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Dhruv Saxena
My mother asks questions the way other people breathe.
Continuously, without apparent effort, as a basic function of being alive. Every phone call has a structure and the structure is this: she asks something, I answer, she asks something else, I answer, this continues for however long the call lasts, and then she says okay beta, take care, and we hang up. The questions are the call. The call is the questions.
Last month she went quiet.
Not the whole call. Just a stretch of it. Maybe three minutes. I had said something, she had said something back, and then there was just her breathing and the background sounds of whatever was happening in the house and no question arriving to fill the space.
Three minutes of quiet from my mother is the conversational equivalent of a fire alarm.
I immediately asked if she was okay. She said yes. I asked if something had happened. She said no. I asked if she was sure. She said she was just thinking. I asked what she was thinking about. She said nothing, just thinking.
I got off the call and sat with my phone in my hand for a while.
My friend Nikhil has the same experience with his mother. He described it to me once as the inverse panic. The louder and more question-heavy his mother is, the more he wishes she would just be quiet for a moment. And then the moment she is quiet, he cannot think about anything else. The quiet is wrong. The quiet means something. The quiet requires investigation.
He told me he once excused himself from a work meeting because his mother had been quiet for two minutes on a call and he needed to call her back immediately to confirm she was fine. She was fine. She had been distracted by something on television. He returned to the meeting. He did not tell his colleagues why he had stepped out.
I was home last weekend. We were sitting at the kitchen table, chai out and Mom's Magic biscuits between us the way they always are, and I asked her about the quiet call. She looked at me for a moment and then said she had just been thinking about something. I asked what. She said it was nothing. I asked again. She said she had been thinking about my father's health check-up results and had not wanted to say anything until she had processed it herself.
The quiet had been protection. She had been carrying something and had not wanted to hand it to me until she knew what to do with it herself. The quiet was not alarming. The quiet was her managing something before involving me.
I ate a biscuit. I felt both relieved and slightly foolish.
The Baseline
To understand the panic, you have to understand the baseline.
My mother's baseline on a phone call is high activity. Questions, observations, updates, follow-up questions to previous answers, the occasional unsolicited piece of advice delivered as information, commentary on whatever is happening in the house while she is talking to me. It is a full programme. It has been a full programme for thirty-one years.
The baseline is so established that I no longer hear it as noise. I hear it as the normal texture of speaking to her. It is, in the way that all baselines are, invisible until it changes.
When it changes, even slightly, the change is immediately audible. The way you notice a sound stopping that you had not noticed was there. My mother going quiet is the conversational equivalent of a fan switching off in a room. You did not know you were registering the fan until it stopped and now the silence is very loud.
My friend Karan described his version of this as the wrong kind of fine. His mother is also a high-baseline person. When she says she is fine in the normal way, it sounds a certain way. When something is actually wrong, the fine sounds slightly different. Not dramatically different. Just slightly. He cannot fully describe the difference. He just knows it when he hears it.
He heard it once during a call two years ago. He got in his car and drove three hours without telling her he was coming. She opened the door and looked at him and said what are you doing here. He said he was in the area. She said he was not in the area, he lived three hours away.
He said he had been in the area three hours ago.
She made him chai. She told him what had been going on. It was not nothing. He was glad he had come.
The Investigation
When the quiet happens, the investigation begins.
The investigation is not announced. It is conducted through questions that are trying to locate the source of the quiet without directly asking about the quiet, because asking directly about the quiet would make her feel like she has worried me, which she does not want to do, which is often why she went quiet in the first place.
The questions go in concentric circles. Outer circle: general wellbeing. Are you okay. How are you feeling. Everything alright. Middle circle: specific areas of concern. How is your health. Is Papa okay. Has anything happened. Inner circle: the thing itself. You seemed a bit quiet on the call. I just wanted to check.
The inner circle question is the one that usually works. Not because she volunteers information immediately. But because the asking of it signals that I noticed, and the noticing is sometimes enough for the thing to come out.
My mother does not want to burden me. This is the foundational principle of her silence. When she goes quiet it is almost always because there is something she is carrying and has decided, for reasons of love, not to hand to me yet.
The frustrating thing about this is that the not-handing-it-to-me makes me more worried than the thing itself would. I have told her this. She has acknowledged it. The next time something happened, she went quiet again.
The logic of her love is not something I can argue with.
The False Alarms
Not every quiet is a signal.
I have conducted full investigations into quiets that turned out to be: a pressure cooker she had left on, a cat from the neighbourhood that had appeared on the windowsill and was distracting her, a serial she was half-watching that had reached a dramatic point, and once, memorably, a mosquito she was attempting to locate in the room.
The mosquito quiet lasted four minutes. I had worked myself into a moderate state of concern by the time she said got it, triumphantly, and resumed normal conversational service.
I said what happened.
She said there was a mosquito.
I said I thought something was wrong.
She said something was wrong. There was a mosquito. She found it. Everything was fine now.
I had no response to this. She moved on. We continued the call.
The Thing I Have Accepted
I have accepted that I will never fully stop panicking when she goes quiet.
The baseline is too established. The deviation is too noticeable. The love is too large for a three-minute silence to feel neutral. Every quiet will be investigated. Some investigations will find something real. Most will find a mosquito.
Both outcomes are fine. The investigation is not really about finding something. It is about making sure she knows the quiet was noticed. That I am paying attention. That she does not have to carry things in silence because she is worried about burdening me.
She will go quiet again. I will notice again. I will ask if she is okay.
She will say yes, just thinking.
I will ask what she is thinking about.
She will say nothing, just thinking.
And I will sit with my phone for a while after we hang up.
This is the call. This is all the calls. I would not change any of it.
