Before I begin again: A tribute to my mother, Usha Charan

Before I return to The Beauty Gypsy, I need to write the piece I never wanted to write.

My mother, Usha Charan, passed away suddenly, less than a week after my birthday. She had not been in the best of health, but none of us understood that we were standing so close to the edge. One day, she was unwell. The next, she was in critical condition. Three days later, she was gone.

So much of what I understand about beauty, strength, contradiction, care, dignity, and becoming a woman began with her.

This is for Mamma.

Today would have been her 76th birthday.

She was a wife.

A mother to two and then a mother to four — as love redrew the family lines, the labels fell away, and her son-in-law and daughter-in-law became hers, too.

A grandmother — Dadi, as many children in India call their father’s mother — whose whole face would go soft at the sound of one particular small voice on FaceTime.

And a kind of mother to thousands more besides: students who passed through her classrooms in three different cities. An MA gold medalist in psychology long before anyone in our part of the world was talking about mental health. A leading kindergarten teacher more interested in shaping young minds and, frankly, running the world than in housework.

She was also a complicated person, as most of us are when seen up close.

She could be tender, funny, impossible, sharp, generous, maddening, and magnificent — sometimes in the same hour. She could be the warmth in the room and the storm that rearranged it. Her love was fierce, but so was everything else about her.

At fifty, I am old enough to know that the people we love most are rarely one thing. Mamma was not one thing. She was my beginning and, sometimes, my battle. Both are true.

She told me the truth — the one I needed, not always the one I wanted. How rare that kind of love is. How complicated. How lucky I am to have been loved by her.

A life across continents

She moved households across continents and countries: Stockholm, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and half a dozen places in between, somehow making each of them home.

She was the youngest daughter in one family and the eldest daughter-in-law in another, and she balanced those two scales for fifty years without dropping either.

Five decades of marriage — hand in hand through every up and every down, neither of them pretending to agree on everything, the marriage working precisely because they did not pretend.

She built homes out of new cities, new languages, new routines, new people. She knew how to begin again long before I understood that life would ask this of us more than once.

A complete contradiction

She was also — and she would have laughed reading this — a complete contradiction.

She collected recipes obsessively and hated cooking.

She kept piles of heritage silk saris — Kanjeevarams and Patolas — locked away in cupboards, and would not be caught dead in a sari.

She would dismiss Hermès without a second look but comb every street stall in Asia for glass bangles, building what I am convinced is the largest collection in the world. Guinness, take note.

Cold coffee for us before every exam — milk, energy, all maternal nourishment — while she herself ate bhujia for breakfast and Maggi instant noodles for dinner.

Thank you, Mamma, for the lifelong lessons in healthy eating (insert eye roll).

She hated museums and made us grind through our history books anyway. She would say, “Tell me the truth, I won’t say anything,” then proceed to deliver a verbal walloping for the ages.

Fiery. Unfiltered. No hidden agendas anywhere on her. What you saw was what you got.

And what you saw was unmistakably her.

She had been silver-haired for decades before the rest of the world caught up, and she taught me — without ever quite saying so — to embrace it. She did not believe in makeup, despite raising a beauty blogger.

She was an extrovert in the truest sense: people lit her up, and she lit them up right back.

And she was never more herself than when she was in motion.

A world-class insomniac, awake when the rest of the house was asleep, scrolling Facebook and clocking which of her children had remembered to post on her wall — because in person did not count. Not on a birthday, and certainly not on Mother’s Day.

A shopaholic. A bargain hunter. A Daiso obsessive who somehow always ended up at the casino when in Singapore, certain for fifteen straight years that the big win was just one more visit away.

She never met a Hindi serial she did not love or a Shah Rukh Khan film she could resist. Teen Patti, the card game, was even better.

Her hands were rarely still: a phone in one, mid-photograph; a craft project underway; a deck of cards.

They are still now.

The other children

And then there were the other children — the ones who came to her not by blood but through the classroom door.

They arrived small and uncertain, carrying whatever the world had handed them: learning difficulties, behavioral labels, loneliness, fear, or simply the need for someone to see them clearly.

She saw them.

She mended what she could. Some of them for years.

They came in as students and left as sons and daughters. There are thousands of them now, scattered across the world, carrying a piece of her with them.

That, too, was motherhood.

Not biology. Not duty. Not performance.

Just the steady, stubborn act of making a child feel safe enough to become themselves.

Dadi

She was a maximalist. Hopeless at keeping a secret. She loved being the center of attention, and almost always was.

But the love between her and her granddaughter was the purest thing I have ever seen.

My brother’s daughter was the grandchild she had waited years to hold, and when that little girl finally arrived, something in Mamma opened that I had never seen before. She became Dadi with her whole heart, instantly and completely.

There are bonds that do not need time to become complete. Theirs was one of them. It arrived whole. Radiant. As if some private line had been drawn between them before any of us knew to look for it.

She is only twenty-two months old. Too small to understand absence. Too young, perhaps, to keep her Dadi’s voice.

And we do not yet know how to explain to her that Dadi is not coming home.

She still calls out to her.

And I hope she keeps doing it for as long as she wants to, because in that small voice, Dadi is still here with us.

What I will miss

There are not enough words for what I will miss.

The way she said her version of my name — Antu.

The way she celebrated all of my successes — even the smallest ones — and had my back in the failures.

The sound of her bangles before she walked into a room.

The cold coffee on exam mornings.

The chhole bhature.

The Thursday afternoon mother-daughter dates — wandering into a new café for coffee, laughter, and the very sacred ritual of thoroughly bitching about whoever had annoyed us that week.

The heeng ka achaar, sharp and unmistakably hers.

The mathris still waiting for me in her kitchen.

The hand on my head when I needed a blessing.

The hug I wanted when things were not easy.

The voice on the phone when everything else was falling apart.

The way she could take over a room, a crisis, a family, a life.

The way she carried so much force inside her — love, anger, fear, devotion, control, protection — and somehow remained the center we all orbited.

There was supposed to be more time.

One more cold coffee. One more verbal walloping. One more birthday post on the wall — in person does not count, after all.

The next word the baby learns. Every birthday she should have been here for. Every ordinary day I did not know I would want back.

I will keep posting anyway.

I do not know what else to do.

She was where every one of my stories began. She held us all together. She still will.

Wife. Mamma. Dadi.

Thank you for all of it.

For being you.

For letting me be me.

I keep reaching for the phone, Mamma. I have not learned yet that you will not pick up.

I love you to the ends of the earth and back.

I will return to The Beauty Gypsy slowly, and with her everywhere in me. There will be beauty here again — products tested, claims questioned, rituals examined, luxuries judged. But before I begin again, there had to be this.

For her.

❦

I may not be able to respond to every message, but I will read them with gratitude.