By Sunita Chakraborty
I didn’t grow up with Mother’s Day in India. No circled calendar dates, no phone calls to assuage guilt, no coupons for “one free hug.”
But we had gestures.
My Dida (maternal grandmother) would travel from the outskirts of Kolkata to the city proper, white sari crisp and a cloth bag tucked under her arm. She didn’t come for vacation, but out of love—to take me off my Maa’s hands for a weekend, a week, or sometimes two. My Maa, newly promoted, was attending professional trainings.
Nannies, backup childcare, and spreadsheets of enrichment activities were replaced by something older and steadier: family. Her.
Some years into motherhood, my son came home from preschool with a stapled “Mother’s Day Spa” booklet and a look of fierce concentration. I showed up. I wedged myself into the tiny chair with the desk attached. I let him paint my nails.
Imagine a spa run by four-year-old boys. Glitter polish applied with the enthusiasm of a Jackson Pollock painting. My eyebrows dabbed with sparkly eyeshadow, my lips lined—generously—with something labeled “sunset berry.” I looked like I’d lost a bet to a drag queen. But when he whispered, “You look so pretty,” I nearly cried.
That afternoon, I went to work without wiping it off. One colleague offered a makeup wipe, but with respect. And that mattered. I wasn’t just wearing my son’s artistic vision—I was wearing proof that someone had tried to care for me.
When I think about Mother’s Day now, it’s not the cards or the hashtags that come to mind. It’s the invisible chain of women watching over each other—and making sure everyone had what they needed to stand upright.
My Maa did the same for me during a difficult pregnancy. She arrived from Delhi, still healing from ankle fractures, but you wouldn’t know it. She moved through my kitchen with purpose, navigating unfamiliar grocery stores, hunting down the right mustard oil, the right rice. One May weekend—when it just happened to be Mother’s Day—she prepared shaad, the traditional feast for a pregnant woman. A ritual of abundance. A symbolic last meal for the mother-to-be, when she’s celebrated, adorned, and most importantly, fed like royalty. She didn’t say it aloud, but she chose the day for a reason.
The kitchen was a quiet symphony: eggplant crisping in the pan, hilsa fish sputtering in mustard oil, rice steaming in the corner. The smell of fried fritters clung to her cotton sari as she set the table, oil still crackling in the kadai.
A silver plate was laid before me, crowned with a mound of rice, flanked by golden fritters, lemon wedge, and a smear of kasundi bold enough to make you sit up straighter. Around it, in little bowls: shukto, chingri malai curry, chutney, payesh. A seven-course map of love and lineage. No one called it a Mother’s Day meal. But it was, hands down, the best I’ve ever received—or ever will.
Mother’s Day now is breakfast in bed—cooked by teen boys. Lego flowers and a Starbucks gift card bought with their own money. But it’s also 20-pound bags of soil from Home Depot—potting, planting, weeding, watering—often paired with hazard pay negotiations. (The bees, apparently, don’t mess around.)
In all of it, somewhere between the mango orchards and the Midwestern snow, I was being mothered too—sometimes with nail polish, sometimes with unsolicited outfit feedback.
The same nail polish-wielding son now offers wardrobe critiques with the calm authority of someone who’s been paying attention far too long. One morning, I wore an off-white silk-blend kurta with a batik lily motif.
He looked me up and down and said, “You look like you’re about to recruit people for your cult.”
It’s not always easy to hear. But I’ve come to understand it as another kind of offering: attention. He notices when I try. And he sees when I fade.
He and his younger brother, both taller than me at 6’1″ and 5’10”, get things from top shelves before I ask. I used to drive them home from Disneyland, their small bodies slumped in the backseat, drunk on happiness and sleep. Now, they drive me. After happy hour. After cataract surgery. When my frozen shoulder acts up.
They make me breakfast or set out lunch when I’m buried in meetings. They tease me about doing my exercises—if I want to fit into (and out of) that romper I thought they hadn’t noticed.
And maybe that’s the real inheritance: not any one gesture, but the willingness to keep showing up in whatever language love speaks. A stitched blouse. A painted nail. A prepared basement. A sharp-eyed son with a license and a dry sense of humor.
I sometimes wonder what my Dida would make of all this—the spa chairs, the gift cards, the bees. I think she’d laugh. And remind me that mothering ourselves—and each other—is the oldest tradition of all. And ask—with that unmistakable twinkle—whether the spa chairs came with chai.
Sunita Chakraborty writes about intergenerational love, lineage, and the everyday ways care shows up. She is learning how to be mothered by her sons as much as she mothers them.
Like what you are reading at Motherwell? Please consider supporting us here.
Keep up with Motherwell on Facebook, Instagram and via our newsletter.