For a long time it was my fervent wish that my parents would come live with me after their retirement. But my father died, and my mother refused. She insisted on living entirely on her own terms. Only when she became completely dependent, in every way, did my wish come true.

I am my mother’s eldest, the one who first gave her the experience of childbirth and of being a mother. All her ideas of how to raise children with care and a scientific temperament she put into practice on me. By the time my sister and brother came along, idealism had given way to practicality.

When I was five years old her older brother – who was also her father, mother, and best friend – went underground to organize landless peasants to take up arms against landlords. It was a great loss to my mother. She needed to talk about him, and in me she found a rapt and sympathetic listener. In this way, she transmitted to me his ideals, which she shared – justice, equality, solidarity with the poor and oppressed.

Growing up in the small South Indian town of Kakinada, I was keenly sensitive to my mother’s troubles in life. She was burdened every morning with the drudgery of cleaning dishes, washing clothes, cooking. Then hurrying off to college to give lectures in history. When she returned late in the evening, again she had to cook and clean.

In her appearance, she was extremely modest, partly because we had little to spend and partly because she had no time to think of clothes or jewelry. Her personality was a curious mix. To almost everyone, friend or stranger, she was pleasing to a fault. But when it came to confronting social evils, as when she stood up in public meetings to make a speech, she was fierce. Many people admired her: neighbors, her students, my father’s students, my teachers, my classmates, their parents, activists of all kinds. They came to her for solace and advice, and she would always go out of her way to help them.

The year after my mother retired, my father died. She was then fifty-nine years old, and for the first time in her life she was alone. I flew home from New York to be with her. For once, she wasn’t all smiles when I met her, glowing with delight, saying endearing things, giving me news of relatives and friends, cooking specially for me, boiling water for my bath. She was not the helper and consoler but the one in need of support.

After a few months, I returned to New York. And she prepared to go off to the distant industrial township where my brother was working as a chemical engineer to live with him and his family, as Indian widows traditionally do. Before long, I got news that she had left and gone back to Kakinada. Some minor incident had made her feel unwelcome. She went away with her suitcase in the middle of the night and, since there wasn’t any transport from the township at that hour, sat at a bus stop till morning.

She decided to live on her own in the apartment my parents had bought for their retirement. It was a world in itself. There were five families, two maids, and a watchman. She would tell me all about them on the phone. Though her depression lingered, once she settled back in Kakinada she was more or less her old self. Pleasant, compassionate, gregarious, socially active. In fact, she seemed to be thriving now that she had full control of her own finances – her and my father’s pension. No longer did she have to worry about money, and she spent it as she liked – mostly by giving it away to all and sundry. In India, women live in the shadow of fathers before marriage, in the shadow of husbands and in-laws after marriage, and in the shadow of sons when their spouses die. My mother was a rare exception, and other women envied her for it.

But when, in the years after my father’s death, she came to visit me and my sister in America, she would behave as though we looked down on her. She would take offense over nothing and stop talking for days. And when I went to see her in India, she guarded her independence zealously. She would never let me spend money, never let me help with cooking or cleaning or do anything for her. Whenever we went out, she had to be in charge of where we were going and how to get there. When I bought her an air conditioner, she threw a shocking tantrum. She was cutting onions when I brought it home, and she flung the knife on the floor in a rage.

I blamed my mother’s new circumstances for the changes I observed in her. And when for the first time a serious strain was put on our relationship, I blamed the social and cultural gap that came from my moving to America. I myself had gone from taking pride in my innocence and over-politeness to being firmer and more street-smart, even assuming a typical New York impatience. Also, having left India in search of a freer life – both as an untouchable in a caste society and as a woman in a patriarchal one – I had adopted the American norms of dating and living with boyfriends, which are not common even in big cities in India. Perhaps naively, I never imagined my mother would have any objection. But when she visited New York for the first time it was over my living arrangements that we had our first big row. She left New York as abruptly as she had my brother’s house and went off to spend the rest of her trip with my sister
in Florida.

