There is a dog-eared, spine-broken diary sitting on the cold granite counter of my family’s kitchen here in Delhi. It is an entirely ordinary object to anyone outside our bloodline, filled with hasty, slanted Hindi script and measurements that make absolutely no mathematical sense. On the bottom right corner of a page detailing a recipe for Gajar ka Halwa, there is a faded, translucent yellow thumbprint. It is a stain from a drop of warm ghee that fell there, perhaps a decade or more ago, pressed into the paper by my mother’s hurried thumb.

Beside that diary is my smartphone, I have applications that can photograph my mother’s handwritten recipe, instantly translate it into Mandarin, calculate its exact caloric breakdown, and generate a hyper-realistic video of a digital chef cooking it. If I so desired, I could take three minutes of my mother’s scattered WhatsApp voice notes, feed them into a neural network, and have an AI archive her exact pitch and intonation forever.