First person: Songs my mother taught me

Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her mother is called Mother Mary Comes to Me. My own mother, whose life I similarly reflect on, was Narayani, named after the protective mother-goddess, whose presence resonates with compassion and words of wisdom.

My husband always refers to her in our conversations as Narayani, not “your mother”. This diminutive woman of steely will, Confucian ideals (without reading Chinese or Confucius), was the woman who taught me everything – some from embryo.

What does one owe our mothers or, does that debt just accumulate with no debtor’s knock on your door? Because it is given with love yet reminding you always of your sense of obligation to return it through the good you can do through life’s bitter and winding alleys? Narayani was my mother, my stalker, my conscience, my doppelgänger.

She left us long years ago. Twelve to be exact. I hold two images of her. One, in a sepia photograph of a 23-year-old, gossamer-thin, her hair long and lustrous, in her wedding sari. In the other image, she lies on her pyre, gray and wasted, in an abandonment of her cosmic soul, her oceanic mind switched to silent mode. How do you keep these two images as one? Yet my mind keeps...

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