Until his death, India to me was his sterile room in Breach Candy and a cacophony of noises outside it. It wasn’t pity, but there’s something about seeing a man lying like a vegetable and dying that urged me to make his life whole in my eyes – an urge that took me to Ranakpour, and then to Baroda, to his cricket club where it all started; to Mum’s house in Bandra, and the fisherman’s village where she stayed during her first recording, and where a photo of her still hangs in the ant-infested kholi she stayed in. I went all the way to Karnataka to see her ancestral temple, where Mariamma sang, and beyond. I lapped it all up in an attempt to get to know my parents intimately and relive their journey.

The following summer, before she passed away, Mum called me to her room one day. ‘Abhi, I have kept this close to myself for many, many years now, but I don’t think I have much time left. Before you say anything, please just take it,’ she said, holding out a medium-sized cardboard box in her outstretched hands. I took it and sat down on her bed. She sat down beside me and quietly said, ‘Open it.’

Inside were clippings of newspapers that were fraying at the corners, ticket stubs for Kiss Me Kate and an ancient-looking royal insignia of Ranakpour. I reached out deeper into the box to pull out a surprisingly non-ostentatious gold necklace, and held it up to peer at the intricate carvings.

‘Your father gifted it to me on my first trip to Ranakpour.’

‘Smooth move,’ I said, raising one eyebrow.

‘I’m sorry, didn’t mean to get too sappy,’ she said in a frail voice, giving me a meek smile as I rummaged through the box.

They weren’t just romanticized artifacts. There were also dour prescriptions carrying unpronounceable medicine names from my father’s eye surgery, and from my mother’s post-poisoning care. The famed black book with strategy notes on key cricket matches and other pressing issues that my father thought needed his attention, including the old man Madhao’s land allocation. Meera’s first audition’s script, a dinner bill from a restaurant, poignant letters from Mum’s fans, and so on. I am quite against sentimental hoarding, but looking at the care with which she had kept little memories stashed away next to her death bed – a life story told in bits and pieces of regrets and triumphs – I was overwhelmed with grief.

‘Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. It was all worth it, son.’ Her final words to me as I wept.