There is something deeply emotional about writing about your own mother. I have written about people, ideas, technology, astrology and many things that matter to me, but writing this page feels different. Perhaps it is because no number of words can quite hold the life of someone who has been woven into almost every part of your own. Prameela Kapilavai is my mother, but she is also one of the strongest, most intelligent, most loving and deeply grounded women I have known. Whatever I write here will inevitably be less than what she has been to our family and less than what she means to me.
My mother spent more than thirty years in state government service, working with the Adult Education Department and serving as a Project Officer at the Hyderabad Collectorate. Much of her work was connected to overseeing adult literacy and education programs designed for people who had missed formal schooling, with the aim of building basic reading, writing and practical skills. The larger purpose of that work was not simply literacy, but empowerment, particularly for adults and women whose access to education had been limited. During those thirty plus years, she repeatedly declined promotions because accepting them would have required her to leave Hyderabad. She had the ability and the opportunity to rise much further in her career, but advancement repeatedly presented her with the same choice: move away and disrupt the life of the family, or remain where my father, my sister and I could continue with the stability we had. Again and again, she chose us. Even after declining so many promotions over the years, she was next in line for promotion and, had she continued in service instead of taking voluntary retirement, she would have retired at the level of a Director.
Looking back now, I understand that this was not one dramatic sacrifice made on one particular day. It was a decision she made repeatedly over more than three decades. Every promotion she declined represented another possibility for her own career that she quietly allowed to pass because she did not want her professional growth to come at the cost of uprooting our family. The career she could have had was much larger than the one she allowed herself to pursue, and the distance between those two lives is, in many ways, what she gave to my father, my sister and me. As a child I could never have understood the weight of that. As a woman with a career of my own, I understand it very differently today.
About fifteen years ago, after more than three decades of service, she chose voluntary retirement when a transfer made commuting from Hyderabad difficult and health concerns made continuing impractical. By then, she had already given more than thirty years to her work while quietly making countless choices that kept our family together. Retirement marked the end of her professional career, but not the discipline, responsibility and sense of duty with which she had lived it.
There is one childhood memory that feels especially tender to me now. When I was around eight or nine, I used to become very upset that my mother could not come to school and pick me up at three in the afternoon. She was working, but at that age I did not understand the demands of her job or the responsibilities she was carrying. I only knew that I wanted my mother there, and in the absolute logic of a child, I would sometimes tell her that she did not love me because she could not come to pick me up.
Today those arguments are among the memories that make me smile and ache at the same time. I can see the situation with an adult's eyes now. I was accusing a woman of not loving me while she was spending her entire life making choices for precisely the people she loved. Yet my mother being my mother, she apparently remembers every such comment. Even today she can become emotional about the time she believes work took away from my sister and me. She still carries guilt that she could not always be there in the ways she wanted to be, and sometimes she becomes teary thinking about it. That moves me deeply because, from where I stand now, I do not see a mother who failed to give enough. I see a woman who gave so much that she somehow still worries it was not enough.
That instinct to give has never changed. Even today, when her daughters are grown and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, her mind still works as though every little thing she saves can somehow be preserved for us. She can look at an entire menu and decide that an idli is enough because it is the cheapest tiffin. We can tell her that she worked for decades, that she deserves to order whatever she likes, and that her daughters certainly do not need her to save the price difference between one breakfast and another. It makes very little difference. Somewhere in her mind, apparently, that money still belongs more naturally to her children than to herself. A mother's children grow up. A mother's instinct to save something for them apparently does not.
At home, however, she was always simply Amma to us, which meant my sister and I sometimes forgot how accomplished she was outside the house. My mother is an exceptionally good orator. During her professional years, she shared stages with collectors, ministers and senior officials, and she could speak with an eloquence and confidence that seemed completely natural to her. Whenever we happened to see that side of her, whether at her office or at a program, we would suddenly look at this articulate and commanding woman and think, with genuine surprise, “Oh my God, our mother is actually very impressive.”
