It obviously struck deep at my mother’s core because she talked about it more than just a few times — how she had given up her fledgling career as a lawyer in Kanpur when she married my father.

But why? I would ask on cue.

In my mother’s mind, the two were irreconcilable. You either had a career or you had a family. The choice, as she saw it, was absolute.

Ten years after she passed, I am on the phone with my elder daughter. She is calling from the airport, on her way to a work trip, guilty at leaving behind her six-month-old daughter with her father.

How is it that more than six decades after my mother made that choice, the same dilemma shadows her granddaughter? Yes, things have changed. Women no longer believe it’s a stark choice between career and family. But the one thing that has survived across generations is the internalised guilt that seems to attach itself almost........

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