Every year, more or less, my parents visited us in Atlanta. My brother, Prashant, lives a few miles from me, so it was a family reunion when my parents visited. They would split their stay between my house and his. This year, in 2014, Prashant (or Dabloo, as he is called at home) had a special occasion. His son Varun was going to go through a Hindu ceremony to mark a rite of passage. It was a pretty big deal, and guests were coming in from all over.

My parents arrived from Delhi on 29 May, just one day before their 48th wedding anniversary on 30 May. Our friends in Atlanta all knew my parents well. We arranged a big party to celebrate their anniversary. It was a great success. Our friends all came. There was lots of food and drink. Singing and some dancing occurred. All was well.

The day after, things began to move full steam ahead for Varun’s ceremony. My mother – or Ma, as I used to call her – had been shopping in India for months in preparation. Her shopping had arrived in multiple large bags with her. These bags were elaborately unpacked, and their contents were itemized and arranged appropriately. The ceremony would go on over several days. Each day was supposed to use very specific items that Ma had painstakingly sought out from different cities and even villages in India.

Ma was not a very energetic woman. Gradually, from a waif-like beauty in her late teenage years, she had become rather large. Several bouts of serious illness and surgery in the 1970s and 1980s had made it difficult to get the weight off. Her very sedentary lifestyle didn’t help. I do remember her going on walks for exercise when we were very young, back in the late 1970s, but I never got the impression that she was serious about losing weight. To be honest, she looked beautiful, even with the extra weight, and in our lives at that time, her weight just wasn’t an issue.

Eventually, knee surgery in 1995 made it easier for her to claim that she found it difficult to walk fast or for long durations. In any case, combined with my father’s meteoric rise in his profession at around the same time, and the very comfortable lifestyle that resulted from this rise, her reluctance to engage in physical activity had created a pattern we knew well. She always woke up early, made sure my father (and anyone else who was visiting them wherever they lived) had his tea and breakfast, saw him off, had her staff help her make lunch, and then spent most of the day watching TV. She used to socialize with whoever was available, but after my father (addressed as Papa by me) came back from work, her life revolved around him and his needs. If he went out and she didn’t, she would watch some more TV. She never ate before my father had his dinner, however late that was. In most cases, that meant she ate around midnight.

So that was her background. The surprising thing we had noticed over the last year or so with Ma was that she had lost weight. She wasn’t emaciated, but she had dropped about 20 kilograms. According to her, the weight loss had happened over a few months, right around the time she had started some medication for complications with her thyroid gland. Since we had seen her several times as she had lost weight, we weren’t very aware of how dramatic the loss was. However, people who saw her after a few years always expressed their surprise at how much weight she had lost. At least a couple of them also asked after her health. But nothing else was wrong. The weight loss had not continued unabated. She was eating and drinking normally.

As she worked to prepare for Varun’s ceremony, her TV-watching continued as we expected it to. I had made sure she had all the Hindi TV channels she could get. Very soon, my satellite recording system, which can record up to 6 channels at a time, was hard at work recording 6 channels! In fact, there were occasions when we had to stop one of her recordings to be able to watch another channel on the system. She liked her TV, and she was absolutely committed to following the myriad elaborate and improbable storylines on the serials she liked.

Between the constant activity that surrounded preparing for Varun’s ceremony, all the people visiting for the ceremony, and all the work that went into that, we were all busy. Varun’s ceremony happened. On the evening of June 7, all of us – my parents, Dabloo’s family, my family, our cousins who had come to visit, parents-in-law, friends, etc. – got together in Dabloo’s house. It was finally time to relax before the out-of-towners went their way the next day, and the in-towners got back to their normal lives. As things often do when our family is involved, the singing started, and soon Ma was asked to sing a song.

Dabloo and I had this relationship with my mother where we joked with her all the time. Some of these jokes were about how she sang the same song for years before picking a new favorite. One of our jokes was that she had picked up this song from the movie Zakhm that she had been singing since the late 1990s. It is the song ‘Gali mein aaj chand nikla’, a song she sang quite well and knew all the words to. As always, she picked this song, prompted also by us when she asked what she should sing.

Her voice sounded unsteady as she sang. She still knew all the words, but where her voice used to soar effortlessly into the higher notes, it quavered now. I remember thinking to myself that, at 63, age was catching up with her.

That evening ended with a lot of dancing. We got drunk and happy. We got back home well after midnight.

That’s the last time I remember being unreservedly happy. You know the type of happiness that you feel because you just received some long-awaited favorable news? This wasn’t that type of happiness. This was the other type, where you are happy in the core of your existence, knowing that even though there are things that are not quite as they should be in your life, the sum total of your existence is very good indeed. As Wodehouse used to write often, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

The feeling wouldn’t last.