Mom & Dad

My parents came from families with very little.

My mother grew up in a small town in Punjab, one of six children: five sisters and a brother. They were lower middle class, but my maternal grandparents were remarkably progressive about one thing that mattered enormously: every child would be educated. Sons and daughters alike were expected to study and build a life for themselves.

My father came from a very different world. He was one of ten children, seven brothers and three sisters, from a remote village in Haryana. Education was not something his circumstances naturally provided. He had to pursue it largely through his own determination.

Somehow, both of them graduated. And then, in a wonderfully unromantic piece of family history, they found each other through a newspaper matrimonial advertisement. They married in 1966.

Both were teachers. Their combined income in those early years was tiny, roughly the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars a month, and soon there were two children to raise. So they saved. They saved almost everything they could. They lived simply, counted money carefully and postponed things that could be postponed. When I was five, they built their first home. For much of my childhood, that is how I understood them: two people working relentlessly to move a family forward.

Looking back as an adult, I notice things I did not fully appreciate as a child. Both my parents taught, but much of the work at home also fell to Mom. Dad took the lead in most household decisions and managed the family’s finances, including both their earnings.

Mom often balanced the needs of her children with the expectations of the household. I saw what she did for us, but rarely thought to ask what she wanted for herself. Today, I appreciate how much she carried, while recognising that her experience is hers to describe, not mine to assume.

Alongside their commitment to the family, there were tensions I remember clearly. Relations with each other's extended families were sometimes difficult, and family gatherings could be followed by arguments at home.

I knew their marriage as their child, not from inside it. I saw tensions, commitment and a lifetime of shared responsibilities. There were parts of their relationship I could never fully know.

They shared two children, a home they had built from almost nothing and more than fifty years of history. Perhaps there were forms of affection I did not recognize because I was looking for them in a different language.

What I do know is what their life produced. Two teachers with very little money raised two children, educated them and gave them opportunities far beyond those with which either parent had begun. Eventually, one of those children left India and was able to help make the family's financial life easier.

When the time came that I could afford to do it, I asked both of them to retire. My father retired first, only a few days before my mother. It was a small reversal that has stayed with me. For decades they had worked so that their children might have choices. Eventually, one of those children could give them the choice to stop working.

My father died in 2018, fifty-two years after they married.

I am still learning to see them as people, not only as my parents.

After Dad died, I noticed Mom making more everyday choices for herself. I cannot speak for everything she felt, but I was glad to see her have that space.

Alongside what I wish had been different, I remain grateful for how hard my father worked, what he overcame and the opportunities his determination helped create for us.

I can be grateful to my father and still see his faults. I can admire my mother's strength while also wondering how much of herself she had to put aside. And perhaps that is one of the things age changes about the way we see our parents.

As children, we know them simply as Mom and Dad.
Much later, if we are willing to look closely enough, we begin to see the two complicated human beings who were there all along.

Some things I learned to do. Some things I learned never to do. Both have stayed with me.

My parents taught me the importance of money. Not simply how to save it, but how to use it carefully. We had very little when I was growing up, so money was never casual. You thought before you spent. You understood the difference between wanting something and needing it. You tried to get the most out of what you had. That has stayed with me. I don't think the lesson was to accumulate money. It was to use it wisely and spend it on what actually matters.

But money also taught me something else. My father was extremely strict about spending. We were rarely allowed to bring friends home. Offering them tea was discouraged. Feeding them a meal was almost unthinkable. Perhaps, given where he had come from, every additional expense felt unnecessary. As a child, though, I experienced it differently.

And I remember deciding that my children would never feel that way. When they brought friends home, I wanted those friends to feel welcome. Food on the table was not going to be an expense to calculate. It was going to be part of having a home.

Marriage taught me another lesson. My father strongly believed that we should marry someone chosen with the family's approval. I personally had no objection to an arranged marriage. What mattered to me was something more fundamental: having the right to choose for myself.

I remembered that feeling. Years later, when my own children began making choices about their relationships, that memory mattered. I did not necessarily have to understand every choice immediately. But I understood something about their right to make it.

Sometimes freedom becomes important to us because we remember what it felt like not to have it.

Family gave me another lesson. I remember tensions in some extended-family relationships and great warmth in others. I loved spending time with my maternal cousins. Those relationships gave me some of the happiest parts of my childhood.

Perhaps those experiences taught me something without anyone ever saying it aloud: being related does not create closeness. You still have to build it. That lesson also shaped my relationship with my own brother, something I will come back to elsewhere.

One of the things I appreciate most about my parents was what they didn't teach us. They never raised us to be rigid about religion. We were not encouraged to become fanatical about rituals, temples, gurus, auspicious days, or rules about what could or could not be eaten on a particular day. Religion existed around us, of course, but it was never allowed to become the measure of whether someone was a good human being. I probably appreciate that freedom more today than I did then.

And then there was the newspaper. My father read it religiously. Politics was discussed. Opinions were strong. He was a committed Indira Gandhi supporter, and as I grew older, we often disagreed strongly. I didn't inherit his politics. I inherited the argument.

I learned to read. To question. To disagree. To have an opinion and then discover whether I actually knew enough to defend it. Politics became something to think about rather than something merely to inherit. That may be one of his more unexpected gifts to me.

Looking back, I don't think our parents teach us only through their advice or their example.

We learn from what they gave us.

We learn from what they denied us.

We learn from what we admired.

And we learn from the things we quietly promised ourselves we would do differently.

All of it becomes part of what we carry forward.

Some burdens are visible. Others you understand only when you are old enough to imagine your parents as people.

