The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

In class 11 I joined a physics tuition. The teacher ranked everyone after a diagnostic test, and I came in 59th. I remember the number precisely because of what happened after: I decided the ranking was unacceptable, and I ground at it. Fortnightly tests, every fortnight, for a year. By the end of the year I was finishing first in most of them.

For close to twenty years I told this as a story about myself. It was my proof of what I was capable of when I cared — the evidence I’d point to, privately, whenever I doubted myself. It took me until 34 to notice that it was never really a story about me. It was a story about my mother.

She believes in diligence the way some people believe in God. Not talent, not strategy, not luck — sitting down every day and doing the work. That belief was in the air of our house, and when I sat down every evening with those physics problem sets, I was running her software. The climb from 59th to 1st was hers as much as mine.

But there’s a part of the story I never told, because I never noticed it was part of the same story. In college, when things got hard in a less legible way — no fortnightly tests, no ranking to climb, just an open field where you had to decide for yourself what mattered — I drifted. Quietly, without ever calling it that. And that, too, I recognize in her: a tendency, when the path forward would require a fight, to let the thing go instead. I inherited the whole package — the grind and the letting go. It just took me twenty years to see the second half.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

My mother finds difficult conversations very hard. With her siblings, with her parents, with her children, with her husband — anywhere a conversation might produce conflict, she routes around it. I don’t say this as a criticism. I have no idea what it was like to be her — what it cost to keep peace in the rooms she kept it in, or what she learned, long before I existed, about what happens when you speak up. I only know the shape of the habit, because I have it too.

I have drafted hard messages and not sent them. I have let situations sit for months because resolving them required one conversation I couldn’t make myself start. For most of my life I thought of this as a personal quirk — something about me, arrived at by some internal process of my own. It wasn’t. It was practiced in front of me, daily, for eighteen years, by the person I watched most closely. The same is true of caution. She has always preferred the safe path, and so, it turns out, have I — every large risk I’ve taken, I’ve taken late and reluctantly, after exhausting the alternatives. I used to call this prudence and feel mildly proud of it.

What unsettles me is not that these traits exist, in her or in me. It’s how long mine were invisible to me. These are my biggest traits — the ones that have shaped my career, my marriage, my friendships — and for three decades I experienced them as choices. They were in plain sight the whole time. They were sitting across from me at dinner.

My father’s inheritance runs through me differently, but it runs.

He found his community in organizations — the RSS shakha, the local temple’s management committee — rather than in the one-on-one friendships I kept expecting him to have. Places with schedules and roles and shared work, where belonging comes with the structure. For most of my adult life I judged this. I had a whole private theory about it — that the structure was a way of avoiding something, that the work was a way of staying busy. I was very confident in this theory, and I notice, now, that I built it entirely from a distance, about a man whose inner life I have never once asked about.

That’s the real finding, and it’s about me, not him. I spent years being certain about what his choices meant while being completely blind to what my own choices meant. I could construct a psychological profile of my father from across the room and couldn’t see the most basic patterns in myself. Whatever his reasons are for the life he’s built, he at least has a community that shows up for him, which is more than my theory of friendship has reliably produced for me.

Two things of his I do carry, observably. A quick temper at small provocations — I’ve caught it surfacing in me these last few years, same triggers, sometimes almost the same words. And his relationship to work, which I’ve spent years deliberately trying to reshape in myself — though I’m no longer sure whether that effort was insight or just another way of keeping score against him.

The thing that finally made all of this visible was watching my wife.

She is very close to her mother in temperament — the same deep settings. She moves through the world with a certainty I don’t have, and spends approximately no energy worrying about how she’s perceived. Where I rehearse a hard conversation for a week, she just has it. She and my mother also run on different settings about the small domestic things — tidiness, order — the way two people raised in two different houses always do.

Here’s what’s funny: I could see the inheritance in her within a year of knowing her mother. It was obvious. Effortless. She’s just like her mom. It took me a decade longer to turn the same lens on myself, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Other people’s inheritances are visible because you met the parent and the child as separate people and can compare them. Your own are invisible because you never met yourself without them. There was no before. I was fluent in reading everyone’s family but mine.

My mother had a refrain, offered whenever someone’s failure came up — hers, mine, a relative’s: everyone’s circumstances are different. You can’t compare. You can’t judge.

For years I believed it, and then for years I privately dismissed it — it seemed like a way of never asking hard questions. I now think I was wrong both times, in an instructive way. As a universal explanation it can’t be right; it explains too much. But as a description of my epistemic situation it’s more right than I wanted it to be. Look at the record of this very essay: every judgment I’ve ever made about my family was made from afar, with the confidence of someone who couldn’t see the same patterns in himself at arm’s length. If I was that blind about the person I know best — me — what exactly was the quality of my read on everyone else?

That’s the part I keep circling. Not that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree — everyone knows the proverb, everyone nods at it. It’s that the apple spends thirty years believing it chose the spot where it landed, while confidently mapping where all the other apples fell.

I don’t know how much of this is undoable, or even how much of it I’m seeing straight now. The habits I’ve fought hardest are the ones I disliked in someone else, which is not the same as the ones that cost me most — it may just mean my vision is sharpest where it’s least charitable. Maybe my son will one day write, with the same rueful confidence, about the inherited habit his father had of blaming his inheritances. If he does, I hope he’s gentler about it than I’ve been. It’s hard to be truly unbiased, and hardest of all about home.