[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was.

[...] The obvious issues with her outfits started coming up, that her bra straps were visible beneath the straps of her tank top, that the pants she wore when going out were too low-rise, but what bothered her mother often had less to do with how revealing her clothes were than with the strange ideas of style they seemed to involve, for example the ripped, intentionally distressed jeans she’d begun wearing, which her mother found especially offensive. Her mother would claim the jeans made her look poor, like she didn’t have anyone to take care of her, and her insistence that what her mother found ugly or ridiculous was in fact stylish only seemed to confirm her sense that her daughter was drifting away from her, falling under the sway of powerful, obscure, occult influences in the outside world. The only clothing her mother was still buying for her by the time she graduated from college was underwear⁠—maybe she assumed there was no such thing as style when it came to underwear⁠—and even after Navini had started working full-time her mother would furtively inspect her bras and panties whenever she did the laundry, taking note of all the fraying pairs she saw and then going out later to buy replacements, leaving them for Navini to find on her bed or dresser. Navini had found the heart to halt this practice only after the end of her first year in New York, confessing finally that she hardly wore the underwear her mother got her, that it wasn’t the kind of thing she or her friends wore these days. Her mother took the rejection in stride, but in retrospect the disclosure had come to seem needlessly cruel, and maybe it was for this reason, seeing all the tourists with their shopping bags in Midtown a couple of days earlier, that she’d decided to take her mother shopping during her visit, not just because it would be a way to spend time indoors, away from the cold, but also because it felt like a way of making amends, especially if it was her money they spent this time. She would help her pick out a few nice, stylish, more expensive items, some trousers and sweaters, an elegant coat to replace the ugly parka with the Scotiabank logo she’d gotten for free years before, things she could take back to Scarborough and wear proudly around the neighborhood, telling people they were gifts from her daughter in New York. It was true that her mother had never liked receiving gifts from her children, that she considered them a waste of money, but the more Navini considered it, the more drawn she was to playing the role of the hardworking, magnanimous daughter, the grown-up child who bought her working-class mother things she’d never been able to afford. She’d shared the idea hesitantly and her mother had, after some resistance, seemed genuinely moved, taking her by the hand and telling her she’d accept the gift proudly, that she’d be so happy to wear something that her daughter had bought her with her own hard-earned money.

[...] It was so typical of her mother to act like she wasn’t wanted, so manipulative of her to say she wished she hadn’t come, to try to hurt the daughter who was in fact the only one in her life who took the time to talk to her and try to understand her, though it was no use anymore, she went on, straining at the edge of her voice, she was too old to be manipulated like that now, her mother could no longer make her feel bad for things she hadn’t done, she was no longer a child and was too old to keep playing these stupid fucking games.

[...] The most beautiful woman in the world had become, after some years, the woman she found most beautiful, and the woman she found most beautiful had become, after a while, merely beautiful, merely nice-looking, turning, eventually, around the time Navini was sixteen or seventeen, into just another middle-aged Tamil woman in the neighborhood, just another aging immigrant whose appearance was unworthy of remark.