Otherwise, the special bond we had always shared remained intact. We talked for hours on the phone. One time, when I casually asked her a question about our caste status and where it had come from, she started telling me stories I had never heard before. I started taping these conversations – over a hundred hours of them – which I transcribed for my own interest and later used as the basis for a book.

I was shocked to learn we had not always belonged to the mainstream of Indian civilization. My great-grandparents lived as hunters and gatherers in a remote forest. They were forced out onto the plains by British economic policies and there, being latecomers, entered Hindu society at the very bottom, as untouchables. If not for the help of Canadian missionaries, who offered them education, medical care, and jobs, they would have gone on living in utter misery.

Having tasted literacy, and not having any other means for advancement, my great-grandparents were keen to have their children educated at mission schools. My mother and her brothers, in their turn, grew up at the time of the independence struggle, when there was a short-lived effort to unify the nation against colonial rule. Unlike today, when there is more open discrimination and untouchables are forced to rely on ‘reservations’, or government quotas, it was a time of openness in employment and higher education for the few untouchables lucky enough to have been spared from farm labor and sent to school. My mother told me all this, and how her brother became a Congress activist and later a communist militant and guerrilla leader, as well as a famous poet. She became a college lecturer, which is not as distinguished or well paid a profession as it is (or used to be) in the West, and struggled to raise us three children, especially when separated for a long period from my father due to transfers to colleges in far-off towns.

Work on the book brought us closer. But between finishing the manuscript in 2013 and its publication four years later, our connection started to fray in ways I could not understand. There were bitter fights over her plans for dividing her savings. The amounts were small enough, and I did not need anything from her, but I objected when she said she wanted my brother to handle everything when she died and take the largest share. I was offended by the favoritism. After all, she had raised me to oppose discrimination against women.

When I visited her several years later, I arrived at her apartment to find a large banner hanging over the front door with a hand-drawn picture of my author photo at one end and at the other a bunch of roses. On top it said in big letters: welcome home, suja. Underneath, in smaller print: congratulations on your achievement. love, amma, babu, anitha.

We sat together, and as usual she began talking. She had always observed the world with a keen eye, and she loved to share what she noticed in her amusing and articulate fashion. When she was growing up it was her brother who listened and listened while she talked and talked, then it was my father, and since his death it had been only me. But this time she was talking too fast and going on too long, her own narrative skill leaving her breathless. She finally said, ‘I think it would be dangerous for me to go on talking.’

We got ready for bed. When I am with my mother, I sleep no more than three feet from her. She was very happy to have me near and said, ‘I have three children, and I will divide whatever I have into three equal portions. Why should it be anything but equal?’

So she had decided to stop favoring my brother. I said nothing, having promised myself not to respond if this matter came up.

She proceeded to say, ‘But I will give Babu more.’

I was amused. ‘How can it be equal and yet he gets more?’

She said, ‘It is equal.’

‘But you also said more.’

‘That is because he spends a lot of money visiting me every year. You girls don’t.’

‘How can you say that? I visit you every year. And when you were eighty, I flew to India just to be with you on your birthday. That year I visited you twice.’

‘No, you visit only rarely. Besides, Babu bought the air conditioner for me.’

‘But that was me!’

‘No, it was Babu.’

‘Don’t you remember, you threw a tantrum and chucked the knife on the floor?’

‘That was Babu.’

We turned off the lights and went to sleep. But in the morning and the days that followed it rankled me to hear her shamelessly lie just to torment me. ‘You know there is a record of how many times I visited you,’ I told her. ‘In my passport.’

‘Then show me your passport.’

But I had forgotten I had recently renewed my passport, and so there was only one entry stamp – the one for that very visit. ‘You are a liar,’ she said. ‘It’s proven.’