That newfound respect usually lasted about three days. Soon enough, my sister and I would return to teasing her and confidently informing her that she did not know this or did not understand that, while quite possibly speaking to the most intelligent person in our family. I think that is one of the privileges children take for granted. The rest of the world may see someone's intelligence, accomplishments and presence. To her children, she remains Amma, the person they feel entirely entitled to argue with about everything.
Books have been part of my mother's life for as long as I can remember. She has been an avid reader from a very young age, and spiritual literature has occupied a particularly important place in her life. Her engagement with spirituality began in her twenties and continued through decades of reading, reflection, study and traditional practice. Her first spiritual guru was my grandmother, Annapoorna Guntur, who was also her mother-in-law. My grandmother's guru was Ramanatham garu, and my mother later also learned from Ramanatham garu and regarded him as a guru. Spiritual learning was therefore not something distant from family life for her. It was present within the family and became part of the foundation on which her own spiritual understanding developed.
For my mother, spirituality has never been something discovered after retirement or something reserved for particular occasions. It has been part of the rhythm of her everyday life for decades. Puja, madi, acharam and traditional observances have remained part of her life even today. But her spiritual engagement has never been ritual alone. She reads extensively, thinks deeply about what she reads and reflects on the people, choices and moral conflicts within India's epics. Questions of dharma, faith, relationships, human character, suffering and responsibility are not merely subjects she encounters in books. They are things she has spent a lifetime thinking about.
Even when she travels to the United States to stay with me, precious luggage space somehow gets filled with spiritual books she wants to read while she is here. Not one small book for the journey, but books she has decided are important enough to cross continents with her. For my mother, spiritual literature somehow qualifies as necessary international baggage, and by now I have accepted that books will always compete very successfully with clothes for space in her suitcase.
Books are also something my mother and I share, although our reading journeys are our own. I became an avid reader in my own right from my teenage years, constantly reading whatever subjects captured my curiosity, while she had already built her own lifelong relationship with books long before that. Perhaps that is one of the quiet similarities between us. We may choose different subjects and approach them differently, but neither of us has ever needed much convincing to open another book.
My mother was also never the kind of mother who believed that love meant allowing her children to do whatever they wanted. She was strict, sometimes very strict, and I, in particular, received most of that discipline while growing up. My sister was usually spared, unless she tried to rescue me, in which case she occasionally ended up receiving an unintended share of her own. My mother also had quite a formidable temper when she was younger, although she may strongly object to this historical description. Her daughters remember an angry young woman. She may remember herself rather differently. Some family disputes are probably beyond the reach of even spiritual philosophy.
That strictness did not, however, produce a particularly obedient daughter. I seem to have arrived in the world prepared to question her. Even at five, I was already arguing my case. Whenever she raised her hand to discipline me, I would immediately remind her that my father had told her not to hit me. The reminder could infuriate her even more, particularly because it was coming from a five year old confidently invoking my father's words against her. But however angry she became, she would stop herself. In my five year old mind, I had discovered an extremely effective argument: my father had said she should not hit me, and I intended to make sure Amma remembered it. Looking back, that little exchange probably captured both of us remarkably well. She had a strong sense of authority and a formidable temper, while I was already questioning, arguing and searching for the one point she could not reasonably dispute.
Having a mind of my own was only one of the challenges I presented to Amma. I was also the kind of child who required an extraordinary amount of collective family management. I was perfectly capable of leaving school, deciding to visit a friend's house and disappearing for a few hours without considering that anyone might be wondering where I was. Eventually my parents, sister and grandparents all became part of the effort to make sure I actually reached wherever I was supposed to be. Every day, my sister was instructed to come to my classroom, collect me and make sure I actually got into the auto, while my grandmother waited at home to confirm that I had arrived. Unfortunately, even successfully delivering me home did not necessarily complete the mission, because I was quite capable of being dropped off and disappearing again to play somewhere. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how Amma, my father and my grandparents survived raising me without developing a permanent suspicion of silence. If nobody could see me for a little too long, there was probably a reasonable chance that I had simply gone somewhere without informing anyone. At the time, this all seemed perfectly normal to me. Only much later did I understand how much patience, vigilance and coordinated family effort apparently went into the simple task of keeping track of one very adventurous child.
