The Things We Inherit - By Tenuli Perera

Written By: Tenuli Perera

Category: Short Stories

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, Tenuli Perera offers a poignant exploration of familial bonds and the complexities they entail with her short story, "The Things We Inherit." Submitted under the Short Story category, Perera's work delves into the intricate dance of love, expectation, and the inherited patterns that shape our interpersonal connections. This narrative invites readers into the intimate space of a family dinner, where unspoken tensions and generational differences unfold with quiet intensity.

About the Work

"The Things We Inherit" captures the nuanced interplay between a mother and daughter, profoundly illustrating the silent expectations and unvoiced grievances that often accompany familial relationships. Perera's prose is rich with imagery, from the cooling rice to the steady rain outside, creating a vivid backdrop against which the story's emotional undercurrents play out. The narrative deftly explores themes of understanding and empathy, inviting readers to reflect on their own familial inheritances.

The Things We Inherit

Original Submission by Tenuli Perera

The Things We Inherit

By Tenuli Perera

The rice was getting cold.

I could tell because the steam had stopped rising from my plate, and the little pool of gravy my mother had poured over it was beginning to thicken around the edges. A piece of carrot sat balanced on my spoon. I had been trying to eat it for the better part of five minutes, which was ridiculous, considering I was hungry, but there was something about having someone watch you eat that made even the simplest things feel like a performance.

“Look at her,” my grandmother said, looking directly at me. “She hardly eats anything.”

I put the carrot into my mouth.

“There. Happy?”

My mother gave me a look. Control your attitude, you silly girl.

“Don't speak to your grandmother like that.”

I swallowed. The carrot was too hot, and I could feel the little burn at the back of my throat.

“I wasn't being rude.” I was talking back now, a rookie mistake.

“You don't have to argue about everything.”

My grandmother made a satisfied little sound and reached for the bowl of potatoes. The spoon knocked against the side of the dish, and for a moment, that was the only sound at the table.

I wanted to ask my mother whether she had heard herself. Whether she understood that I had been told to eat more and then scolded for the way I spoke when I did. But I knew how it would go. She would sigh, put down her spoon, and ask me why I always had to make a simple dinner difficult.

So I ate.

Outside, the rain was beginning to tap against the windows. Someone had left the curtains half open, and the glass reflected our little gathering back at us, yellow light falling across the tablecloth, my grandmother's silver bangles, the dark shape of my mother's hair tied loosely at the back of her head. There was a smell of fried onions and coconut milk in the air. The fan above us turned lazily, making a dry clicking sound every few rotations.

It was a perfectly ordinary evening.

Nothing terrible was happening. Nobody was shouting. There was food on the table, the rain was coming down, and my mother was sitting close enough that her elbow occasionally brushed mine.

Still, I wished I were somewhere else.

“You've gotten so thin,” my grandmother said to my mother.

My mother looked up from her plate.

“Have I?”

“You have. You're not eating properly either. And look at your eyes. Do you even sleep at night?”

My mother laughed, embarrassed, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Amma, I'm fine.”

“You always say that. You never take care of yourself. And then you wonder why you look so tired.”

I looked at my mother, waiting.

It was stupid, I know. She was a grown woman. She could defend herself if she wanted to. But I wanted her to say something. Anything. I wanted her to ask why her mother could sit there and comment on her face, her food, her tiredness, as if a person was an object to be inspected for faults before sale.

Instead, my mother smiled and changed the subject.

I looked down at my plate.

Of course.

It was always easier to let something go when you were the one being hurt by it. Or perhaps it wasn't easier at all. Perhaps you simply got used to swallowing things, until you could no longer tell the difference between being patient and being afraid to speak. I had learnt it at such a young age.

I wondered if my mother had learned that at this very table.

I had never really imagined her as a child. It was difficult to do. My mother belonged to the world of packed lunches and school meetings, of reminders to take an umbrella and questions about whether I had finished my homework. She was the person who knew where everything in the house was, who could find a missing earring in a room full of clutter, who remembered that I hated the hard bits of coconut in my sambol and would pick them out of my plate when she thought I wasn't looking.

She was my mother. Surely she had always known what she was doing.

Except she hadn't.

There had been a time when she was learning to hold me without hurting me, learning which cries meant hunger and which meant sleep, learning how to keep a tiny human being alive when the whole world suddenly seemed full of things that could go wrong. I knew this because she had told me the stories herself, usually when I was small enough to find them comforting. How I refused to sleep unless she carried me around the house. How I would cry the moment she put me down. How she once spent an entire night sitting upright with me against her chest because I had a fever and she was frightened that something would happen if she closed her eyes.

