Calling your parent in India when you live in another time zone

Call their morning, not your evening

Most people abroad call when they are free, which is their own evening. For a parent in India that lands late at night or in the late afternoon, and both are the worst hours of their day.

Almost every family reports the same shape: the person is most themselves early, and gets harder to reach as the light goes. Calling into that decline means you consistently speak to the tiredest version of your parent and then carry the flat, difficult call around with you for the rest of the day. Calling their morning means you speak to the best version, and you hear them sound like themselves, which is most of why you called.

• Toronto and New York: their 8am is your 10.30pm the night before. Late for you, and worth it.
• London: their 9am is your 4.30am. Hard. Their 11am is your 6.30am, which most families settle on.
• Dubai: their 8am is your 6.30am. The easiest of the lot, and no excuse not to.
• Sydney and Melbourne: their 8am is your 1.30pm. The one time zone where this is genuinely simple.

Short and often beats long and occasional

Four minutes most days is worth more than forty minutes on Sunday. Attention gets thin quickly, and a call that runs past that point usually ends in a tired silence you will both remember for the wrong reasons.

The long weekend call also puts everything on one roll of the dice. If Sunday is a bad day, that was the week. Spread across five short calls, a bad Tuesday costs you Tuesday.

Make the call the same shape every time

Predictability does a lot of the work that memory used to. If your call arrives at the same hour, opens the same way and lasts about the same length, your parent does not have to work out what is happening, and the household around them learns to have the phone in the right place.

Say your name first, every single time. Then say one true small thing about your own day before you ask anything at all. It gives them something to react to rather than something to retrieve.

• Same hour, same greeting, same rough length.
• Lead with a statement, not a question. "It is raining here and I forgot my umbrella" is easier to join than "what did you do today".
• Tell them when you will call next, at the end, every time. They will not remember it, and the person who looks after them will.

Work with whoever is in the room

Your call depends on somebody in India answering the phone and handing it over, and that person is doing you a favour whether they are your sibling or somebody you pay. Agreeing the hour with them is the difference between a call that happens and a call that half happens.

Ask for the phone to be on speaker and put down rather than held to your parent’s ear. Holding a phone up gets uncomfortable within two minutes and is a common reason calls end early for no apparent reason.

On the days the call does not work

Some days you will get almost nothing. Silence, confusion, or a flat conversation that ends after ninety seconds. It is very rarely something you did.

What stays after a call is not its content. Families regularly find their parent repeating a fragment of it to a neighbour hours later with no memory of who said it. The fragment is what the call was for, and you got it even on the day it felt like a failure.

Where else to look

These are other people’s pages, not ours. Our own published work and the neurologist who reviews it are on the research page.

• Cultural adaptation of Alzheimer’s disease assessment scale-cognitive subscale for use in India and validation of the Tamil version for South Indian population.
  The cultural adaptation of the same questionnaire for use in India.
• Hindi Version of Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination III: Distinguishing Cognitive Impairment Among Older Indians at the Lower Cut-Offs.
  A Hindi memory questionnaire validated for older adults in India.
• Alzheimer’s and Dementia Support, India
  The Alzheimer’s Association’s own pages for families in India.