Shalu was meeting her mother after a year. She had spoken to her a couple of times in the middle: once on her birthday, once on Shalu’s, and once when she had called to say that she did not have the money to attend Shalu’s graduation. When Shalu heard her mother’s voice break on the other side of the call, she had waited patiently for the crying to get over, said it was ok, and hung up. Sentimentality was not going to get in her way.

She was not surprised that her mother was late. She had been waiting for 25 minutes and was about to call her when she saw her mother walk in. And suddenly she was overwhelmed. She had not expected there to be any kind of fondness, let alone tears; and yet they welled up at the sight of Mina. It looked like her mother had aged ten years. She held back her tears and managed to put on a feeble smile. Mina was gushing at the sight of her daughter. She had been looking forward to the day for weeks.

“So, what have you been up to?”

“Nothing, just busy with Masters applications,” Shalu replied, making sure she sounded controlled.   

“Where are you applying?”

“Uh…here and there…you wouldn’t know…”

“I was just looking up some places online…and I saw… I mean maybe you could apply to this University in Hyderabad called EFLU…”

Shalu suppressed a smile. Her mother had finally learned to look things up online. She tried changing the topic.

“So…what happened to the dance class you were going to join? With Mriga Maasi?”

“Hmm…I don’t know how to ask your Pa for money. He already thinks I waste too much so…”

“Mummy, but—doesn’t he keep buying completely useless things all the time? Why don’t you assert yourself a little more? You have as much right to his money!”

“Leave it na, baba. There’s no point arguing with him. I’m thinking of going back to singing and making a little something from it. I’ve been talking to a few people –”

Shalu sighed. She reminded herself to maintain her calm. Her mother’s fate was not in her hands. She could not make her decisions for her. If her mother wanted to stay with her father, there was nothing she could do about it.

Mina noticed her daughter frowning and tried to lighten the mood.

“Always the quiet type, na? What do you keep thinking so much?”

“Nothing.”

Mina stared awkwardly at her hands, not sure what to say next. But she was determined not to let anything taint her meeting with her daughter. She tried again.

 “Do you want to order something? I remember you loved the chocolate milkshake that we—”

“I already ordered. I am off sugar anyway.”

“Oh. What about this parmeeseeyun troofle— ”

“It’s parmisaahn trufful—whatever, doesn’t matter. Just order your garlic bread, na. You will not like anything else…” 

 They sat in silence. Shalu checked her phone restlessly, while Mina scanned her daughter’s face. It was like she was counting the minutes till she could leave. Her heart was racing. She could not let her daughter go so soon. She reached out for Shalu’s hand and held it tightly.

“Shalu, look at me!”

She looked up reluctantly and saw in her mother’s eyes a desperate, helpless plea. The tears welled up again. She looked away.

“I’m so proud of you sweetheart, I heard you came third in your entire batch? Why didn’t you tell—”

Mina’s voice cracked, but she was determined to carry on.

“I just want you to finish your Masters quickly so that you—”

“Mummy please, don’t start again, I told you I—”

“So that you can earn your own money, and live on your own terms. I don’t want you to depend on any of these men anymore, like me…”

Shalu nodded automatically. It took her a minute to register the weight of what her mother had just said. She was taken aback. Hadn’t her mother been a strong advocate for marriage as soon as a woman graduates college? What had brought about this sudden change in opinion?

She looked up at her mother and noticed the fatness that hung on her like a comfortable old friend. You could see it everywhere—under her eyes, on her arms, around her waist, and other places she kept hidden under her baggy clothes. How unlike the Mina of the sepia photographs. She looked for traces of that young, confident woman in her mother; for any remnants of that zest for life that radiated from every part of those photogrpahs: from the wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled, her neatly trimmed bob cut and her boot leg jeans styled in keeping with the latest trends of the time. But that Mina felt like a different person altogether. It is hard to point to the exact moment when her mother had begun to wither away, but Shalu knows that she had not always been that way.

*
When Shalu recalls her childhood, the warm yellow light of her grandparents’ old crystal chandelier floods her memory. She is engulfed by a loud din of chatty Marwaris fighting over a game of cards, or just excited to be around each other after months of being apart. She remembers the light pink of her mother’s dupatta that tinted everything she saw, as she peered from behind it, protecting herself from the overwhelming adult presence around her. She was too shy to play with the other children, so she clung to her mother. Mina seemed like the only reassurance that the evening would eventually come to an end and she would return to the comfort of her quiet home. When conversation seemed to fizzle out, the drifting gazes of her aunts and uncles settled on Shalu. Even from behind the pink dupatta, they did not miss the remarkable resemblance Shalu shared with her mother.

“She has taken after you, na?”

“Ya, looks ekdum…mirror image!”

Mina smiled proudly and tried to draw her daughter out, but the attention only pushed Shalu further into her mother’s folds. Mina would sense her daughter’s uneasiness and whip up some nonsensical topic of conversation to steer the attention away from her daughter. Shalu remembers feeling awed by her mother’s ability to talk about anything with anyone. In her heart she had always believed that she would grow up to be that way too.

 But Shalu’s shyness only increased with age. It accompanied her everywhere she went, and to top it off, no one could stop commenting on how little she spoke.