She had loved me before she knew how.

I had always liked that part of the story.

I was less fond of the parts that came afterwards.

“Your daughter needs to learn some discipline,” my grandmother said suddenly.

I looked up.

My mother followed her gaze towards me.

“She doesn't listen to me anymore,” she said, with a little laugh that was supposed to make the whole thing sound harmless. “I don't know what has happened to her.”

There it was again. That familiar look, the one that made me feel as though I had arrived at the table as somebody's child and was now being discussed as a problem.

I wanted to tell them that I was sitting right there.

I wanted to ask when I had stopped being a person and become a collection of habits that needed correcting.

Instead, I looked at my mother.

She was still smiling, but there was something tired about it. The kind of tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep. I knew that look. I had seen it when she stood in the kitchen after an argument, staring at the sink with the tap running long after the dishes were clean. I had seen it when she came to my room to apologise without actually saying she was sorry, asking whether I wanted tea or whether I had eaten, as though a cup of tea could cross the distance we had made between us.

Sometimes I took the tea.

Sometimes I told her “I don’t want tea” because asking to be left alone felt more cruel and her mother would sulk over it.

Sometimes I lay awake afterwards, listening to her footsteps move down the corridor, and wished I had said something different.

But I never went after her.

Neither did she.

I picked up my glass of water. The outside was wet with condensation, and the cold settled against my fingers.

You were supposed to love your parents. Especially your mother. It was practically written into everything. The stories I had read as a child, the films where daughters eventually understood the sacrifices their mothers had made, the women who told you that one day, when you were older, you would realise your mother had been right about everything.

Even when she insulted you.

Even when her words followed you into the bathroom and stood beside you in front of the mirror.

Even when you began to wonder whether you should eat less, sleep more, speak less, smile more, become a little quieter, a little easier, a little more like the daughter she seemed to want.

You were still supposed to trust her.

Because if you couldn't trust your mother, then who could you trust?

I hated that question. I hated how it made every hurt feel like a betrayal on my part, as though being wounded by someone you loved was somehow proof that you hadn't loved them properly.

But I knew my mother loved me.

I knew it in the way she waited for me to text when I was out late. In the way she left the last piece of my favourite cake in the fridge and pretended she hadn't wanted it herself. In the way she could be furious with me at eight in the evening and still come to my room at eleven to ask whether I needed an extra blanket.

Love was there. I wasn't blind to it.

If she didn't love me, I could have hated her without feeling guilty. If she were cruel all the time, I could have placed her neatly in the category of people I needed to protect myself from.

But she wasn't.

She was my mother, who loved me and hurt me, sometimes in the same breath. She was the woman who told me I was beautiful and then asked whether I had put on weight. She was the woman who wanted me to tell her everything and then reacted in ways that taught me to keep things to myself.

And I was her daughter, who wanted to be understood but sometimes refused to explain herself, who wanted her mother to trust her but lied about little things because it was easier than having the same argument again.

I wasn't innocent either.

The thought arrived with such irritating sincerity that I almost pushed it away.

My grandmother was saying something about how children these days were too sensitive. My mother nodded, and I felt the old resentment rise in my chest.

Then I looked at her hands.

She was twisting the edge of her napkin around one finger. She did that when she was uncomfortable, a small, absent-minded movement I had known since childhood. I remembered being six years old and watching those same hands button my school uniform while she knelt in front of me. I remembered how she used to kiss my forehead at the school gate, and how I eventually grew embarrassed by it and pulled away, pretending I was too old.

She had looked hurt that day.

I had noticed.

I had pretended not to.

Perhaps growing up was not the sudden, glorious arrival into adulthood everyone promised it would be. Perhaps it was a long series of little rejections, some necessary, some cruel, all of them leaving the people who loved you wondering where the child they knew had gone.

Teenagers changed. Everybody knew that.

One day, you were your mother's little girl, reaching for her hand in crowded places. The next, you were shutting your bedroom door and asking her to knock before entering. You had thoughts she couldn't understand, feelings you couldn't explain, and a whole private world you were desperate to protect.

She had to learn to let you go.

You had to learn that letting go didn't mean she loved you any less.

Neither of you had been given instructions.

And perhaps that was the part that made me angriest. Not that my mother made mistakes, but that I had to live with them while trying to forgive her for something she might not even know she had done. I wanted her to understand without my having to explain. I wanted her to remember what it was like to be young, even though I knew that being young had probably felt entirely different to her.

I wanted her to be my mother.

I wanted her to be a person.

I didn't know how to make room for both.

“Are you even listening to me?” my mother asked.

I blinked.

