Besides, Mom had always been a sight for sore eyes. Even though she had given up vibrant colours for more muted ones after Papa had passed away, Mom was always elegantly attired and impeccably turned out, her serene countenance deceptively masking the iron fist she could so effectively wield. She looked beautiful now, in her powder blue chikankari sari and the pearls that Papa had gifted her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which she always wore now.

Mom being around also meant that some culinary treats were in store, I realized happily as a whiff of her incomparable rajma—chawal assailed my nostrils. Mom loved to cook, and while Sammy and Rishi had a cook who could dish up some decent fare, it couldn’t hold a candle to the melt-in-your-mouth cuisine Mom so effortlessly whipped up for us whenever she was in town. Lately though, Mom had developed this obsession with health food and everything she cooked had to be either low fat or low sodium; she had been driving Sammy and me up the wall with her ‘health fundas’ as we called them. Thankfully this obsession with all things healthy hadn’t impacted the amazing taste of Mom’s cooking so far.

‘Have your dinner, beta,’ Mom said now ushering me into the dining room. ‘Sameera and Rishi have finished eating. They turned in early to make the most of the fact that Aryan is sleeping well today, but I was waiting for you. It’ll also give us a chance to have a nice chat; we haven’t done that for so long!’

I squirmed in my seat and stole a glance at Mom; ‘a chat’ was a euphemism for a long lecture on how I needed to get my priorities right and my personal life sorted out. But Mom didn’t seem to be on her usual war footing today, chatting instead about her latest vipassana course and a trip she was planning to Mussoorie with some of her students as part of a research project to study the phases of the moon.

‘How’s work?’ she asked me now as I contemplated another serving of the low oil, low sodium but still yummy rajma—chawal.

‘Huh? Oh, work is great, Mom! In fact today was particularly good. You remember that new project I had started work on? The Bright Biscuits one? Well, we faced some roadblocks on that initially, but things are looking up now. We’ve got a new team on board and we’ve already started work on the launch. In fact, there’s this new guy on the creative team, Yudi, who—’

‘Yudi? What kind of name is that? Really, the names people give their children these days! Do you remember the Khannas? They lived next door to us when Papa was posted in Gwalior. Mr and Mrs Khanna have also settled down in Dehradun now. Their younger son Gautam is your age, if you recall. I met him recently at the Bhatnagars’ daughter’s wedding. Preeti, remember her? And do you know what everyone was calling him instead of Gautam? Gomzi! Imagine! Ruining a perfectly good name, I say.’