Some of my adventures were genuinely dangerous. On one occasion, my older sister and I were standing on the second floor when I became convinced that we could jump like Superman and then go outside to play. My sister, displaying considerably more sense, warned me that we would die if we jumped and reminded me that there was also a well below. I confidently told her that I would jump first and that she could follow me. I was just about to put my plan into action when Amma caught me. Understandably terrified by what she had nearly witnessed, she disciplined me very firmly. Incidents like this were not rare exceptions; I seemed to invent some new way of alarming my family almost every day. My adventures were not confined to the outdoors either. I would even play with fire in the kitchen, which frightened Amma enough that she began keeping the kitchen locked and gave my grandmother strict instructions never to give me any keys at all. Looking back, details like these explain better than anything why Amma believed I required such close supervision. Keeping me safe was apparently not ordinary parenting; it was a full family operation.
Both my maternal grandparents were teachers, and my grandfather found perhaps the most ingenious way of keeping me safely occupied and within his sight. He taught me to play rummy and promised to give me one paisa for every count. To this day, I do not know whether he intentionally lost games so that I would keep playing or whether I genuinely played well enough to beat him. What I do remember is wanting to play game after game, because playing more meant earning more money, and more money meant more chocolates. I believed I had discovered a wonderful source of chocolate money. My grandfather may simply have discovered an even better way to keep one dangerously adventurous little girl happily occupied, safely at home and within his sight.
By my teenage years, arguing with Amma had become almost a family tradition. My father frequently found himself playing peacemaker after one of our disagreements, asking me to apologize and persuading my mother to come out of the bedroom and join us for lunch. I would firmly refuse to apologize and then proceed to eat my lunch perfectly happily, apparently suffering no crisis of conscience whatsoever. At that age, while Amma remained upset behind a closed door, I was entirely capable of deciding that she was being a little dramatic and simply continuing with my day. Looking back, the contrast between us is almost comical: she felt everything deeply, while I could argue my case, stand firmly by my position and proceed directly to lunch.
Ours has always been something like a lifelong duet sung in different keys: deeply loving, endlessly argumentative and remarkably consistent in disagreeing with each other. My sister, meanwhile, was almost my complete opposite: calm, measured, extraordinarily responsible and genuinely about as close to a perfect daughter as one could reasonably hope for. The contrast between us was not subtle. Amma could trust my sister with house keys, money and practically any responsibility, while I had an extraordinary ability to become distracted and forget whatever responsibility had been assigned to me. I could come home, open the doors and then run off to play without remembering to lock them again, leaving Amma to return home and discover the house standing wide open with nobody inside. Naturally, Amma trusted my sister with things she could not safely trust me with. At the time, however, I did not see responsibility. I saw partiality. I would argue with Amma that she loved my sister more, question why my sister was being given rights that I was not, and insist that being her daughter entitled me to equal treatment. I could make Amma genuinely upset, even cry, while passionately presenting what I believed was an airtight case against her discrimination. Growing up has forced me to admit the much simpler explanation: my sister was responsible and I, quite spectacularly, was not.
My sister, for her part, took care of me with a level of consistency that I shamelessly accepted as the natural order of the universe. She packed my school bag, carried my tiffin box and frequently ended up carrying both her things and mine while I walked toward the auto with absolutely nothing in my hands, apparently under the impression that I was some kind of princess travelling with an extremely efficient personal assistant. She also did my homework with astonishing consistency from LKG all the way through the first year of BTech. She did it so regularly that on one of the rare occasions when I genuinely completed my own homework, my teacher looked at the handwriting and asked me who had written it. I told her that I had. She simply did not believe me. The handwriting did not match what she had been seeing in my notebook, so she threw the book aside and asked me to get out of the class. The unfortunate part was that I had actually done the homework and had absolutely nothing useful to say in my defense. I quietly got out of the class. After that experience, I apparently concluded that the safest way to maintain consistency in my academic record was never to do my own homework again.
