A deeply touching and lyrical tribute to a mother for her precious inheritance

There are inheritances that sparkle in vaults and those that shimmer only in memory. Mine was of the latter kind—priceless, portable, and pulsing quietly in my veins until grief brought it roaring to the surface.

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It began a decade ago, in the heavy hush that follows loss. My mother—my first compass, my fiercest confidante—was gone. In the weeks that followed, the air around me felt like lead. The house, once scented with sandalwood and the faintest trace of jasmine from her saris, now stood still, as if holding its breath.

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One afternoon, unable to bear the weight of absence, I reached for her trunk—an heirloom of its own, not in gold but in gravity. Inside: diaries, delicate as pressed petals; newspaper cuttings whose edges had browned into the shade of old tea; pages of her stories, her articles, her voice suspended in ink. I had read them before, in the easy light of earlier years. But this time, the words rose from the paper like perfume released from a long-forgotten bottle.

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My mother had always urged me to write. Sometimes gently, sometimes with the persistent grace of someone who knows a truth you have yet to see. I, however, had been caught in the choreography of a busy life—lectures to deliver, lessons to plan, the intricate ballet of home and career. I told myself there would be time. Now, with her gone, I realised time is the one currency you cannot earn back.

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That day, as I turned her pages, something shifted. I felt a sudden, almost physical urge to spill my own story onto paper—to braid together my grief and our joy, to chronicle the tapestry we had woven together. At first, what emerged was raw: autobiographical, confessional, intimate. But slowly my gaze widened.

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The women around me—students, colleagues, strangers in the  metro —began to walk into my writing. Perhaps it was inevitable. I had spent years teaching gender and literature to postgraduate students; I had lived in the text and subtext of womanhood. But now, my pen moved differently. It was not just analysis—it was empathy, celebration, and sometimes, gentle rebellion.

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My words began to honour the world of women: the quiet weight of their roles, the irrepressible desire for free will, the poetry of their daily resilience. It became my tribute to my mother’s strength, and to every woman who wears her struggles with the same understated elegance.

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And yet, even as my writing expanded outward, it remained, at its core, a conversation with her. I began to recognise her in my sentences—her cadences, her compassion, her way of seeing the world with both tenderness and truth. Nostalgia would often sneak in like a familiar perfume, and I realised that in losing her, I had somehow gained a deeper knowledge of her.

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Perhaps that is the paradox of loss: it strips away the noise and leaves you with the essence.

My first book of the newspaper “middles,” The Priceless Petals, was dedicated to her. It was less an act of literary formality and more a homecoming. My father, unwavering in his quiet support, stood beside me through this creative rebirth. My husband and son became my soft place to land.

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At family gatherings now, relatives remark—sometimes teasing, sometimes tender—that I resemble her more with each passing year. I take it as a coronation of sorts. She was, to me, the most beautiful woman in the world, and to be compared to her feels like wearing a crown only she could have fashioned.

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It has led me to a private truth I recite to myself like a mantra:

When I was young, I was beautiful.

When I married, I became more beautiful.

When I became a mother, still more beautiful.

Now, as I resemble my mother, I am most beautiful woman in the world.

Beauty, I have learned, is not the bloom of a single season. It is the layering of love and loss, of roles embraced and battles won. It is the patina time leaves on a woman who has lived, fully and without apology.

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My mother’s beauty was never brittle. It did not depend on youth or the right shade of lipstick. It was a beauty that deepened, like the slow steep of saffron in warm milk—richer, more resonant, impossible to rush. She made resilience look like silk, selflessness felt like song. The highs and lows of life, she faced with poise and perseverance. Her writing which got published in prestigious magazines of her time, casually read by me in my younger years, are pearls of wisdom which I could  now comprehend as I wrote. May be her legacy had to come to me, a heirloom of thoughts and tenacity.

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In my writing now, I try to capture that beauty. Not in the geometry of a face, but in the geometry of a life: the way a woman rethreads herself after unravelling; the way she carries her own monsoon yet finds sunlight for others. I write about women who are oceans pretending to be ponds, mountains disguised as meadows. I write them because I am them. Because my mother was them because in writing I become every woman, what my mother portrayed with passion and panache.

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Sometimes, I imagine us together in the same room—two desks, two lamps, two women separated by time but united by ink. She would be smiling that quiet, knowing smile of hers, the one that always felt like both approval and invitation. I would be writing, as I still do, not just to create, but to converse with her.

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In truth, she left me more than a cupboard  of words. She left me her lens, her lexicon, her light. And now, in every page I write, she blooms again—petal by petal, line by line, we blossom together in unison and I have an epiphany that she is here, with me close to my heart, transfixed and crystallized in words, on floor of  my mind - a beacon of light.

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Because she is no longer in the room, but she is in every story I tell. And that, I have realised, is the rarest and most radiant inheritance of all.