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D

istant mountains are always blue. That was something my mother used to say to me. Over and over again. Distant mountains are always blue. It is true, especially in India, where the Ghats are dark bundles of risen geometry pointing up to the sky.

But I think it means more than that now, more than just a description of the Sahyadri mountains seen from far away. It is as if the distance itself is coated in dark blue melancholy. The same color of a deepening sky as night falls. The same color that makes it seem like twilight is nostalgia for the day.

It is not just the way the lush greenness of the Sahyadris somehow mixes with the deep purple rock face, and turns the distant shapes to midnight cobalt. It’s something that happens in the space between — the very far awayness of those far away mountain ranges.

Distant mountains are always blue.

I know this now, because my mother is my distant mountain.

My mother is Parsi, born and raised in India. Like many children of immigrants, I spent parts of my childhood in my mother’s country. I have an Indian name, and Indian eyes, but I am not Indian in India, and not quite American in America. I am, like so many, in between.

When I think of my childhood visits to India, I most vividly remember my mother’s caves. Well, maybe they are not her caves, not really, but for almost as long as I can remember my mother has been obsessed with — and has studied — a place called Ajanta.

Ajanta is a UNESCO world heritage site — 30 Buddhist caves carved into the rock face of a giant ravine, forged and painted between the first century BC and 6th century AD.

My mother has spent the last 30 years as an art historian learning and understanding the artwork left behind there; sculpture and paintings and stories. From centuries beyond imagining; the trace beginnings of the divine.

It is not just the caves, with their cold stone interiors, not just the giant sculptures of the Buddha, and the way you can sense that this was once a place of worship and sacrifice. This was also my childhood playground. I wandered in and out and around the caves, while my mother squinted in the dark.

I have watched my mother disappear into other kinds of caves too. Depression is after all, a kind of cave.

Now, decades later, I visit my mother in India again. She's depressed again. So in the winter of 2018 I make the 20-plus hour trip from California to see her. I told myself that she needed me, but if I’m being honest I went for myself too — to trace some scars of my own.

Together, we returned to Ajanta. We went back to her caves. It was a pilgrimage of sorts to the place that makes her happiest, and to the last place I truly remember being mothered.

This is the story of that journey. It’s a story about mothers and daughters, mental illness, historical trauma and history itself. The way it repeats, the way it fails to learn, and the way the ghosts of the past live on inside us.