My parents found each other through a newspaper advertisement and stayed married for fifty-two years. For most of my life, I never really asked what those fifty-two years were like for each of them.

Together they raised two children, built a home and spent a lifetime fulfilling responsibilities. As a child, I saw the decisions they made. Only much later did I begin to wonder about the pressures behind those decisions.

There is much about their lives before parenthood, and about their private hopes, that I never thought to ask.

I knew what they did for us long before I wondered what life felt like for them.

I cannot fill those gaps with certainty now. But I can look back with more curiosity about what each of them carried, including the things I never saw.

My parents carried fear for us too. Growing up, many of their restrictions seemed unreasonable. They worried about where I went, who I spent time with, what influences surrounded me, whether I would lose focus, whether I would make choices that could change the direction of my life. At the time, some of it felt like control. Today, I look back differently.

On many of those things, they were right. Absolutely right. The boundaries I resisted helped keep me grounded. Some of what I interpreted as restriction was simply fear wearing the clothes of parenting. They had struggled too hard to create an opportunity for us to watch us casually throw it away.

And then they succeeded. Perhaps more than they expected. I left. I never really lived with my parents again.

They had worked and saved so their children could have lives larger than their own. But one consequence of giving me that life was distance from them. I know I carried that weight. I suspect my mother did too.

There is a strange contradiction in parenting: sometimes giving your children the wings you worked so hard to give them also means watching them fly away from you.

My father carried something else that I understand much more clearly now.

Pride.

He took enormous pride in my education and the life I was building, and he enjoyed sharing that pride with family, friends and colleagues. I understand it differently now.

He had come from a remote village where education was hardly guaranteed. He fought his way toward it, became a teacher, and then made education part of the foundation he built for me. So when he spoke proudly about what I had accomplished, perhaps he wasn't only talking about me.

He could see something of his own journey continuing in mine. There is something deeply satisfying in knowing that before he died, my life had given him that pleasure.

There are still differences between my father's understanding of family responsibility and my own. I can recognise the pressures he lived with without agreeing with every decision he made.

As they grew older, my parents looked to their sons for care and reassurance. By then, our lives had taken different paths, and we had to work out how to be there for them in different ways.

Understanding their expectations also means examining my own. I am a parent too, and I want to remember that my children's lives will not simply follow the shape of mine.

I don't have neat answers to every difference between us. The older I become, the less interested I am in reducing my parents to either their sacrifices or their mistakes.

They carried scarcity.

They carried fear.

They carried expectations.

They carried pride.

They carried each other, however imperfectly.

And for much of their lives, they carried us.

Only much later did I begin to understand the weight of all of it.

Mom, Dad,

There are things I wish I had said differently. Things I wish I had said at all.

---

Mom,

I wish I could spend more time with you. It is strange that some of the longest stretches I have ever spent with you have been here in the United States, so far from the place where our life together began.

You have always been my go-to person. My Gibraltar. There was something reassuring about simply knowing you were there. I am not particularly religious. You know that. But somehow I have always known that if I made a mistake, if something went wrong, if I was frightened or uncertain, somewhere you would say a prayer for me. Maybe that was enough religion for me.

There is something else I have never forgotten. When you and Dad fought, I would sometimes lie under my blanket and silently cry. I wanted to do something to help you, but I was your child and I didn't know how. Looking back, I know that resolving those arguments was not a child's responsibility. What stays with me is the wish that things could have been easier for you.

I wish you had had more space, support and freedom to choose for yourself.

I wish there had been more time for the things you wanted, alongside the needs of the family. You spent so much of your life being someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's wife, someone's mother. I sometimes wonder how much time you ever had simply to be you. I want to make more room now to ask what brings you happiness, rather than assume I already know.

And I know that even today, you wish I would talk to you longer. Not because there is something important to discuss. Just talk. About nothing in particular. I know you would happily stay on the phone with me for hours. I am not sure why I cannot do that. Maybe I have become too accustomed to conversations having a purpose. Maybe I am always thinking about the next thing I need to do. I don't really know. But I know that you would like more of my time, and I know that one day I may wish I had given it more freely.

There is one more small thing that probably sounds strange. I wish you would talk to me the way you used to. There was a directness in the way you spoke to me when I was growing up. You were my mother and I was your son. There was no ceremony between us. These days, sometimes when we speak on the phone, you sound almost too respectful with me. I have even told you this. I don't know why you do it, but somehow that extra respect makes me feel a little less connected to you.

I don't need that distance from you, Mom. I don't need you to speak to the person I became. Sometimes I just want you to speak to the boy you raised.

---

Mom, Dad,

The older I become, the less certain I am that loving our parents means remembering only the good parts. Maybe it means being able to remember the whole person. The sacrifices and the mistakes. The security and the hurt. The things you gave us and the things we wish had been different.

I don't need either of you to have been perfect anymore.

You were two people who began with very little, built a home, raised two sons, worried about us, fought with us, made mistakes with us, and gave us opportunities neither of you had been given yourselves. A great deal of who I am began with the two of you. Some of it because I wanted to be like you. Some of it because I wanted to be different. All of it is part of what you gave me.

But more than anything, thank you. Thank you for giving us a life that, when I look back now, was beautiful.

I only wish I had understood those moments while I was living them the way I understand them when I look back at them today. The small house. The restrictions I complained about. The things we could not afford. The arguments. The ordinary days that seemed completely unremarkable at the time.

Somehow, with distance, so many of them have become precious. Perhaps that is one of life's cruelties. We often recognize the beauty of an ordinary moment only after it has become a memory.

Dad, I wish I could hug you once more.

Mom, I hope I still have many hugs left.

I love you both.

And I miss you.