“Arrey, who would have thought, out of all the kids Mina’s daughter would be the quietest?”

“I remember when Mina was a child, she just would not stop talking…”

“What do you mean when she was a child…she can’t even stop now”

These whispers reverberated in her head and grew louder as the evening passed. The voices would soon start merging to form a loud, persistent hum that drowned all other sounds.

As soon as they reached home, Shalu would run to her room and slam the door shut. She hated those family gatherings, and that she was still forced to attend them. She hated how she became when people were around, and that her mother would never understand how she felt. She could never be the life of the party, the person everyone looked forward to meeting and wanted to talk to… she could never be her mother.

When the door slamming and refusing to go out had become regular occurrences, Mina tried talking, scolding, even pleading with her daughter but nothing worked. In fact, it just made Shalu retreat further into her own shell. She did not know how to help her daughter. Everyone told her it was just a phase, that Shalu would eventually grow out of her shyness like most children did. But Mina could see it taking roots in her. Slowly and steadily. And she could see her daughter sheltering it with all her heart. She wanted to reach out and uproot the plant all at once, but Shalu would not let her get close to it, let alone touch it. Mina could almost feel the long and lonely path that lay ahead of her daughter. The thought of it made her shudder.

*

It was when she was thirteen or fourteen that Shalu had consciously started withdrawing from her mother. She remembers waking up to a crumpled bed sheet on the extra bed, coming home from school to her mother’s red-rimmed eyes, and sitting through long and painful dinners where no one spoke to anyone. She knew that her parents had been fighting and it was taking a toll on her mother, both mentally and physically. She watched as Mina would spend hours crying about something her father had or hadn’t done, and all she wanted was to go shake her out of the spell, to tell her to take control of her life and something with it. But Mina remained in her depressive slump. Shalu became scared even to mention her father in conversation because she knew it would send Mina into a long and sarcastic tirade against him. She had to always walk on eggshells around her. Her mother had become a mess, and Shalu wondered constantly why, if she hated the marriage so much, did her mother not pick her things up and leave. She decided that she had to protect herself from the turmoil at home, and receded further into her own shell. She had vowed to herself that she would leave the house as soon as she could and have nothing to do with her parents.

But sometimes she would hear her mother’s voice in the way she spoke, and that horrified her. When someone pointed out their resemblance, she would smile feebly at them, but after that, she went back home and ensured that she never dressed in a way even remotely similar to Mina. She cut her hair short, started wearing excessive amounts of lipstick and got a septum piercing. She gave up singing because everytime she sang Mina reminded her that she had passed her talent on to Shalu. Shalu had long accepted that she could do nothing about their physical resemblance, but she made sure that she would not be like Mina in any other way.

When Shalu left for college and entered into her first relationship Mina became the benchmark for everything she would not do. Where Mina would have cried for hours if her husband cancelled a plan, Shalu smiled and said it was no problem at all when her boyfriend did the same; she had seen Mina throw so many tantrums about her father putting work before family, that she went out of her way to tell her boyfriend that it was okay to put everything else before her. Sometimes, even when she was in desperate need for help, she refrained from asking him: she had seen the debilitating effects of her mother being too dependant on her father, and she just could not let that happen with herself. Even when she got very lonely, she reminded herself that at least she was not in as pitiful a state as Mina…perhaps loneliness was a small price to pay for independence.

*

Shalu was shaken out of her thoughts when she heard a familiar voice repeating her name. She looked up to find a school friend she hadn’t seen in three years standing beside her table. She got up awkwardly to talk to her, when she noticed Mina looking the other way, clearly attempting to avoid making contact with her daughter’s friend. This struck her as strange—the earlier Mina would never have passed up the opportunity to talk to anyone, no matter where they were placed on the scale of familiarity—but then she recalled the day she had forbidden her mother from talking to her friends. They spoke to her more than they spoke to Shalu, and frankly, she did not need another person to come and steal her friends, and so Mina had decided to stay out of her daughter’s sight everytime she was with her friends.

And all of a sudden then Shalu was overcome with guilt. She spoke to her friend absentmindedly, thinking all the while of Mina’s turned face and downcast eyes. She had witnessed the life drain out of her mother slowly and done nothing about. In fact, she had contributed to it. Shalu’s friend noticed her preoccupation and turned to find Mina sitting at the table as well. She pointed to her and said,

“Your mother? Looks ekdum…mirror image!”  

Shalu gave her a feeble smile. She had been trying desperately, all her life, to escape that phrase, and for a while she had even succeeded. But, no matter how much she tried convincing herself otherwise, she longed to share her day with her boyfriend, and it hurt everytime he told her he was too busy. She hated that he was still friends with the boys who made her feel uncomfortable everytime she crossed them, but the fear of coming off as uncool had always stopped her. Her fingers itched to hold the guitar once again, and join the college band. Maybe Mina had passed her talent on to her daughter, or maybe it was a co-incidence. Either way, there was no escaping it anymore. She looked at her mother and realised there was no way to recover the old Mina of the photographs, but she knew that if she didn’t stop running away things would only get worse. The only way for both of them to proceed without losing their ways was walking by each other’s sides. That is how it was always meant to be. After all, one could not separate the thing from its reflection.