diary I kept at the time, I wrote that I was “feeling slightly alone,” then added, “Mom doesn’t even know I lost my job.”
In 2015, CBS moved me over to the presidential campaign, which ushered in a new round of life upheaval. As a campaign embed, you don’t really sleep. You’re always in a politics bubble that even your closest friends have difficulty penetrating, let alone distant parents. And you’re always on the road at rallies, debates, conventions, you name it. This wasn’t something I could easily talk to Bishakha about, and I didn’t have time. I never even told her about the new job, because by then months of noncontact had become a year. Selfishly, I knew that being on the road so much made being there for her in any meaningful way almost impossible. I also knew that as a woman in her approximately late sixties, she was getting to the age where she needed help—say, around the house and with medical issues. She wasn’t terribly fluent with technology in a world that increasingly doesn’t allow for that. By not calling her, I put myself in an ideal position to ignore that dynamic. I put all my energy into my work, in part because that’s what campaign reporting requires but also because other parts of my life felt like distractions.
But relationships being a two-way street, I didn’t hear from her either. I did notice that after college, she sounded sadder when we spoke, but she never told me what was wrong. Sometimes, she gave the impression that she didn’t want to hear from me. Our conversations became more strained as we had trouble finding things to converse about, punctuated by frustrating disputes born from the lack of understanding of each other. The increasingly rare calls were filled with long bouts of silence. By the time I started covering the Trump campaign, she was like an old associate from whom I drifted as I tried to maneuver through a stressful adulthood. I didn’t make her a priority, and if I were to guess, this frustrated and hurt Bishakha, who, in turn, went into a cocoon of her own. Part of it, I’m sure, was financial. She was fast approaching retirement. She didn’t make much money as a cashier at a pharmacy, and she was worried about her security when she couldn’t work any longer. I have another theory: Bishakha was having difficulty with how quickly the world around her was evolving. She would express frustration about completing easy tasks online—say, setting up appointments to renew her green card or other basic Internet chores, which she didn’t know how to do. Bishakha couldn’t progress as fast as the rest of the world.
I have this old handwritten letter I received in the mail from Bishakha that came folded in a birthday card. It’s on lined notebook paper and is about a page long. I don’t know exactly what year it’s from, but I estimate it to be from about March 2012, two years before that last Gchat. This came in the midst of a particularly stormy time for our relationship.
I had to move home again to New Jersey after college because I couldn’t find work after my Boston Globe contract ended, which wasn’t surprising given how much the recession had ravaged newsrooms. I was unemployed for several months and fighting through my own millennial frustrations about how the world owed me. Three months later, I finally landed at NBC and was able to move out again. I was now living in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan.
This is what her note said:
Dear Shambo,
Happy Birthday. I hope and wish that whatever you want in your life, you will get it. I always pray for you. When you were a child, you did not have a normal life like others. I wish I could do better for you. But you turned out to be a handsome, young man. And I am very proud of you.
Ma
It’s one of the few things I have from my mother, the first and only example of my mother’s acknowledgment of the difficulties of our family dynamic.
She struggled with depression as I grew up. It manifested itself in various ways, but whatever form it took, the result was anger and tears. My best reasoning is that she was a deeply isolated and lonely individual, trapped in a failing marriage and getting through her days without feeling unconditionally loved. In Howell, there wasn’t a sizable Indian community for Bishakha to be