How does it all go so pear-shaped?: Poonam Saxena writes on bonds with mothers

It can become something of a fractured relationship, the one with a mother. No one explored this with more delicacy than masterful Hindi writer Swadesh Deepak.

There is a short story about a man and his mother that has stayed with me for almost eight years, ever since I first read it.

The story is Bagugoshe (Hindi for Pears) by Swadesh Deepak. I’ve written about Deepak before. He was the outstanding Hindi novelist, playwright, short-story writer and author of a one-of-its-kind memoir, Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha, on his seven-year battle with mental illness. (His own story had no firm ending: In 2006, at the age of