One morning she put on a sari to go out and started looking for some papers in her safe. Only she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She was getting more and more worked up: ‘No, I kept it here. How can it have gone?’ I could not help but feel sorry for her.

Finally, she set out. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I have some business.’

She went to a branch of the State Bank of India on the main road and I followed her. They gave her some information she couldn’t grasp and some instructions she couldn’t follow. I explained to her what they had said. It seemed that, earlier that day, she had been to another branch some miles off, whose clerks had sent her here, and now they were sending her back.

I followed her to the other branch. More complicated instructions from the bank manager there. She was in a state of extreme agitation. I could see her blood pressure rising. I took the papers and helped her do some calculations. Only then did I realize she was trying to liquidate her savings and transfer the money she had long been vaguely promising to give me to my account in New York.

I told her I didn’t want the money. It was her lies and insults that I objected to. But she refused to listen. She was determined to prove she was not biased and I was greedy. It was turning into a scene. So I let her transfer the money with the bank manager’s help, telling her I would send it back once I got home.

When I was leaving for New York, she accompanied me to the railway station, but we didn’t speak. I didn’t accomplish much of what I hoped to in that visit. My intention to discuss plans for when she could no longer live on her own had come to nothing. But I had managed to get her to sign a couple of papers, a green card application and an application that would allow me to request leave from my job for the sake of her care. She was reluctant and suspicious but she signed.

When I reached New York, I called as I always did to let her know I had arrived safely, and this time also in the hope of hearing she felt remorse for how she had treated me. To my shock, she accused me of stealing her money. I reminded her it was she who insisted I accept it. She said I had threatened her and made her sign over her power of attorney against her will.

‘What power of attorney? When?’

‘You had me sign those papers.’

‘That was for your green card and my family leave, all for your sake.’

‘I know what they are. You had me sign the power of attorney by force.’

I slammed the phone down.

I was bitter. At the same time, I began to worry. She was old. She was frail. She lived alone. When the pandemic began in 2020, I got back in touch. She was in the highest risk group. I sent her letters listing precautions to take. No reply.

I decided to travel to India as soon as restrictions were lifted. My idea was to settle her in a place set up for a woman her age, whether it was her own apartment with hired help or a suitable old age home. When I called her to let her know my plans, she forbade me to come.

In Kakinada, I rented an apartment that I hoped to persuade my mother to move into, one hundred times better than hers. I planned to hire help to look after her there once I was ready to go home. This place would be much more comfortable than any old-age home. I imagined my mother sitting on the balcony, sipping tea, reading a newspaper.

Weeks went by and my mother wouldn’t speak to me. I tried sending her some snacks. She sent them back with a message saying she could never forgive me. I was there six months before I got my chance. An annual memorial was held for my uncle. She could not fail to attend, nor could she stop me from coming too. I prepared for the day with hope and anxiety. I dressed well and neatly combed my hair as she always urged and as I ordinarily would never do. I entered the meeting hall and spotted her sitting with some people. She was frailer than ever. I knelt before her and held her hand. She allowed me to sit with her during the meeting and stayed to eat dinner with me. I saw her off as she got into a car.

Now that I was allowed to visit her, I could see she was living a disorderly life. She did only what she felt like doing. Sometimes she watched news or cricket matches on TV, but mostly she read. Newspapers, magazines, books. Unlike in the West, college lecturers in India need not be scholars, and typically are not. Many lecturers in small towns like ours lack a basic understanding of their subject. My mother was not one of those. She had genuine interest not only in her subject – modern European and American history – but many things outside of it as well. She always read newspapers and magazines regularly, but she never had time for books until after her retirement. Now I saw she was reading a huge volume on the rise of Nazism in Germany. She made notes, she dog-eared pages, she underlined passages. She read the hell out of that book. Then she started on a book I gave her about the Indian independence movement. She would read all day, fighting off sleep until four or five in the morning.

