For Amma, on Her Birthday

My mother doesn’t need a smartphone
to remember what she has always known.

A number once, a date, a name,
years may pass, she knows the same.

Ask her how two people relate,
she’ll trace the family line straight.
No search, no screen, no AI bot
can quite compete with what she’s got.

And me?

I never know what gift to give,
and when I try, I rarely win.
So on your birthday, Amma, today,
I sat and thought of what to say.

“I love you, Mom” three words so small,
for some they may come out at all.
But where I grew up, love wasn’t said,
it was shown in what we did instead.

It waited until everyone ate,
it worried when someone came home late.
It planned the day before it began,
and somehow always had a plan.

I was your younger son, always near,
yet so much was never very clear.
I ate without asking if you had eaten,
I saw the home, but not what went into keeping it.

Only much later did I start to see
what you may have given up for me.
And these last few months, staying back at home,
I noticed a world I had never known.

The thinking, the planning, from morning to night,
a hundred small things to somehow get right.
Work that is noticed only when it is not done,
yet starts before and ends after everyone.

So to every mother whose work is at home,
I understand a little more of what you have known.
We call it “homemaking” one simple word,
for so much work that is hardly heard.

And Amma, you have done this year after year,
for everyone you hold so dear.
Through all the work and every demand,
I hardly remember a complaint at hand.

Your patience, your care, your quiet way,
your love has been in what you do every day.
Maybe that is why I am like you too,
I find it hard to say what I feel for you.

In our world, love wasn’t spoken much,
it lived in food, in care, in touch.
It lived in waiting, giving and doing,
in quietly knowing what someone was needing.

But life moves fast, and days move on,
and things we should say are sometimes gone.
So maybe we need to slow down and see
the people who quietly make us who we are meant to be.

They call it gratitude, a word so small,
for someone who quietly gave us all.

And this is still not really a gift.
I still suck at that bit.

Naanna will probably read this out to you,
and somewhere he may be thinking too,
“You wrote all this for Amma today,
what about me, what do you have to say?”

Naanna, don’t worry. You are already here.
You have been part of her every year.

Because if Amma has shown me one thing true,
it is how much her life has been about you.
Sometimes I feel, from all that I see,
she thinks of you even before herself, maybe.

And Amma, here is the funny part too:
I am still shy to say all this to you.
Yet somehow today, I am sharing it wide,
the words I still struggle to say by your side.

Maybe somewhere there is a son like me,
who feels the same but lets it be.
Who loves his mother but does not know
how to say the things he wants to show.

Maybe he will stop.
Maybe he will call.
Maybe he will say something after all.

Maybe not in perfect words or rhyme,
just something he has held for a long, long time.

So no, this may still not be a gift from me.
But maybe it is something I needed to see.

To stop for a moment.
To look back too.
To notice all that came from you.

Amma, I still don’t know how to say
what you truly mean to me today.
Maybe I will never find words that do.

But I know this much is true:

I am blessed
to be your son.

Happy birthday, Amma.