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Dhruv Saxena
My mother starts packing for my departure approximately eighteen hours before I leave.
Not my packing. Hers. The packing she does on my behalf, which is a parallel operation running alongside my actual visit and which I only become aware of in stages, as items begin appearing in a bag I did not bring or a box that has materialised near the door.
The first stage is the food. Something gets made the day before I leave that is not on the regular meal rotation. Something specific. Something that travels well and that she knows I will eat at home in Bangalore on a Tuesday when I am tired and have not organised dinner and the fridge has nothing useful in it. She makes this without announcing she is making it. It just appears.
The second stage is the supplementary food. The dal she made two days ago that there is still some of. The pickle she knows I like that she has been meaning to send with me. The dry snack she has portioned into a container that will not leak. The specific thing that a neighbour gave her that she has decided is better experienced by me than by her.
The third stage is the non-food items. Something she has found in the house that she thinks I need. A book she has finished and wants me to read. A medicine she has decided I should have in Bangalore. Something practical that she purchased because she thought of me when she saw it and has been waiting for a visit to hand over.
By the time I am packing my own bag, there is already a separate collection of things that are also coming with me that I did not know about and had not planned for.
I was getting ready to leave last month. I was doing my own packing, which takes me twenty minutes. She appeared in the doorway with a bag. The bag had been packed by her. I looked at the bag. The bag was heavier than anything I had brought with me to this house. I asked what was in it. She began listing items. The listing took three minutes. I had a flight in four hours. I accepted the bag.
We had a final chai and the last of the Mom's Magic biscuits before I left, because that is what we always do when I am leaving, and she had the expression she has when I am about to go which is the expression of someone making a final check that everything that needs to be in the bag is in the bag.
Everything was in the bag. I know because she put it there.
The Food Architecture
The food packing is a structural achievement.
Each container is positioned to survive a specific journey. The things that might leak are sealed and then placed inside another container as insurance. The things that are fragile are padded. The order of the items in the bag reflects the order in which they should ideally be encountered. The thing I should eat first is accessible. The thing I can eat later is at the bottom.
She has been doing this long enough that she knows exactly what travels from Delhi to Bangalore. She knows what the journey does to food and she plans accordingly. The architecture of the bag is based on thirty-one years of data about how I travel and what happens to things when I travel.
My friend Nikhil's mother packs the bag and then repacks it. She packs it once, considers it, takes some things out and rearranges them, and repacks. He has watched this process. He said it happens with the focus of someone solving a structural problem they have been thinking about since before he arrived for the visit. She is not casually putting things in a bag. She is optimising.
He said the optimised bag is always better than it looks from the outside. Every time he unpacks it in Mumbai he finds something he did not know was there. Something she put in at the last stage, pressed into a corner of the bag, that she knew he would find and need.
The Things That Appear at the Door
The packing is not complete when the bag is complete.
As I move toward the door, things continue to appear. One more thing, she says, and produces something. She has been doing this my entire life and I have learned that one more thing means at minimum three more things, delivered in sequence, as if each one triggers the memory of the next.
The one more thing is the specific item she has been meaning to give me for weeks and kept forgetting and just remembered. The second one more thing is the thing she thought of while she was packing and went to get and is now here. The third one more thing is the thing she genuinely just thought of and which is, in her assessment, too important to leave until next time.
My friend Karan has timed the one more thing sequence. On average it is four items and adds seven minutes to the departure. He does not factor the original departure time into his planning. He factors in the one more thing time and then adds a buffer. He has never missed a flight.
He said the one more thing items are always the best items in the bag. The ones that feel most like her, most specific, most clearly chosen for him rather than just packed. The spontaneity is the quality. She thought of it as he was leaving and she gave it to him immediately and that immediacy is its own kind of love.
What Is Actually Being Packed
I have thought about the packing for a long time and I think I understand it now.
She cannot come with me to Bangalore. She cannot be there on the Tuesday when I am tired and the fridge is empty and I need something that feels like home. She cannot be in my flat at 8pm when I open the dal she made and heat it up and eat it at my kitchen table alone.
But she can put the dal in the bag.
She can send the pickle I like and the medicine she thinks I need and the book she finished and the thing the neighbour gave her and the one more thing she just remembered. She can pack the bag with the care and the architecture and the optimisation and the three-minute listing of contents and she can hand it to me at the door.
And then when I am in Bangalore and I open the bag and I find the things she put there, she is in the bag. She has sent herself, in the form of everything she thought I would need, across the distance.
I landed in Bangalore last month. I unpacked the bag. At the very bottom, in the corner, was a small packet of something sweet she had wrapped separately. I had not seen her put it in. She had not mentioned it in the three-minute listing.
I stood in my flat holding the packet for a while before I opened it.
I know she put it there for exactly that moment.