She was not taking care of herself or the apartment. It was filthy, but she refused all help. She would clean it herself, she insisted, but nothing ever got done. When I challenged her one day, she tucked the hem of her sari into her waist and, gathering brooms and dusters, worked day and night for three days. But all her effort was somehow ineffectual, and I never saw any difference.

She came to visit the apartment I was renting. She lay down on a couch and read a newspaper, then left. I tried to get her to come back – if not to live there with me, then at least for another visit. This made her fear I would hold her captive there. She wouldn’t come. She said the floors were shiny like mirrors. If she set foot on them, she said, she would get confused and fall down. Instead, she asked me to come eat lunch with her every day.

My mother was speaking with me now, but not about the issues I had come to India to resolve. Months passed and progress was very slow. And then, in a moment, we were back where we started. We had a small disagreement, and again she said I stole her money. Now she added new accusations. She said I stole her watches and took her gold bangles. To taunt me, or so I thought at the time, she even acted out how I supposedly approached her, grabbed hold of her arms, and yanked the bangles off her wrists.

Eventually, I had to return to New York. Three weeks later a cousin called. My mother was not doing well. She was not cooking for herself and wouldn’t let anyone send her food. She lived on fruits and sweets brought by visitors. Her apartment was unlivable. There were dead rats hanging from curtains, rat nests in pots. Some fetid liquid coming out of the refrigerator. My cousin told me he stepped inside, gagged from the stink, and had to get out right away.

I flew back the next day. There was no time to waste on coaxing her to see a doctor. She would never listen to me. I enlisted the help of her doctor along with friends, relatives, activists, prominent people in Kakinada. On their advice, I tried various schemes to get her into the doctor’s office. I sent confederates to urge her to seek care and even to slip her a sedative. Everything backfired.

In the end, I went myself, together with the woman who cooked for me and the watchman of my building, who had his own auto-rickshaw. When we arrived, my mother was just going out to the bank. She let me in to ask after her health. We got up to leave, and she walked us to the gate. Just as we reached it, the cook and I put our arms around her waist and tried to steer her toward the auto. My mother realized she was being ambushed and started screaming. She dropped to the ground and lay stiff, making it impossible to lift her to her feet. The watchman came and, taking her by the shoulders, dragged her into the auto. She shouted out to people on the street that she was being kidnapped. She was losing her independence, and she resisted like a wild horse refusing to be broken. The coconut seller in front of the house and all the neighbors gathered to gawk in horror at the spectacle.

At the clinic run by her doctor, she begged him to call the police. The nurses drew her blood, and the tests came back in no time. She had a severe urinary tract infection. Septicemia. She needed to be admitted immediately.

The doctor phoned a psychiatrist, who rushed over and spent an hour with her in her room. When he came out, I was told she had dementia.

For a week straight, she did not stop ranting. She even threatened the doctor that she would report him. She told the nurses to piss off. She wouldn’t eat. She kept urging strangers passing by her room to call her other daughter and her son and let them know she was being held prisoner.

It was fifteen days before she was discharged. We got into an auto. When she saw it wasn’t going in the direction of her building, she resented the fact but did not resist. She would never return to her apartment, her sanctuary, her pride.

The angry, willful, suspicious woman I had been dealing with on and off for the past few years disappeared. Now she panicked when I was out of sight. She apologized for the things she had done to me, the particulars of which she could not recall. She even told me she was no longer concerned about social expectations and I should live my life the way I wanted to. She who once called me a thief and a bully now marveled at what a generous and all-knowing person I was.

Gradually, I was disabused of the idea that I could settle my mother there and go back to New York. It was necessary for me to stay and care for her full-time. Having exhausted all my savings, I managed to get access to my mother’s account where her pension was deposited every month. I hired a cook, two aides, and a physical therapist.

