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Dhruv Saxena
My mother does not believe I know how to buy vegetables.
This is not something she has said directly. It is something I have inferred from twenty years of evidence. The evidence includes: her asking me every time I cook for myself whether I have checked that the vegetables are fresh, her explaining, on multiple occasions and with no apparent awareness of repetition, how to tell if a tomato is good, and the fact that when I visit Delhi she takes over the vegetable buying entirely without discussion, as though the task has a natural owner and it is not me.
I am thirty-one. I have been buying my own vegetables in Bangalore for eight years. My vegetables are fine. I have not poisoned anyone with a bad tomato. The track record is good.
None of this has updated her assessment.
I brought this up last month. We were at the kitchen table, chai between us, Mom's Magic biscuits on the plate, and I said Maa I have been buying vegetables in Bangalore for eight years. She said yes but the market here is different from the one near your flat. I said vegetables are vegetables. She said the tomatoes here are better. I said I had been managing perfectly well with my tomatoes. She said she was not saying I had not been managing, she was just saying she would get them while I was here.
I did not win this argument. I will never win this argument. She will be explaining the tomato test to me when I am forty-seven.
The Competence She Acknowledges
She is not uniform in her assessment of my competence. There are things she considers me fully capable of and things she does not, and the distribution follows a logic I have been trying to map.
She believes I am capable of professional things. My work, my decisions about my career, my financial planning in the abstract. These she does not question. When I tell her about something I am doing at work she receives it with confidence. She does not ask follow-up questions that suggest she thinks I might be getting it wrong.
She believes I am capable of social things. Managing friendships, navigating difficult conversations, handling relationships. She has observed me doing these things and has updated accordingly.
She does not believe I am capable of domestic things. The vegetables. The cooking, in the sense of whether I am cooking enough and eating properly. The whether I have a good enough blanket for winter. The whether I am sleeping enough. The whether I have had a check-up recently.
The domestic competence is permanently in question. The professional and social competence is not. She has, over thirty-one years, built a very specific map of where I am reliable and where I require monitoring and the monitoring zone is entirely domestic.
My friend Nikhil has the same map in his family. His mother is completely confident in his professional abilities. He runs a team, he makes complex decisions, he manages significant things. She has no questions about any of this. She does not understand why he still needs to be reminded to wear a jacket when it is cold.
These are not inconsistent positions for her. The work Nikhil and the cold Nikhil are different people requiring different things. The work Nikhil is competent. The cold Nikhil has not been wearing enough layers since 2003 and this is not going to change without reminders.
The Advice That Arrives Anyway
The advice arrives independent of whether it has been requested.
I say I made rice last night. She says did I wash it properly. I say I have been washing rice since I was twenty-two. She says yes, but did I wash it twice. I say I washed it until the water ran clear, which is the standard. She says she washes hers three times. I say I think once until clear is fine. She says it is my rice.
This is how the advice conversations go. She states the advice. I explain that I have information and methodology. She acknowledges my information and methodology. She then restates the advice in a slightly modified form. I accept the modified form. The rice gets washed according to my methodology, which I have established works, and also according to my mother's belief that I should wash it three times.
My friend Karan told me his mother gives him cooking advice over WhatsApp. She sends voice notes. The voice notes have the quality of someone dictating into a recording device for posterity. He received one last week that was four minutes long and covered the correct way to store onions. He has been storing onions correctly for a decade. He listened to the full four minutes. He sent back a voice note saying thank you, very helpful.
He said it was easier than explaining.
He is right. It is easier than explaining.
The Other Side of It
I have thought about the vegetable monitoring and the three-times rice-washing and the blanket inquiry and I have arrived at something.
She is not doing this because she thinks I am incompetent. She is doing this because she spent the first twenty years of my life being the person responsible for whether I was fed and warm and healthy and the responsibility was real and the habit it created is real and the habit does not fully switch off just because I moved to Bangalore and have been feeding myself adequately for eight years.
The monitoring is the residue of the responsibility. The responsibility was discharged years ago. The monitoring continues because the love that produced the responsibility does not have a clean off switch.
She will ask about the tomatoes when I am forty-seven. I will tell her my tomatoes are fine. She will say the ones here are better.
She will be right about the ones here being better.
I will not tell her she is right.
Some things are better left as negotiations.