She was looking at me, a little frown between her eyebrows.

“What?”

“I asked if you wanted more rice.”

“No, thank you.”

“You've barely eaten.”

I looked at my plate. The rice had gone cold, the gravy had soaked into everything, and I suddenly felt so tired that I could have put my head down on the table and fallen asleep beside the serving dishes.

“I'm full, Amma.”

She hesitated. Then she reached across and moved the bowl of potatoes away from my elbow, where I had nearly knocked it over.

“Fine. At least finish what's on your plate.”

I wanted to say that I couldn't win with her. I wanted to say that I was trying, that I was always trying, and that perhaps she could stop making me feel as though trying wasn't enough.

But she looked tired again.

So I picked up my spoon.

My grandmother had started talking about something else. The rain was heavier now, running down the windows in thin, crooked streams. My mother reached for the jug of water, and I noticed that her glass was empty.

I filled it for her.

She looked at me, surprised, then gave me a small smile.

“Thank you, darling.”

I nodded and returned to my food.

I didn't suddenly understand her. I didn't forgive everything she had ever said, and I certainly didn't stop being angry. The things that had hurt me were still there, tucked away in the places where old words tend to settle. They would probably come back the next time she commented on my body, or the next time I told her something important and watched her misunderstand it.

And perhaps I would hurt her too. Perhaps I already had.

I thought about how many first times there were in a life. First words, first steps, first day of school. We were so careful with children when they were learning to do the smallest things. We clapped when they stumbled towards us, laughed when they got their words wrong, held their hands when they were frightened. We understood that they were learning.

But nobody had ever told me what to do with a mother who was still learning.

Nobody had told me what to do with a daughter who was learning too.

My mother had never been a mother before me. I had never been anybody's daughter before her. We had met at the beginning of our lives together, her frightened and exhausted, me entirely dependent on her, and somehow we had both been expected to know what came next.

Maybe grace should have been given more freely.

Not as an excuse. Not as a reason to pretend the hurt hadn't happened. Just enough to remember that the person sitting across from you might be trying, even when they were getting it wrong.

My mother reached for the serving spoon and placed the last piece of potato on my plate.

I stared at it.

“Amma.”

“What?”

“I said I'm full.”

She looked at the potato, then at me.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then she took it back.

“Okay.”

It was such a small thing. A potato, for goodness' sake. It shouldn't have mattered.

But she took it back without arguing, and I watched her put it into the serving dish as though she had done something she would need to remember for next time.

I wanted to tell her that I loved her.

I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for all the times I had made loving me difficult, although I wasn't sure that was entirely fair to myself either.

I wanted to ask her whether her mother had ever made her feel the way I sometimes felt, and whether she had promised herself she would do things differently, and whether she had ever sat at a dinner table wondering how two people could love each other so much and still keep getting it wrong.

Instead, I took another sip of water.

My mother went back to eating. A few minutes later, she asked whether I had remembered to bring in the washing before the rain started.

I had forgotten.

She closed her eyes briefly.

I waited for the lecture.

It came and went. I shouldn’t be reckless and careless at my age.

I watched her walk towards the kitchen, stepping around the chair my grandmother had pulled out too far. She paused to pick up a fallen napkin, then disappeared through the doorway.

I could hear her opening cupboards, moving plates, running water into the sink.

For some reason, I remembered her hands again. Those same hands, years ago, holding mine as I learned to walk. I had fallen so many times. She had picked me up every time, even when I cried, even when I refused to try again, even when I was too stubborn to let her help me.

She had never asked me to get it right the first time back then.

I wondered when we had stopped offering each other the same kindness.

When my mother came back, she sat beside me and brushed a grain of rice from the tablecloth.

“Go and sleep early tonight,” she said.

I looked at her. There was so much to do.

And yet,

“Okay, Amma.”

“And eat properly tomorrow.”

I nearly smiled.

“Okay.”

She reached for my glass and filled it before filling her own.

Outside, the rain kept falling, and the food on the table grew cold. My grandmother was still talking. My mother was still my mother, and I was still her daughter.

Nothing had been fixed.

But when her shoulder brushed mine, I didn't move away.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar stands as a prestigious platform celebrating the rich tapestry of human creativity. This international event showcases the talents of writers and poets from around the world, offering them an opportunity to share their unique voices and stories. Participants enter a diverse array of categories, contributing to a vibrant literary exchange that transcends borders and cultures.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Tenuli Perera for her compelling contribution, "The Things We Inherit," to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her narrative, brimming with insight and emotional depth, enriches the tapestry of this year's submissions. We look forward to seeing more of Perera's captivating storytelling in the future.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.