Pastries produced their own early lessons in justice and property rights. My sister usually had the money, while going to the bakery and actually bringing the pastries back somehow became my assigned contribution to the operation. We would normally buy three. We each ate one whole pastry, but the third created a much more complicated economic arrangement. Because my sister had provided the money, she would take three quarters of the final pastry and give me only one quarter. For some time, I apparently accepted this system. Eventually, however, my sense of constitutional justice had finally awakened. I began arguing that the money was not really my sister's money at all. It came from our parents, and since they were equally our parents, I had exactly the same right to that money and therefore exactly the same right to the third pastry. The old three quarters to one quarter arrangement was abolished, the final pastry was divided precisely in half, and I claimed my share. Responsibility may have taken me a little longer to discover, but equal rights apparently arrived right on time.
My early constitutional arguments were not limited to pastries. When I was four or five, I sat on my maternal grandfather’s lap during his Shashtipoorthi ceremony. He began teasing me that he had married me as his second wife. At that age, I was old enough to be horrified by the idea but young enough not to be completely certain that he was joking. I would cry, fight with him and repeatedly ask whether he had really married me and why an old man like him had done such a thing. I could never quite believe him, but, thoroughly enjoying the situation he had created, my grandfather would solemnly assure me that he truly had married me. He would then show me the photograph from the ceremony as evidence and frequently declare that he loved me even more than he loved my grandmother.
Although I strongly objected to this supposed marriage, I became remarkably willing to invoke it whenever the status worked in my favor. If my grandmother became tired of the nuisance I was creating, scolded me and told me to get out and return to my own house, I would firmly refuse. I would tell her that, as my grandfather’s second wife, I had exactly the same rights in that house as she did. I was not going anywhere and, if one of us had to leave, she should be the one to go. My grandmother would first stare at me in complete shock and then burst out laughing at my answer.
One day, however, I developed a genuine doubt. I knew that married women wore mangalsutras, so if my grandfather had truly married me, where was mine? My grandfather kept a stack of letter forms ready for writing, each with his own return address already filled in. I still do not know why he kept so many or to whom he normally wrote. Although I could barely write at that age, I took one and wrote to him asking, “Did you really marry me? If you did, where is my mangalsutra?” I posted the letter without writing any “To” address. Since my grandfather’s return address was the only address on it, the post office returned it to him. By failing to address the letter properly, I had somehow managed to deliver it to exactly the person for whom it was intended.
My grandfather found the letter so delightful that he showed it to everyone in our family and extended family before carefully placing it in the iron almirah where my grandparents kept their jewelry and other valuables. When I was eight, I found the entire episode terribly embarrassing and tore up the letter. My grandfather patiently taped it back together and returned it to its place among their valuables. Both my grandparents have since passed away, but that little letter is still safely preserved in the same almirah: a taped-together piece of my childhood that my grandfather considered precious and refused to let me erase.
Looking back, those arguments about partiality make me smile because I can now see what I could not see then. Amma was not measuring her love differently between two daughters. She was responding to two children who were genuinely poles apart. My sister could be trusted with keys, money, bags and responsibilities without anybody wondering what disaster might follow. I needed rather more supervision. Yet as a child, I experienced differences in responsibility as differences in rights, and differences in rights as evidence of unequal love. Even then, if something felt unequal to me, I wanted to understand why, and I was rarely shy about asking questions until I did.
Amma therefore learned very early that the same approach would never work with both of us. She speaks to my sister and me differently, responds to each of us differently and instinctively knows how much explanation, firmness, patience or humor each daughter requires. With me, argument somehow became part of our love language. I tease Amma, disagree with her and challenge her so predictably that Amma now often just smiles, as though she knows the script, knows the actress and has long stopped expecting a different ending. My sister usually gave Amma far fewer reasons to exercise her parenting diplomacy. I sometimes think Amma got one daughter who made parenting look wonderfully peaceful and another who made sure she never became bored.
