India, May 10 -- How many versions of our past selves exist entirely within the memories of the women who raised us? We spend our adult lives aggressively moving forward and discarding earlier versions curator of all those, says SAKSHI PRIYA

How many of our forgotten selves do we simply leave behind in the dark? As adults we ruthlessly march forward and drop our past identities by the wayside without a single backwards glance. We shed the frightened child, the terrified teenager, and the hesitant youth, leaving those heavy layers of old pain far behind us in our absolute rush to grow up.

Yet exactly one person acts as the silent curator of all those forgotten identities. A mother operates as the living repository of a human being's enti...