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 them together, impossibly, and stubbornly.

She was Narayanikutty, BA always spoken in full, the first woman in her family to have a university degree, mathematics with honours, no less, numbers and abstractions balanced in a mind that should have belonged to the future but was bound to the household, to the repetitive routine of cooking fires and family expectations.

A contradiction: the diminutive woman of steely will, the one with the degree that glittered with its false promise, and the same one who lived within the frame of feminine bondage. Her brilliance smouldered quietly, expressed in a different calculation: how far the rice would stretch, the dresses she stitched for us, her children, our homework, the rationing of dreams. That contradiction does not resolve itself; it carries forward, unresolved in me, as if my own life were the equation she never solved. I am the unfinished theorem of her life and mine.

Yet she also sang. Not with melody, but with words, with numbers and with stories. She was the spinner of the wonderworld. In the long evenings, after we had said our prayers and eaten, she became a storyteller. Krishna and Sudama, their friendship woven through parables of humility, Orpheus and Eurydice, a myth she carried across borders without ever stepping beyond Indian shores. And then, unexpectedly, the many wives of Henry VIII, their names reeled off........

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