Dhruv Saxena

I was sitting with my mother last year, both of us doing nothing in particular. She was folding clothes. I was pretending to read, when I asked her, completely out of nowhere, what she wanted to be when she was a teenager.

She stopped folding. Looked at me like I’d asked her something in a foreign language. Then she laughed and said, “an air hostess. Can you imagine?”

I could not imagine. My mother, who irons her dupattas before going to the supermarket and keeps three backup packets of everything in the pantry and has never, to my knowledge, been late for anything in her life. An air hostess.

I know what you’re thinking. The signs were there. Hmm..

“Why didn't you?” I continued.

She shrugged. “Different time. Different expectations. Your Nana would have had a full heart attack.” She went back to folding. The conversation moved on. But I kept thinking about it for days.

Because in thirty-something years of knowing this woman, I had never once asked her what she dreamed about when she was young. It had simply never occurred to me. I knew her as my mother. I didn’t know her as a person who existed before that.

And that felt like an enormous thing to have missed.

The Version of Her We Never Think to Ask About

We come into our mother’ lives at a very specific chapter and we assume that chapter is the whole book.

We know the mother version. The one who packed our tiffins and attended our PTMs and cried at our graduations. We know her preferences, her habits, her pet peeves. We know she doesn’t like the fan on full speed and she’ll always offer you food the second you walk in and she has strong opinions about the correct way to store onions.

But we don’t know the girl she was before all of that. The things she wanted. The things she gave up. The things she chose, and the things that were chosen for her.

That’s an entire person we’ve never met. And she's standing right there in the kitchen making chai.

Why We Don’t Ask

Partly it’s habit. Our relationship has a groove, and the groove goes in a particular direction. She asks about us, we update her, she worries, we reassure her, everyone has chai, someone leaves. It’s comfortable. It works. And comfortable grooves are hard to step out of. Right?

Partly it’s that we assume we already know her. She’s our mother. We’ve known her our whole lives. What could there possibly be to discover?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

My friend Priya called me after she’d spent a weekend at her parents’ place last winter. She’d asked her mother, on a whim, what her favourite memory from her own childhood was. Her mother had talked for forty-five minutes. Priya said she sat there the whole time thinking, why have I never asked this before? Why did we spend so many weekends talking about my life when hers is apparently this interesting?

The Questions Worth Asking

These aren’t therapy prompts. They’re just the kinds of things you’d ask anyone you were genuinely curious about.

“What's something you were really good at when you were young that you don't do anymore?”
My mother said drawing. She used to sketch faces. I have never seen her draw anything in my entire life. I didn’t know this about her until last year.

“What's something you wish you'd done differently? Not about us. About yourself.”
This one takes courage to ask and courage to hear. But the answers are almost always worth it. It makes her feel seen as a person with her own story, not just a supporting character in yours.

“What did you and your friends do for fun when you were my age?”
This is a great one because it’s light enough that she won’t feel interrogated, but specific enough that it actually opens something up. You’ll learn things. I promise.

“Is there something you've always wanted to try but never have?”
My aunt said pottery. She’s 64. My cousin booked her a class the following month. She went three times and hated it but loved the story.

“What's something about your own mother that you understand now that you didn't when you were younger?”
This one is my favourite because it does two things at once. It gives her space to reflect, and it quietly tells you something about how she sees herself as a mother too.

“What were you most afraid of at my age?”
The answers to this one are consistently surprising. Fears you’d never expect. And somewhere in there, usually, something that explains a thing or two about how she raised you.

The Trick Is Asking When Nothing Is Happening

The best conversations with our mothers don’t happen when there’s an agenda. I feel, they happen when you’re both doing something else. Folding clothes, making chai, sitting in the car, standing in the kitchen waiting for the pressure cooker to whistle.

There’s something about parallel activity that lowers everyone’s guard. She’s not being interviewed. You’re not being earnest. You’re just two people in a kitchen, and one of you asked something, and now you’re both somewhere you didn’t expect to be.

For instance, I keep Sunfeast Mom's Magic in my kitchen now. There’s something about sitting down with chai and a biscuit that signals, we’re not rushing. This isn’t a quick check-in. We’re just here for a bit. And in that unhurried space, the good questions tend to surface on their own.

While the Relationship Is Still Evolving

There’s a version of this piece that could’ve been about regret. All the questions we didn’t ask and now can’t. But I don't want to write that piece and you don’t need to read it. Because the relationship isn’t finished. It’s still going. She's still there, I hope. Probably wondering why you haven’t called.

The questions can happen now. This weekend. On the next call. In the next quiet moment when you’re both in the same room and neither of you is particularly busy.

You don’t need an occasion. You just need to remember that she was a full person before you arrived. With dreams and fears and a version of herself she probably hasn’t thought about in years. And that asking about that person is one of the kindest things you can do.

She wanted to be an air hostess. Can you imagine?

Ask your mother what she wanted to be. See where it goes.