My wallet, with my SIN card in it, was stolen some months back and last week I decided to be proactive about getting together the documentation I’d need for a replacement. So late one morning, when everyone else was out and I decided I deserved a break from the essay that was writing itself in the laptop on the table in my bedroom, I rifled through my father’s briefcases of legal paraphernalia. Old drivers licences that should have been cut up and discarded long ago. Photocopies of Saudi visas. First grade report cards. A collection of cheque books dating back to the years we’d lived in England, addresses still clear on them as though we still live there. A copy of the first university magazine that published me.

Passports, too. Glossy maroon covers with gold embossed text.

One holds a black and white photograph of me at age three. I remember this, though less clearly than I used to. My mother couldn’t join us because she had work, so my father took me to the studio. He was probably at least as nervous as I was at the thought of being alone with each other. He sat me down on the seat, studied my face, and then, perplexed about what he was supposed to do, told me to comb my hair. I must have tried, and it could not have been very good, because my father took the comb and attempted it himself. In the picture, my eyes are too large for my face and my lips just pulling apart from each other form a tiny o. My hair, as thin as it has become again these last few years, falls from its split on the left diagonally across my forehead, until it obscures in the strangest, most jagged fashion one eyebrow and the corner of one eye.

There is another passport holding an even older picture of my mother. In this picture, she’s twenty-seven, several years older than I am now, and it’ll be a few more years before I’m born. The picture is a three-quarter sepia profile. She’s pulled her hair back into a neat ponytail that flares out in the corner of the photograph, a thick mass of wavy hair, rippling in suppressed curls away from her forehead. Her blouse has a simple rectangular neck and her collar bones lie deep under her skin, their hollows showing up faint below her neck. Her sari is draped neatly over shoulder, its edges bordered with pineapples. I find this detail inexplicable, these fruits jarring, especially when set against the expression on her face.

She’s pretty in a simple, understated way. There is a calmness to her, or a silence anyway. A certain kind of composure that I don’t find true. I wanted to ask the young woman in this picture whether the stories I’ve heard of her childhood are true, and if they are, then how is she so still, so calm in this picture. Or is that a seriousness she’d consciously learned and how did she learn to arrange her face in exactly this way in front of a camera and would she be willing to teach me. Then, holding that laminated image in my hand, I descended into sentimentalism and I wanted to ask her, also, whether anyone told her she was beautiful, what she did when that happened, how her face looked then. Or whether she made sure to cut off those kinds of conversations, whether she learned early to intimidate the boys with her brilliance, to scare them off so she could focus on proving herself to herself and everyone else.

I used to resemble my mother much more than I do now, but yesterday looking at a recent picture of me, I saw her face in the droop of my lips, the distance around my eyes.

In her fifties, my mother’s hair is still like that. It still springs from her forehead in thick waves, is still, despite the occasional white strand, a deep black. Like my sister, my mother brushes her hair vigorously and it retains its volume undiminished. My mother is still like that, still intimidates people with her brilliance, still staggers her colleagues with her technical skill, still endears herself to patients she refuses to indulge.

A part of me wants to grow up to be like her, and with good reason. But underneath this is a choking terror of that happening. I do not want to learn the clarity of purpose she assumed for this picture at twenty-seven. At twenty-seven cameras will still render me stricken, afraid. Fear of the world will show on my face and unlike my mother, I won’t have learned to mask that fundamental insecurity with determination. At twenty-seven, I will wear my failures where everyone can see them as a way of maintaining a certain level of honesty. The kind of performance my mother has honed almost to perfection in the years since she took that picture requires more fortitude than I have. Nor do I have any more the kinds of goals she’s always had that make that kind of resolve sustainable.