My sensibilities come basically from my mother. From my father, I’ve got my sense of adventure and from Mama, my love for nature. She would crave to be in the hills and would get so carried away at the sight of mountain streams and trees and the colors of flowers . . . she was so exuberantly expressive about all those things that they unknowingly became a part of me. I’m not a city person. I come to Bombay only when I have something to do here, otherwise I just run to the mountains – back to Himachal or go trekking in Ladakh and do all those crazy things.
   
    Mama always keeps her calm. I admire her complete grace on all occasions, and as a child I always thought, ‘This is the way I want to be when I grow up.’

    I perceive Mama as a highly emotional human being. It’s her sensitivity to little things that makes a difference to my life. Like all mothers do, she just knows what I need without my having to spell it out. Of course I have had difficulty communicating with her during my growing years. I assumed she would say ‘no’ to most things but later it became so easy to relate to her. One can talk about life and discuss relationships and it just gets easier. It’s a big reassurance that she’s there.

    Mama was born and brought up in Burma, in a place called Mandalay. All my years as a child in Amritsar, on all those winter nights when we used to snuggle together, Mama would tell me stories about Burma and her childhood there. People grow up on stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata – but I grew up on stories of Burma. I always imagined going back there with my mother some day.



    It was in the winter of 2002, when I finally took Mama back to Burma. Both Didi and I went with her. We saw all the places that I had been hearing about since I was a little girl. All that I had visualized was now before my eyes – her house in Mandalay, the school she went to, the mote around the Mandalay Fort. All that images I had lived with were now being materialized before my eyes.

    But it meant so much more to my mother – she was like a little girl, full of excitement, going back and locating all those places of her childhood, people that were still there, her old friends from school . . . those were some great moments – seeing my mother return to her homeland, and reliving her childhood in Burma . . . the country she had left 60 years ago.