It started like any other afternoon—Mumma in the kitchen, frying prawns.

She always saves the first batch for me. It’s an unspoken rule in our house: I get the first taste of almost everything. Sometimes even the prasad meant for God passes through my plate first.

That day, I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, eating quietly. When I got up to sneak a few more prawns, she laughed and said,

"Who is stealing prawns from there?"

“Me,” I replied with a smile.

Then, suddenly, her tone shifted.

She said,

"Raise your daughter with love. Feed her well, give her her favourite things... and one day, someone will say she eats too much or behaves badly. I’ll never tolerate that. No one gets to treat my daughter like that."

I was taken aback.

"What happened?" I asked.

She told me she’d just seen a scene from the film Mrs., where a mother-in-law complains to Richa’s mother that her daughter eats a few paneers while cooking—and how the mother quietly confronts Richa later, hurt by what she’d heard.

That stuck with Mumma. Maybe because she knows the world often picks apart women over the smallest things—how much they eat, how freely they laugh, how they live.

Her words that day weren’t dramatic, but they stayed.

Because behind the teasing and the prawns was a promise:

That I’d always have someone in my corner.