That contrast between Amma and me extends even to something as simple as taste. If Amma says something is beautiful, there is an excellent chance I will look at it and say, “Yuck.” If Amma declares that something is absolutely not nice, I will probably announce that I love it and intend to buy it. This pattern has been so reliable throughout my life that Amma has become almost afraid to buy anything for me without my approval, whether it is a dress, jewelry or something else, because she is quite certain there is a very real possibility I may never use or wear it. I sometimes tell her that when she is choosing something for me, she should simply pick the thing she dislikes most because there is a very good chance that will be exactly what I love. That has softened a little since I moved to the United States, but not enough for Amma to become particularly adventurous about selecting things for me without checking first. We have spent a lifetime disagreeing about almost everything while never having to question the love underneath any of it.
What changed after I moved to the United States was not my ability to disagree with her, which remains remarkably intact, but my understanding of her value. Distance gave me enough space to see differently the woman I had spent so many years arguing with at close range. I began to understand the sacrifices I had once taken for granted, the strength behind her strictness, the depth beneath her emotions and the enormous amount of love that had always existed underneath our battles. Distance gave me a perspective that proximity sometimes did not, and beneath all our arguments I began to understand much more clearly how extraordinary the woman I had been fighting with all those years actually was.
Through all of this, one thing has become much clearer to me: my mother has always believed that loving someone includes correcting them when they are wrong. She did it when we were children and she still does it now. When my emotions cloud my judgment, she brings me back to perspective. When I become too judgmental about someone, she corrects me. When she thinks I am wrong, she does not modify her opinion simply because I am her daughter. She tells me what she believes is right. Sometimes I agree with her immediately, sometimes I argue, and sometimes I understand much later that she saw something I could not see at the time.
A mother is often described as a child's first teacher. Mine has never retired from that role. She continues to guide me, question me, ground me and remind me that affection and correction are not opposites. Sometimes the people who love us most are also the people willing to tell us what we least want to hear.
That same sense of discipline extends to the way my mother approaches relationships themselves. She believes deeply in boundaries, fairness, self respect and mutual responsibility, even with the people she loves most. For her, closeness has never meant that limits disappear or that one person should take another for granted. This was not simply her own habit; it was something deeply ingrained in my mother's side of the family. I remember watching my grandmother settle the smallest amounts with my mother. If one of them had bought leafy vegetables for the other, even one or two rupees would be sent back. As a child, I found this completely bewildering because the same grandmother who insisted that two rupees be returned could, minutes later, happily give me fifty rupees because I did not want rice and wanted a burger or pizza instead. I once asked her what kind of strange transaction this was: how could two rupees require such careful accounting while fifty rupees could simply be handed to me? Her explanation stayed with me. The two rupees, she said, were a transaction and therefore should remain clear. The fifty rupees were love. There was nothing to settle. That distinction captures something fundamental about the way my mother's family approaches relationships. It is not miserliness; they are, in fact, extremely generous and charitable people. The amount has never been the point. The principle is that obligations should remain clear so that affection is never burdened by entitlement, resentment or misunderstanding. My mother has followed that principle with her sisters, with her own mother and with us, and my sister and I absorbed much of it from her. It remains one of the strongest traits running through my mother's side of the family: love can be extraordinarily generous, deeply attached and giving while still preserving fairness, dignity, limits and boundaries.
That same balance of love, responsibility and self respect has shaped the many relationships in her life. She has been a devoted wife, a deeply loving daughter, an attached and caring sister and an extraordinarily dedicated mother. Family has shaped some of the largest decisions of her life. She placed professional advancement aside for it, organized much of her life around it and continues to worry about everyone in it. So much of what she gave was never announced as sacrifice. She simply gave because that is how she loves.
My mother's devotion to our family is perhaps most visible in the relationship she has shared with my father. She is enormously proud of the man she married and still speaks about his character with the gratitude of someone who genuinely believes she was fortunate in her marriage. And yet, watching them all these years, I have often felt that my father loves her even more than she realizes. His affection, respect and concern for her have always made that devotion deeply mutual. She has cared for him with a depth of devotion that has always been part of the atmosphere of our home. For her, love has expressed itself through attention, service, loyalty, concern and the instinct to make the life of the person she loves easier. Yet theirs has never been a relationship in which devotion meant inequality. My father has always respected her intelligence, valued her judgment and treated her as an equal partner.
