incomplete information delivered second-hand through the filter of my own telling of things. She knows this and proceeds anyway.

My friend Karan is in the file as someone reliable. Not because she has seen his reliability herself. Because every time I have mentioned Karan he has been doing or saying something that registers as reliable. The file has accumulated enough reliability data points that reliability has become her primary association with him.

My friend Priya is in the file as someone sharp. Again, not from direct observation. From the things I have quoted her saying and the way I have described how she handles things. Sharp is the word my mother would use if you asked her to describe Priya. She has arrived at this word through years of second-hand information.

The assessments are more accurate than they should be given the methodology. This is the part I find most interesting. She is working with incomplete, filtered, second-hand data and her conclusions about these people are largely correct.

The Photograph Evidence

The file is supplemented by photographs.

My mother follows some of my friends on Instagram. Not all of them. The ones I have mentioned enough that she was curious. She follows them quietly and does not interact but she sees their content and the content feeds into the file.

She knows things about my friends' lives that they have not told me because she saw them on Instagram and mentioned them to me. She knows when someone posted something that indicated a life change. She knows which of my friends has recently been somewhere interesting. She knows what my friend's flat looks like because there was a reel that showed it.

My friend Nikhil does not know my mother follows him on Instagram. I have not told him. I am not sure how to explain it. The explanation would require me to also explain the file system and the comprehensive assessment and the thing from three years ago she is still tracking, and I am not sure Nikhil is ready for the full picture.

The Meeting

When my mother meets one of my friends for the first time, she already knows them.

Not in every detail. But the file is there. The preliminary assessment is there. She is not meeting a stranger. She is meeting the person the file has described and confirming or updating the file in light of direct evidence.

My friend Karan came home with me once, briefly, for something practical. He was there for maybe forty-five minutes. He had chai. He was polite and warm and exactly as reliable as the file had indicated. My mother talked to him for twenty minutes. When he left she said he is exactly as you described him.

I had not described him. Not in any organised way. I had mentioned him over years of calls and visits. She had built the description herself.

She also said he had good posture, which was a detail I had not mentioned and she had observed independently and filed in the supplementary section.

The Accuracy Problem

The accuracy of the file is something I find both impressive and slightly unsettling.

She has formed views about people she has never met based on information she received from me, a person who is not an objective reporter of events involving his own friends. I have my own biases. I notice some things and not others. I tell her things in the specific way I experienced them, which is not the same as the way they were.

And yet her conclusions are largely correct. Not perfectly correct. But in the ballpark in a way that suggests the methodology is working better than it should.

I think this is because she is reading between the lines. When I tell her something about a friend, she is processing not just what I say but how I say it. The things I emphasise. The things I leave out. The tone I use. The speed at which I tell the story. She is reading all of this and it gives her more information than the words alone would give.

She is, in other words, reading me. And from reading me she is understanding them.

The file is built from my data. But it is interpreted by her. And her interpretation is better than mine.

Nikhil is going to meet her eventually. I think she will like him. I think he will be slightly unnerved by how much she already knows.

I am going to let him find out in real time.