When I flew back to New York for a few weeks, however, my mother reverted to the state she was in when she was first brought to the clinic. She shouted abuse all day and made dark threats. Only the sight of me on a video call would soothe her. I could not look after someone on a separate continent. And so, I decided to move her to New York.

In her condition, she could not fly economy. I emptied her account and bought two business-class tickets. Throughout the flight, I was surprised to see my mother sitting relaxed and comfortable as though in an easy chair in her own living room. Until she asked a flight attendant for something and was told, ‘Why, we are going to be landing in New York in fifteen minutes.’ That was when she turned to me with a look of astonishment. ‘Why have you brought me to New York? Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing me here?’ She was disturbed. ‘My brothers will be looking for me. They will be worried.’ As the horror of her abduction sunk in, she faced it bravely: ‘Just tell me how you intend to dispose of me.’ Her unhappiness lasted a few minutes.

For years, I had explained the changes in my mother’s behavior in various ways. I would tell myself they were due to her living alone after my father’s death. Or to the cultural gap that had opened between us. Or a patriarchal streak I had never noticed. Or else a nasty side of her personality, previously hidden from view, had unexpectedly come to the surface and slowly taken possession of her.

When I was first told she had dementia, I was happy to learn she was not evil but merely sick. And yet I could not accept that her condition was as severe or as permanent as I was told by the psychiatrist at the clinic. After her discharge, I saw unmistakable signs of a decline in her faculties. But I still didn’t trust the doctor’s assessments. I decided to restore her cognitive health with proper nutrition, medications, and supplements. I bought her sensory toys, coloring books, small puzzles. It was several months after her first hospitalization that I accepted that my mother had dementia.

As I took care of her, I had many questions. She would get agitated in the late afternoon and restlessly sit down, stand up, sit down again, and again stand up. What should I do? And how could I stop her talking endlessly? I turned for answers to social media forums for dementia caregivers. I found many people facing the same difficulties, including some who were themselves in the early stages of the illness. Each post would get hundreds of replies offering advice and support.

The problems addressed in these forums were not limited to the needs of the loved ones. As a caregiver, I have experienced symptoms myself, including total neglect of my own needs, bursting into loud sobs when talking to her doctor, not wanting to go out or meet people or even answer phone calls. Fear of what I will do with my life when I am no longer caring for my mother.

Dementia is a vicious disease that has a cascading effect on many lives. It can spoil relationships and break up families. And of course, it destroys careers and ruins finances. In India, I had the benefit of residing in a poor country dominated by imperialism where medical services and domestic help are, for better or worse, dirt cheap. The aides I employed in Kakinada were allowed only one day off a year by the agency that sent them. Even with the extra time off I gave them (never as much as they asked for or needed), I could afford to care for my mother on her modest monthly pension.

For all its costs and troubles, caring for my mother has been a source of fulfillment. I spend nearly every hour of the day or night at her side. Ever since she came home from the hospital, she has called me Annayya, ‘dear older brother’. For some time, I would laugh and try to remind her I was not her brother, but she persisted. Once I asked her why, and she replied with perfect lucidity that it made her heart brim with contentment to utter that word. And when she does, I love to hear it. I know she is calling me her protector.

Sometimes now, when she gets upset, I explain to her how she came to forget so many things. I tell her how she began having problems with her memory and difficulty taking care of herself, and how I came to India to help her. I tell her the whole story I have related here, and she listens quietly like a wide-eyed child hearing a bedtime story.

It is like going back in time, but with the roles reversed. My mother, whose own mother died when she was only four, now has for a mother her daughter who chose never to have children.

No wonder she is confused. Last night I asked her, ‘Who am I to you?’

When questioned like that, she often suspects a trick. ‘It depends on the context.’

‘What context?’

‘From a sociological point of view, you are my husband’s daughter.’

‘What other point of view?’

‘There is the scientific point of view.’

‘Who am I to you from a scientific point of view?’

‘You are my mother.’

‘No, no . . .’

‘You are my mother,’ she insisted.