New Delhi, June 6 -- After a great-aunt died, my mother read a little tribute I wrote for her and said wistfully, "You're the writer in the family. Perhaps you'll write something like that for me after I am gone. Why don't you write it now so I can read it?"

I rolled my eyes and said, "The feeling won't come now."

In the last few weeks as my mother struggles with a slew of sudden health issues, the feeling still hasn't "come" but when I see her lying in a hospital bed, confused and shrunken, I feel perilously close to it.

I didn't grow up in a family that said "I love you" easily. That was too western, like in a Hollywood movie. "Have you eaten?" is the way we said "I love you." When I lived in America, my mother would call and ask if ...