Dhruv Saxena

I found out by accident.

My sister forwarded me a screenshot. It was a text from my mother, sent at 11:43 pm on a Tuesday, asking if she'd eaten dinner. The exact same text, word for word, that she'd sent me directly twenty minutes earlier. Same spelling. Same punctuation. Same unnecessary full stop at the end that my mother puts at the end of every message.

She was texting each of us individually. Every single time. While we were all, at that very moment, talking to each other in a group chat she had no idea existed.

It made me really sad.

Our family group chat, for context, is called "The Originals." My sister named it. It has me, my sister, and two cousins in it, and it is where the actual conversations happen. Trip planning, family gossip, complaints about extended relatives, the occasional life update that needs a second opinion before it goes public. It is lively, frequently chaotic, and has been running for four years.

My mother knows about a different group chat. The official one. The one called "Family" that has both my parents, both sets of grandparents who were added and have never sent a single message, three aunts who only use it to forward Good Morning images, and my uncle who once accidentally sent a voice note meant for someone else that nobody has ever acknowledged. That group chat looks like a government notice board.

She thinks that's where the family lives. She has no idea about The Originals.

Last Sunday I was at my parents' place, eating my mother's extremely good aloo paratha. She'd put out Mom's Magic biscuits with the chai, the way she always does, like they're a non-negotiable part of sitting down together. And she mentioned something my sister had told her. Something I'd said to my sister, in The Originals, that my sister had then relayed to my mother individually over their own separate text thread.

So my mother was receiving information about me, secondhand, from my sister, who got it from a group chat my mother doesn't know exists.

I smiled and said nothing. She refilled my chai. The paratha was very good.

The Infrastructure of the Indian Family

Every Indian family, I have come to believe, runs on at least three parallel communication channels simultaneously.

There's the official channel, which is the family group chat where the Good Morning images live. There's the unofficial channel, which is where the actual information travels. And then there's the individual channel, which is your mother, texting each person separately, because she either doesn't know about the group chat or doesn't trust that her message will be seen if it's not sent directly to each person individually.

My mother operates almost entirely on the individual channel. She texts me, then my sister, then my cousin, then presumably whoever else is on her mental list, sending variations of the same message to each person because she wants to make sure each person actually received it.

What She's Actually Doing

My friend Varun figured this out before I did. His mother does the same thing. He asked her once why she didn't just send one message to everyone. She looked at him like he'd said something mildly strange and said, "Because I'm not texting everyone. I'm texting you."

That stopped him in his tracks. He told me about it weeks later, still thinking about it.

She's not sending a broadcast. She's having individual conversations. Every text to him is a text to him specifically, not a message fired into a group and hoped for the best. The extra effort isn't inefficiency. It's intentionality. She wants him to know the text was for him.

Meanwhile he'd been in a group chat with his siblings for three years, occasionally discussing her, never thinking to add her.

The Guilt Nobody Admits

If you have a family group chat your mother isn't in, you know this feeling. It's not exactly guilt. It's more like a mild, persistent awareness that you've created a hierarchy and she's on the wrong side of it.

You tell yourself it's practical. You'd have to watch your language. You couldn't complain about certain relatives. The dynamic would change. All of this is true. It would change things.

But when you find out she's been individually texting each of you the same message at 11:43 pm because she doesn't have a group to send it to, the practical argument gets a little harder to make with a straight face. Isn’t it?

My cousin Priya actually added her mother to their cousins group chat two years ago, bracing for impact. Her mother's first message was a Good Morning image with flowers. Her second was a question about whether everyone had eaten. Her third was a forwarded article about the health benefits of tulsi.

Classic opening three moves. Very on brand. Haha.

But then, gradually, she started just talking. Joining in. Making jokes that landed. Asking questions about things the cousins had mentioned. Becoming, without any announcement, just another person in the group.

Priya said it was the best thing she'd done in years. Her mother, she told me, seems lighter somehow. Like she'd been on the outside of a room for a long time and someone finally opened the door.

The Part I'm Still Sitting With

I haven't added my mother to The Originals yet. I'm being honest about that.

Partly because the group chat is four years old and has a lot of history she'd have to scroll through. Partly because there are conversations in there that would require significant explanation. And because change is hard and I am, apparently, still working on things.

But I think about her at 11:43 pm, sitting somewhere in the house, individually texting each of her children to ask if they've eaten. Taking the time to send each one separately because she's not texting all of them. She's texting each of them.

The least we can do is take a few steps back toward her.

I'll add her eventually. I'm going to have to do some archiving first.