Seven and a Half Hours Ahead of My Mother

At eight o'clock tonight in New Zealand, it was half past twelve in the afternoon where my mum lives in India. I know this without checking now. For most of the year the gap is seven and a half hours, and when our clocks go back in autumn it shrinks to six and a half. I used to have to work it out on my fingers. These days my body just knows it, the way you know where the light switch is in a house you grew up in.

Tonight's call went the way most of them go lately. She asked if I had eaten. I said yes. She asked what. I said dosa, and she asked which chutney, and I told her coconut, and she made the small noise that means she approves but would have added more ginger. Then she asked to see the baby.

The baby is the main event now

Our son is four months old, and he has quietly taken over these calls. I used to get about twenty minutes of questions about work, sleep and whether I was wearing a jumper. Now I get about ninety seconds before she says, "Turn the phone, I want to see him."

So I turn the phone. He stares at the screen with total seriousness. She talks to him in Telugu, in that sing-song voice grandmothers seem to be issued at the hospital, and asks him things. Has he eaten. Is he troubling his parents. Does he know who she is. He answers with a sound somewhere between a sneeze and a laugh, and she treats it as a full reply.

What gets me is that she isn't performing for the camera. She means every question. She's building a relationship with a person she has mostly met through a rectangle of glass, and she's doing it with complete faith that it counts.

Living on two clocks

There's a strange double life that comes with having family on the other side of the world. I'm always quietly running two clocks. When I wake up at seven, I know she's just gone to bed. When I'm making lunch, she's starting her morning. When I'm about to sleep, she's in the middle of her afternoon, probably with the TV on in the background and someone at the gate.

It means the good times to call are narrow. My evening, her lunch. Weekend mornings for me, which are her late evenings, if she isn't too tired. Anything outside that window means waking someone or catching them mid-task.

My neighbour Mr. Mummu tried to fix this once with technology. He set up a shared calendar for his whole extended family across three countries, colour-coded by time zone, with reminders. It lasted four days. On the fifth, his aunt called him at three in the morning his time to ask why the calendar kept "ringing at her". He explained, very patiently, half asleep, how time zones work. She listened, then asked, "So you're awake now?" He admitted he was. "Good," she said, and talked for forty minutes. He deleted the calendar the next day. "The schedule," he told me over the fence, "was never the problem. I only wanted to be the kind of person who picks up."

What the gap gives you

I won't pretend the distance is fine. It isn't, always. There are birthdays I've watched on a phone, festivals I've seen in photos, and moments where I want to be in her kitchen and I'm here instead, a very long flight away.

But the gap has given me something I didn't expect. Because calls can only happen in that small window, they've become a ritual. I don't call when I'm half paying attention. I call when I can actually sit down. And because the time is always slightly inconvenient for one of us, picking up feels like a choice, every single time.

My wife noticed it before I did. She said our calls to India are the only phone calls in the house where nobody looks at another screen. She's right. It's hard to multitask when your mother is asking a four-month-old whether he's been good.

A note for tomorrow

Tonight after the call, I sat on the back step for a bit. The baby was asleep. Somewhere it was lunchtime and my mum was probably telling a neighbour that her grandson had answered her questions today.

I don't have a lesson here, not a tidy one. Only a reminder to myself: the window is small, so use it. Call at her lunchtime. Turn the phone when she asks. Let her ask him questions he can't answer yet.

One day he will answer, in Telugu or English or some mix of both. I hope she's on the other end of the line when he does.