Saw this wonderful post on FB... My mother is seventy and lives alone in the same old house in Srinagar where the three of us once lived, my father, my mother, and me. I left Kashmir for America seventeen years ago. First for studies. Then a job. Green card. Marriage. Kids. Somewhere along the way life became meetings, school runs, and the next flight that never quite happened. In the beginning she called every day. “Have you eaten?” “Wear something warm, it’s cold there.” “Show me the snow outside your window.” She would stare at the phone screen the way a child stares at something new and say, “Our Kashmir snow is different? Then the calls became weekly. Then she stopped asking for much. Old parents learn to make their love smaller so their children don’t feel weighed down by it. I always told myself I would bring her over someday. When the kids were older. When work slowed down. When things settled. Things never settle. Last month I had work in the Gulf. On the way back I stopped in Srinagar without telling her. It was almost midnight when I knocked. I heard slippers moving slowly across the floor. The latch opened. She just looked at me for a few seconds, like she was checking if I was real. Then she put her hand on my face. “Is it really you?” That was all. Everything I had built in those seventeen years my degrees, salary, house etc suddenly felt small. She pulled me inside, still touching my shoulders as if I might vanish. Then she went straight to the kitchen. “Mother, sit. I’ll order food.” She laughed. “Even after all these years in America you still think a mother’s house is a restaurant?” She brought the samovar and two cups of noon chai. Same pink tea. Same old table with the broken corner. My father’s chair still by the window. The name sticker I stuck on my bedroom door as a schoolboy still there. Nothing had changed. Everything had. She talked about ordinary things, a neighbour who had died, the apples in the market this year. I didn’t check my phone once. For the first time in a long time I was just there. Then I saw the paper pinned next to the calendar: the time difference between Srinagar and New York. She had been living on two clocks. Later she said, almost lightly, “Sometimes I still switch on the light in your room at night. You used to study late. When the room is dark I feel maybe you’ll walk in.” An old mother can wait, can’t she? Next morning she was in the courtyard watering plants in her pheran. Moving slowly, carefully. I had seen her do this a hundred times when I was a boy. That morning I finally noticed she had grown old while I was busy somewhere else. “Sometimes,” she said, “I still make two cups of noon chai in the evening. Then I remember you’re not here.” Loneliness doesn’t always come with tears. Sometimes it just becomes habit, a second cup of tea, a light left on, a mother who keeps saying “I’m fine” so her son won’t feel guilty. I stayed longer. She started humming while cooking. She opened old trunks and pulled out schoolbooks and photographs. When neighbours came she said, quietly proud, “My son has come from America.” One afternoon we walked through the old city. She pointed at pherans and embroidered shawls the way she once held my hand tight in crowded markets, scared I would get lost. We stopped at a shop selling Kashmiri shawls. She insisted on buying me one. “Mother, where will I wear this in America?” I joked. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “I don’t know. A mother just wants her child to carry something from home.” That night while I was packing she stood in the doorway and asked the question I couldn’t answer. “Are you happy in America?” I had the job, the house, the security people run after. Sitting there with her I realised I had never really stopped to ask myself if any of it gave me the peace I thought it would. She smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” Continued below..