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       When My Mom Got Sick, This TV Show Kept Us Going

       “Indian Idol,” the Hindi version of “American Idol,” is a pleasant distraction from life’s more trying predicaments.

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       Credit...Photo illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

       By Scaachi Koul

       May 1, 2024Updated 11:18 a.m. ET

       Every family has its archetypes, so here’s mine: My dad and my brother and I are all miserable. None of us are quick to experience joy, and all for different reasons — my dad is irritable, my brother is anxious and I’m bitter. The three of us combined could make one moderately unwell person. Instead, we are planets that orbit a sun more optimistic than we could ever be, and we hope that some of that shine rubs off on us periodically.

       My mother believes in a positive ethos: that things invariably will improve, that everyone is trying their best, that it’s better to be surprised by harm than anticipating it all the time. In April 2023, I was laid off from my job, and she reassured me immediately. “Everything always works out,” she said. But for the first time, I noticed a slash of worry run across her face. It looked as if she was losing her radiance.

       I later learned that my mother had been hiding something important from my brother and me for a month: She’d had a biopsy to determine if she had breast cancer. Within weeks of her 69th birthday, she had a lumpectomy. The doctors told her she would need an exhausting surgery, and then exhaustive radiation. For a little under a year, she went through treatment, and steadily she changed — she became sour, nihilistic and impenetrably dark, just like the rest of us. I had never seen it before, and I didn’t know what to do with it other than try to change her mind. Who was this woman? Every few weeks I’d fly home to find my mother again.

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       A version of this article appears in print on May 5, 2024, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Indian Idol’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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