Merry Christmas, Mum

In the special few days towards the end of each year, on annual trips to their hometown, one writer finds the secret places where her steely immigrant mother hides love.

- CHANDREYEE RAY

What does failure look like? To my mother, it may look like a daughter who writes for a living. It may even look like the books piled high on every spare surface in my bedroom—I prefer to call it my ‘artful hoarding den’— and my cluttered wardrobe bursting at its seams. It definitely looks like the unpacked suitcase occupying a corner of the floor, garments and accessories strewn across its open faces.

It’s a bad habit I have nursed for years, putting off unpacking for weeks, ever since I started packing my own luggage for our annual year-end trips to my parents’ hometown in India.

Around the age of eight, I remember picking out my first travel bag: a bright pink backpack on wheels, with a picture of Hamtaro splashed across the front. I stuffed it with prized possessions like Enid Blyton books, a Motorola flip phone and chewy candy to tide me over the painful in-flight earaches that would torment me as a child. I knew my mother would handle all the boring stuff, like clothing and my passport.

Now, I travel alone. I pack my own clothes—in an equally pink albeit much larger suitcase. Before each trip, my mother faithfully brings me a pouch of medication collected from various pharmacies and our family doctor. I never request for this beforehand, nor do I ask for the verbal tirade that it is invariably accompanied by. “You’re disorganised, you’re 25 years old but you’re so much more disorganised than I was at your age,” she laments.