Reading my mother through her books

Our parents are an accumulation of stories. Go find them before it's too late.

- Rohit Brijnath

The painting is crumpled on the sides and the crayon-work is rough and smudged. On the old paper, the sun gleams, a flower blooms, birds fly and two figures run down a path towards a house. The artist is a child.

This painting is tucked between the pages of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and it is from about 40 years ago, when my mother worked part-time at an adoption agency in Kolkata. Now 91, she holds the painting and travels backwards.

Her memory is unclear in parts, like a painting with faded colours. But bits and pieces gradually come into focus. She remembers harrowing days when women, caught in the unforgiving grip of poverty, had to give up their children. And yet also comforting days when homes were found for children and thus food and education assured.

The painting is slid back into the book. Another novel is opened. There is a thank-you note from a person my mother can't remember. With all of us eventually, there will be so many people the memory leaves behind. The thank-you card feels like an elegant anachronism: Who writes them any more?

What is happening, you might ask. I am investigating my mother through her bookshelf. There is a rough-hewn one behind her TV and it carries remnants of 75 years of her reading. When I take books down, I am dusting off her past and discovering that life in its many forms lives within a book.

I find her sister's schoolbook of Shelley poetry from 1947 and Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory from 1952. Before I was born in 1962, my mother, incredibly, had a life. She has more definitions than parent and wife. She had tastes, wants, beliefs, and I want to know about them because I am haunted by time.