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Dhruv Saxena
My kurta was torn.
Not badly. A small tear at the seam, the kind that is not visible when you are wearing it but that you can feel when you put it on and that you know will get worse if you ignore it. I had been ignoring it for approximately three months. The plan was to get it fixed at some point. The point had not arrived.
I went home for a visit. I unpacked my bag. The kurta was in the bag because I had brought clothes for a week and the kurta was one of them. I put it in the small pile of things that were going into the cupboard.
Three days later I went to wear the kurta. The tear was gone.
I did not say anything to her immediately. I put the kurta on. I wore it. Later that evening I asked her when she had fixed it. She said she had noticed it when she was putting things away. I said I did not ask her to fix it. She said she knew. She said she had done it while I was out. I said she should not have done it without telling me. She looked at me with the particular expression she reserves for things I have said that do not require a response. We moved on.
This is a pattern. Not the kurta specifically. The pattern of things that are broken or worn or in need of attention that I have been ignoring, and that get fixed during a visit home, without announcement, while I am out or asleep or in another room.
I have been paying attention to this pattern for several years. The scope of it is larger than I initially understood.
I was home last month. We were at the kitchen table, chai out, Mom's Magic biscuits between us, and I asked her directly what she had fixed this visit. She looked at me for a moment and then said she had not fixed anything. I said I knew she had fixed things and I would like to know what. She said she had just done a few small things. I asked what small things. She listed four items. I had not noticed any of them were broken.
The Inventory
Across the visits I have been tracking, the fixed things include the following categories.
Clothing repairs. Hems that needed attention. A button that had been loose. The kurta. A sock I had been wearing with a small hole in it that I had considered acceptable and she had considered not acceptable. These items are repaired and returned to exactly where they were, so that unless you are looking for the repair you will not find it.
Kitchen items. Something in my bag that was not quite right. A container that had a lid problem. A zip on a pouch that was catching. Things I use and had registered as slightly imperfect and had made a mental note to deal with and had then forgotten the mental note.
Things in the house that I had broken during previous visits and not fully fixed. The wobbly chair leg I had mentioned once and not returned to. The thing in the bathroom I had said I would look at and had not looked at. These have a longer timeline. They get fixed at some point after the visit in which I mentioned them, sometimes much later, and I find out they are fixed when I next visit and notice they are no longer broken.
My friend Nikhil's mother extends this to his flat in Mumbai. She has visited twice. Both times she has, in the course of the visit, identified and fixed things that needed fixing in the flat that Nikhil had not noticed or had noticed and deprioritised. She fixed a curtain rail that was pulling slightly from the wall. She rehemmed a pair of trousers that were sitting in his cupboard. She reattached a handle on a kitchen cabinet that was coming loose.
He found all of these things in the state of having been fixed after she left. He called her. She said she had just done a few things. He asked why she had not told him. She said there was no need to tell him, the things were fixed now.
The Why of It
I have thought about why she does this without telling me and I have arrived at something.
If she told me, I would feel guilty. I would say I could have done it myself. I would say she did not need to. The telling would create a transaction, a debt, a moment where I was aware of having received something and she was aware of having given it. She does not want the transaction. She wants the thing to be fixed and for me to have a fixed thing without having to carry the knowledge that she fixed it.
The not-telling is an act of love that is trying to pass itself off as nothing. She fixed the kurta because the kurta needed fixing and she could fix it. She does not want credit. She wants me to have a kurta that is not torn.
My friend Karan's mother takes this further. She visits his flat once a year and after every visit he finds things that have been addressed. Not just repairs. Organisation. Something she has found a better place for. Something she has cleaned with more thoroughness than his regular cleaning. A kitchen arrangement that is slightly improved.
He said he used to feel slightly invaded by this. He lived alone, the flat was his, and the evidence of her having gone through it while he was out felt complicated.
And then one year he came home to find that she had framed a photograph. A photograph he had printed and left sitting on a shelf because he kept meaning to get it framed and had not. She had found a frame somewhere, framed it, and put it back in approximately the same place.
He said he stood in front of that framed photograph for a while. He said the invasion feeling went away and something else replaced it. The photograph had been sitting on that shelf for two years. She had been in the flat for three days and she had noticed it and done something about it.
She had seen what he had meant to do and she had done it for him. Without telling him.
The Thing I Have Started Doing
I have started leaving things slightly broken when I visit.
Not on purpose exactly. I have started being less diligent about hiding the small imperfections. The slightly worn thing. The item that needs a small repair. I leave them visible, in the natural course of the visit, and I do not fix them before I go.
This is not laziness. It is an invitation. An acknowledgement that the fixing is something she wants to do and that refusing the fixing is refusing something she is offering.
She fixed the kurta because the kurta was broken and she loves me and fixing broken things that belong to the people you love is just what you do when you can do it.
I wear the kurta. The repair is invisible. She is in it.
