I am 27 years old, and my mother still does my hair every night before I sleep. Not occasionally. Not just on weekends. Every single night.

It does not matter if I get home at 11 pm after work or stumble into the house at 2 in the morning smelling like Connaught Place Social and Delhi pollution. Somewhere between her sleep cycles, my mother will wake up, put me in a headlock, drag me to her room and ask me the same question she has probably asked me for most of my life: “Baal nahi banwane kya? (Won’t you get your hair done?)”

Then, half asleep herself, she braids my hair and quietly goes back to bed.

The absurdity of this arrangement has never been lost on me. I am a fully functional adult woman. I file taxes. I survive heartbreaks. I know how to order groceries and yell at customer care executives. And yet, every night, I sit cross-legged on the edge of her hard mattress while my 60-year-old mother fights through my tangled, frizzy hair like I am still eight years old and late for school.

The week I realised how deeply abnormal this was when my mother left for Patna for seven days.

It was the first time she was travelling alone in over a decade, and the longest I had ever stayed away from her in all my 27 years. Before leaving, she spent days giving me instructions I already knew by heart. Lock the door before sleeping. Collect the milk in the morning. Put the trash out before the dogs get to it.

I nodded through all of it.

But secretly, the only thing causing me genuine distress was much smaller and much stupider: what exactly was going to happen to my hair without her?

My mother and I fight a lot for two people who spend every night attached by a braid.

Sometimes we stop speaking for hours. Sometimes for days. We are both dramatic in deeply incompatible ways. She likes to raise her voice immediately; I prefer long stretches of wounded silence. Entire afternoons can pass with doors shutting harder than necessary and passive-aggressive utensil noises from the kitchen.

But somehow, none of our fights survive the night.

At some point, usually long after both of us have committed to the performance of being angry, she will walk into my room without warning and say, “Nautanki ho gayi ho to baal baandh du? (If the drama is over, shall I tie your hair?)”

Not “are you still upset?” Not “should we talk?” Just that.

And that is usually the end of the fight.

She stands behind me with a comb, muttering about how carelessly I treat my hair while aggressively pulling apart knots caused almost entirely by my own neglect. We complain about each other indirectly. She slips neighbourhood gossip into the conversation. I respond with one-word answers until eventually I don’t.

It is difficult to continue a cold war with someone whose hands are patiently braiding your hair.

Some families hug after arguments. My mother and I haven’t hugged in years. Because in my house, reconciliation arrives with coconut oil, a comb, and three tight sections of hair.

My mother’s attachment to my hair began long before I understood it as my own.

As a child, my hair was impossibly long, the kind relatives praised with alarming sincerity and strangers felt entitled to touch at weddings. My mother treated it like a shared responsibility. She oiled it every weekend, dried it in the sun, guarded it from bad shampoos and insisted on braids tight enough to survive an entire school day.

I hated most of it.

I hated sitting between her knees while she attacked my scalp with a comb. I hated the smell of coconut oil following me to school. I hated how every haircut discussion ended with her looking personally betrayed. Somewhere along the way, my hair stopped feeling like a body part and started feeling like a family heirloom.

Unfortunately for me, I inherited her exact hair.

The same thick, wavy texture that turns feral in humidity. The same frizz. The same stubborn knots. The same tendency to expand at the first sign of moisture in the air. My mother likes to say my hair behaves badly because it has my personality.

Even now, at 27, she studies my split ends with genuine emotional disappointment.

Sometimes I think my mother sees my hair as proof that some part of her will always remain visible on me—a part of me that will likely never be familiar to anyone else’s touch but hers.

Lately, every conversation around me seems to end at the same destination: marriage, motherhood, and moving away.

At 27, people ask these questions with the confidence of those discussing weather forecasts. Where would you want to settle down? Would you move cities after marriage? Do you want children? My friends who live away from home speak about independence with the kind of excitement usually reserved for freedom. Sometimes they look at me with mild concern when I say I have never wanted that life for myself.

I have never lived away from home. I have never really wanted to either.

Whenever someone asks me if I would ever move to another city alone, I always give them the same answer: if I move, my mother moves with me.

Usually, people laugh when I say this.

But somewhere underneath the joke is a fear I still do not know how to explain properly.

Every time conversations about motherhood come up, I find myself returning to one particular night from years ago—the night my father died.

I do not remember most of that day clearly. I remember my mother collapsing from grief, crying until her voice disappeared, burning with fever by nightfall. I remember relatives filling the house. I remember silence arriving in strange intervals.

And then, somehow, I remember this too.

Late that night, in the middle of her own devastation, my mother woke up from her feverish slumber. She reached out towards my hair with trembling hands, and said with a shaky, haunting voice: “Uth jaa bacche, baal banwa le (Get up child, get your hair done).”

Even now, that remains my clearest memory of motherhood. Not sacrifice in the dramatic, cinematic sense. Not perfection either. Just a woman whose world had collapsed only hours ago, still reaching for her daughter’s tangled hair out of habit, instinct, love—maybe all three.

I think that is why the idea of being away from her has always terrified me in strangely specific ways. I do not think about whom I will call first during emergencies, festivals or major life milestones. I think about ordinary nights. I think about coming home tired and finding no one waiting with a comb in their hand.

For 27 years, every single day of my life has ended the same way.

I do not know what it will mean for me when one day, inevitably, it doesn’t.