From the memoir: A daughter wonders about how to reconcile with her capricious mother in her old age

There were nights that kept us up, nights when the Santa Ana winds roared with fury. Those nights always followed the same pattern.

A large, three-paned window provided a view of our cul-de-sac. One day, when the winds were roaring, I stared out into the darkness of our neighbourhood, at the shadows of palm trees swaying. Their leaves looked like the weeping feathers of a wet bird. Wind whistled through the cracks in the windows and doors and warned us of its strength. Fear overtook my mother’s body.

“Cholo, let’s go,: my mother said.

I picked up my favourite toy, a worn-out stuffed animal that looked like Snoopy, and shoved it under my arm, its once smooth surface now pilled and faded. She collected some of our belongings – clothes, numerology books, a statue of Ganesh, holy beads and a single stack of cash – and shoved them into our suitcase, a small forest-green bag with a bright line of red duct tape across it so we could easily identify it on any baggage carousel.

We drove to the nearest Motel 6. My mother panicked that we might lose everything except the small suitcase with a little bit of money and books meant to predict our future. The texts were her lifeline to security. My oldest aunt, Boro Mashi, had referred my mother to an astrologer who gave her the books and told her the days that were safe to travel.

“This is all we need,” she said. “Sona, if god says we will be safe, we will be safe.”

Even in the motel room, my mother did not sleep. I stroked her hair, thinking it might ease her racing mind. She still couldn’t sleep, so neither did I. In the morning, an eerie calm fell across Los Angeles County. The world hadn’t been burnt away, and we had survived.

When I was five, six and seven years old, these visits to Motel 6 were cyclical, in line with the arrival of the relentless winds each year.

In the moments of panic, I wanted my mother to shield me from the horror of our house in a storm or a madman on the loose. I wanted her to be Superwoman. But she wasn’t a superhero, and we were all alone. We had no relatives to call us or check in each day to see if we were still alive, no close community of friends or neighbours. She didn’t have some innate ability to protect me, because she also needed protecting, and there was no one to protect her but me.

Occasionally, my mother found peace in astrological games. Many nights at 2 am, I sat on the floor of our long hallway and watched as she threw dice and consulted her Chinese numerology texts, her long hair brushing the Spanish tiles. She added up the dots and shuffled through the pages of her books to find answers to questions about our future, her lips moving as she ingested sentences, her mind fluttering in search of serenity. Those nights, like most, she sought the elusive knowledge of things to come. And because she searched for the answers to our future, I did as well.

I also searched for answers about our past.

In 1979, my white father died of pancreatic cancer, six days before my second birthday. After my father died, my life was solely my mother. We were one.

My parents had met through the mail. My mother had been working for the Indian Consulate in Germany and was visiting Delhi for Independence Day. There, she was introduced to an American man, my father’s colleague. They took a photograph together and kept in touch. When my father saw the picture, he was entranced. My mother’s round face and almond eyes – features that illustrated her distinct ethnicity – bewitched him.

He had been pursuing his doctorate in psychology through a correspondence programme and had become fascinated with Carl Jung and archetypes. He had read Jung’s writings on Eastern religions and had grown intoxicated by Buddhism and Hinduism and their deities – Kali, the goddess of destruction; Ganesh, the remover of obstacles.

He asked for my mother’s address from his colleague and wrote to her from Pasadena, California on a baby blue aerogramme with navy-blue and red stripes along the edges. He told her he wanted to visit India and asked her to teach him about all the inscrutable customs that made her nation so mesmerising. My mother wrote back. They exchanged pictures of each other, flaunting their features – photos in which they smiled at the camera, each inviting the other in. They sent cassette tapes so that they could hear each other’s voices, their inflections conveying emotion and intent.

My mother was twenty-nine. My father was over fifty. He flew my mother to Pasadena to be with him and bought her a house tucked neatly into the San Gabriel mountains, in a picturesque part of the city where gardens bloomed, lemons fell from trees and deer wandered across backyards, eating roses. The sky was filled with smog, the air dry – not humid like Kolkata, where my mother had been born and raised.

In my younger years, my mother relayed the story of how she and my father met. She had hoped for a better future, filled with the safety provided by a man who would love her and give her a big, bright home with the sound of children. Jewels on her dainty fingers. Financial security. She had told me that my father was a good man and that he loved me.

We were on her king-size bed as she pulled out photo albums that contained pictures of him. In the first photos, he was young and handsome, his shoulders broad, his complexion smooth and buttery. Not withered like the creased skin of a chicken, which is what he would eventually look like as he neared his death. She smiled as she told me how I was conceived on the thirteenth floor of a hotel room in Honolulu, how very romantic their lovemaking was, how she just knew a baby was going to come from their union that evening. She also told me that she wished I were born a boy. Boys faced fewer burdens in life. Boys could not get pregnant before marriage.

I remember little about my father, but his tapes lived next to the old vinyl Beatles albums and Bollywood soundtracks tucked inside the media console in our television room. The tapes were a confluence of my parents’ sonic lives. They detailed my father’s desire to meet my mother, touch her, envelop her. They had me mesmerized. I wanted to hear about my parents’ union, not the story of my father’s death. I wanted enchantment, not melancholy.

When I was four, five and six years old, I would insert a cassette into the tape deck, press play and lean against our tall speaker, my ear on the mesh grille. I’d absorb my father’s voice and try to imagine him in the room with me – as a handsome young man, not as the old, cancer-ridden one who defecated in a bucket. I’d picture his hand running through my hair; his eyes filled with adoration. My body would warm up, as if his words were his touch. My hands would grip the speaker. My eyes would close, the vision of my father there, in the curtained space behind my eyelids. I’d feel at peace with each note of his voice, gratified by his archived existence.

When my mother found me one day, my ear to the mesh grille, my eyes fixed on the illusion of the father I had designed for myself, she yelled, “You think losing your father is the worst thing! I grew up with nothing! No dolls like you have! You have me!” As I cowered, she grabbed the box of tapes from my hands and shoved them back into the media console.

When I recall my father now, I wonder at his intentions, even as I question my mother’s submission to his desire for an Indian wife who was half his age. He was a white man from America attracted to a woman from far, far away. A woman with light brown skin and the blackest hair. A woman whose first language was not English. I know his erotic drives were rooted not only in this difference, but in her loveliness and youth and the idea that she would be a good and obedient wife.

I wonder – how might their marriage have worked out if he hadn’t died? What kind of father would he have been – this man who married a woman because of her beauty and race?

As a child – let me admit it – I didn’t think about my father’s flaws. I just wondered what life might have been like with a man who could have taken care of my mother.

Then again, everyone seemed to understand my mother would not be taken care of. She was like Santa Ana’s devil winds, untameable. No one could possess her – not even me.

Excerpted with permission from Do You Know How Lucky You Are: A Mother-Daughter Memoir, Rani Neutill, HarperCollins India.