Year Six - Time Flies

Raising Lila while balancing two careers, relationships, family, and some semblance of culture and community has made time feel both impossibly slow and incredibly fast all at once. The days themselves can feel long, but the years quietly stack on top of each other before I even realize they have passed.

It is hard to believe that six years ago today, Mom died.

A few years ago, Lila and I started a nightly ritual together. Every evening, we read a book, turn off the lights, and then I tell her a story about Mom.

It always begins the same way:

“Once upon a time, in a land far, far away called Bombay, there lived a little girl named Minnie.”

From there, I build stories around memories I carry of my mother and the many people connected to her life. These stories always make me smile because they remind me of how many roles she played throughout her lifetime. She was a sister, daughter, wife, friend, aunt, mentor, and above all else, someone who made people feel deeply seen.

Over the years, our ritual has expanded to include stories about family friends and relatives, all with their own strange subplots and personalities woven into the larger tapestry of our lives. Lila loves trying to guess who the person is before the story ends, and she laughs with such delight knowing she belongs to this sprawling web of people, memories, and histories.

During quarantine, Lila started using Kids Messenger to call my dad and ask him questions about his childhood. From the other room, I would overhear stories I had never heard myself. Sometimes I would stop what I was doing just to listen.

After every story, Lila inevitably finds something she shares with the person in it. A habit. A fear. A personality trait. A strange preference. Watching her do this has made me wonder whether storytelling is one of the ways we slowly come to understand who we are.

Maybe stories help us locate ourselves inside something larger.

Maybe they help us understand temperament, identity, belonging, and inheritance before we even have language for those things.

So many of the stories I now tell Lila were first passed down to me by Mom. She was the keeper of stories in both the Shah and Bhalakia families. She carried memories, interpretations, family mythology, and emotional nuance in a way that made people feel alive long after the moment itself had passed.

We never ran out of things to talk about.

As I revisit these stories night after night, I realize I am dipping into a well that stretches back generations. What once felt like casual conversations now feels like inherited wisdom hidden inside ordinary storytelling.

Many of the stories reveal themselves differently now that I have lived through more life myself. The struggles feel more complicated. The triumphs feel more earned. The cautionary tales about etiquette, relationships, duty, sacrifice, and expectation suddenly make far more sense than they did when I was younger.

Life has a way of maturing our understanding long before it provides answers.

Having now moved through multiple seasons of adulthood myself, I understand more deeply the complexity behind people’s choices. Love, duty, family, ambition, compromise, grief, loyalty, reinvention. The stories that stayed alive within my mother were the ones that had transformed her in some way. Every story she carried taught her something about being human.

If I can say one thing about Mom, it is that she never needed a grand life to live an abundant one.

I was lucky enough to witness her evolution up close. When I was younger, I followed her everywhere like a shadow. As I got older, that transformed into long phone calls, letters, observations, and endless conversations about life and people.

In many ways, we were incredibly different.

And in many ways, Lila and I are incredibly different, too.

What I appreciate now is that Mom never demanded sameness in order to maintain closeness. Even when we struggled to understand each other, she never let those differences grow distant.

Instead, she helped me imagine consequences.

As we talked through life decisions, relationships, fears, and possibilities, she taught me how to weigh trade-offs thoughtfully. She never told me exactly who to become, but she constantly helped me think more deeply about the paths before me and the life each might create.

Over the years, I have realized I am far more like her than I once believed.

So here she is still, shaping me from somewhere beyond what I can fully explain.

What she ultimately left me with was not perfection or certainty, but the ability to participate fully in the human experience through both the mundane and the magical. Her greatest gift was her ability to connect deeply with people no matter how briefly or casually they crossed her path.

Oddly enough, losing Mom also stripped away many of the things that once drove me: ambition for ambition’s sake, envy, anxiety about imagined futures, and endless rage against systems and outcomes I could not control.

Somewhere along the way, those motivations simply lost their grip on me.

Instead, I have started trying to live more consciously in the present and think about the stories Lila is quietly absorbing as she watches me move through life. The bigger existential questions about purpose, identity, and meaning will likely continue to unfold over time.

But for now, I hope I can continue prioritizing the people in my life across every sphere: family, friendships, community, and work.

In the end, I suspect relationships are what remain.

I feel deeply blessed by the richness of connection that surrounds my life, and I hope that, if life allows, I can continue to give some of that richness back to others.

Until next time, keep on keeping on.