Ashna started to pace, words failing her. The Padma Shri was one of India’s highest honors for achievement in a field.

“Ashna, your mother is winning the Padma Shri! All my hard work, all my sacrifices. It’s all paying off.” The excited quiver raised Shobi’s pitch a few levels. She was entirely unaware of the fact that she was saying these words to the sum total of all her sacrifices.

This time Ashna cleared her throat. “That’s amazing,” she said, because she wasn’t a colossal enough bitch to be unkind when someone was excited about winning an award only a handful of people won.

“Thanks, beta,” Shobi said, clearly struggling with how her inexplicable daughter could be so underwhelmed by her brilliance.

There was another awkward pause, awkwardness being their default mode. Ashna took herself to the bathroom and turned on the tub faucet. A shower wasn’t going to cut it today.

“Listen, Ashna. I know this isn’t easy for you to understand, but it hasn’t been easy for me either.”

Which part? But Ashna knew the answer to that already.

The part where Shobi had to abandon Ashna to achieve what she was born to achieve. You couldn’t ask a question like that without being reminded of how dispensable you were, and even worse, how selfish you were for feeling sorry for yourself for being dispensed with for the sake of “changing the world.”

Truth was, nothing was ever hard for Shobi. She had been the star of the Indian national women’s cricket team. After retiring from that, she had singlehandedly taken sports advocacy for girls to the remote corners of India, a country that determinedly ignored all sports except men’s cricket.

As if that weren’t enough, she had transformed her sports advocacy into a weapon to change the lives of girls and women across the country by building sports-focused schools for girls. Her network of grassroots female empowerment projects brought together millions of dollars from the world’s greatest philanthropists. She made conscienceless politicians tremble, manipulated corrupt media, and managed to employ hundreds of people who truly cared about her cause in an entirely self-focused world. If anything dared stand in her path, she leveled it like the champion she was. In other words, she was the polar opposite of her daughter in every way possible.

Ashna had been struggling to keep one restaurant afloat for ten years. For the entirety of those years, Shobi had been waiting for her to fail.

“I see that you’re not going to make this easy for me,” Shobi said with the deep regret she used in fund-raising speeches. It was a tone that could guilt people into coughing up every penny they could afford.

“I’m really happy for you,” Ashna repeated in the most upbeat of her collection of upbeat tones. The emptiness that overtook her when she spoke to Shobi didn’t make it easy.