She has also been one of my father's most trusted advisers. My mother is intelligent, practical and perceptive, and throughout their marriage she has never simply stood beside him and agreed with everything he did. She has advised him, reasoned with him and told him when she believed something could be done differently. He listened to much of what she said, although certainly not everything, as she would probably be very quick to remind us. She has been deeply devoted to my father while also being his intellectual companion, adviser and equal, and that combination is one of the things I admire most about their marriage.
When I think about where I learned to love, I do not have to search very far. I learned love by watching my mother love my father. I learned that love can be deeply devoted without losing intelligence, giving without keeping score, loyal without becoming blind and honest enough to correct the person we love when necessary. The relationship between my parents remains the best marriage I have witnessed closely in my own life. Long before I had words such as devotion, companionship, partnership or respect to describe what I was seeing, I had already been watching those things at home. Perhaps one of the greatest things my mother taught me without deliberately teaching it was how to love, simply through the way she loved.
That same relationship was also built on values they both lived by. My mother and father have always had a deep commitment to integrity and have consistently stood against corruption. They never believed that money, position or convenience justified compromising what they knew to be right. Growing up with them taught me that integrity is not something we speak about only when it is easy. It is something we live through the choices we make, especially when doing what is right asks more of us.
I also want something to be very clear about her presence on The Cosmic Pattern. Prameela is not writing here simply because she is my mother. She belongs here in her own right. She has spent decades reading India's epics and spiritual literature, living within traditional practices and reflecting seriously on faith, dharma, relationships and human character. She is a strong writer with a natural command of Telugu and with the kind of perspective that comes from a lifetime of reading, observing, experiencing, questioning and thinking. Her understanding does not need to mirror mine. In fact, part of what I look forward to is allowing our different voices and interpretations to exist beside one another.
Her articles on The Cosmic Pattern will carry her reflections, her understanding and her authorship. She may write about Krishna, Karna and the many other characters and questions that have stayed with her through years of spiritual reading. Her original articles will be written in Telugu, the language in which she writes with the greatest natural depth, and I will translate them into English while trying to preserve the meaning, emotion and richness of her own voice.
Writing about her makes me realize how much of a mother's life children understand only in retrospect. When we are young, we simply experience our mother being our mother. We do not calculate the promotions she declined, the career she might have built, the afternoons she could not leave work even though she wished she could, the guilt she carried because her child once said, “You don't love me,” the money she still saves, the books she continues to read, the prayers she performs, the discipline we resisted or the countless ordinary decisions through which her family came before herself. What looks ordinary to a child can reveal itself, years later, as a lifetime of extraordinary love.
Today, when my mother remembers that she could not pick me up from school and still feels guilty, I wish I could somehow give that younger version of both of us the understanding I have now. I would tell my younger self that love is not measured by who is standing outside the school gate at three in the afternoon. Sometimes love is a mother sitting at work because she is carrying responsibilities her child cannot yet understand. Sometimes it is declining another promotion. Sometimes it is correcting you when you are wrong. Sometimes it is carrying spiritual books across an ocean. And sometimes, even decades later, it is choosing the idli because some part of her still wants to save the rest for her children.
My mother has been my rock, my teacher, my critic, my source of strength and one of the people in my life whose love I have never had to question. The older I become, the more I understand that some of the things I once complained about were themselves expressions of everything she was trying to hold together for us.
Perhaps that is why I find myself emotional while writing this page. I can describe her career, her intelligence, her spirituality, her love of books, her discipline and the sacrifices she made. I can write about the professional, wife, daughter, sister, mother, reader and spiritual seeker that she has been. But none of those descriptions completely captures the person I know simply as Amma.
The older I grow, the more I understand that no achievement, no title and no words could ever measure what my Amma has given me. I can only hope that this page carries a small part of the love, gratitude and respect I feel for her.