Which of the two mothers is wiser: The one that silently starves herself while ensuring her children get to eat, or the one that bewails her misfortune deep from the lap of poverty?
As far back as she could remember -let's call her Parvathi - owned no more than two sarees. One green and faded like a leaf drained of chlorophyll, the other the colour of turmeric that determinedly held fast to its hue despite the sun's fierce gaze whenever it was washed and hung to dry on the bamboo fence - which was once a week.
She pawned her earrings shortly after the birth of her eldest daughter. The necklace went the same route when the next child - another girl - came along.
She gave up wearing 'additionals' such as footwear after girl number three and by the time Kannan - as weak and emaciated as his mother - was delivered cautiously into her arms, Parvathi was already contemplating the 'What next?' What could she give up?
Food, she reckoned. She could easily do with one less meal a day. In any case, her stomach had shrunk to a size that could no longer tolerate overindulgence, such as three square meals.
It was about this time that her husband, mistakenly suspected of being a dacoit, was shot and killed. To her employers - the Bharat Kumars - she became Parvathi with the Four Mouths. Surely five, prompted Mrs Bharat Kumar on occasion, "Don't you eat as well, Parvathi?"
Usually it was the silence that delivered her answer as Parvathi, polishing a doorknob, mopping the floor or washing the ever-silver feigned deafness or was simply too exhausted to respond.
Sweat was her closest companion those years and toil was the friend that, while sucking the energy out of her, paid her something in return. When he was 14, and adept at mathematics, young Kannan's perception led him to a discovery.
His mother, he noticed, would prepare seven dosas. He - the son - would be fed three, each sister would eat one and then two sisters would share the seventh.
Yet at the end of the meal Parvathi, drinking deeply from a brass bowl of water, would contend she was as satiated as Kannan and couldn't possibly eat another morsel. A sadness filled his heart.
Twenty-two years later, he would tell his colleagues in the government office that it was his mother's sacrifice more than anything that spurred him on. He would unwrap a package and show them what he'd bought with his first salary.
A brand new saree, pearly white. And that night, he was treating his mother to an exclusive meal at the new vegetarian restaurant.
Parvathi would never go hungry again. Mala, too, had been dumped unceremoniously into the Poverty Pit. Four children, too. All boys. You think she'd be pleased at least with that, commented one irked neighbour.
Mala became known to all as Mala the Mourner. Self-pity, not sweat, was her companion as she trudged the length and breadth of her street, complaining about her lot in life.
Her four boys caught the full gale force of her agony and - just like any four sons who love their mother - resolved that at some stage in their adulthood they would need to do something to set things right, rid their poor mother of this unbearable yoke. They, too, didn't seem to recall a father in the background.
It was the second boy, Shiva, the dropout, who, with the help of a seemingly enterprising peer decided that drug running was a quick way to lift the entire family out of the morass.
Big money for a moment's risk. He wasn't intellectual enough to worry that he was selling death to others. It was life that concerned him.
His, his brothers and, most importantly, his mother's. Which is how he came upon his lengthy jail sentence, caught at the first attempt. Some parents 'make' their sons. A few, unwittingly, help destroy them.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
