The Rainbow (A Reflection)

The call came on a Thursday evening. It wasn’t the first time the call had come. Over the phone, my dad told me that my mom had another stroke.

Strokes run in our family, on my mother’s side. Perhaps it will come for me.

My mom’s first stroke was in 2021, shortly after the pandemic, shortly after her retirement, shortly after her relocating from Rhode Island to Hollister, California. A quiet, once country town of brown and green, on the foothills of the Diablo Range. A town of specific resonance — where my Mom had first emigrated in 1963 from India, to attend junior college. An easy town, where she had created her third and final home as an adult in the US, her garden, and her patio. Her first apartment, still on the main street downtown.

She recovered almost completely from that first stroke, but not completely. She learned to use chopsticks with her left hand. She cooked. I’d chop vegetables when I visited. She gardened. She returned to traveling the world. To visiting museums. To coming to New York. To climbing San Francisco hills. Experiencing symphonies. Seeing family and friends. My dad tended to her, helped with things.

My mom was a person of tremendous independence and will power. She wanted to live life on her own terms. For most of her life, she did. The loss of that final percent, never fully recovered from the first stroke, frustrated her immensely.

The call came on a Thursday evening. This call was different.

My mom was taken to a neurological ICU in San Jose, CA on April 4th. I flew to California on the morning of April 5th.

I have many homes. The Bay Area is one of them. San Jose is my first memory of the Bay — all of my mom’s sisters and brothers in the US lived near San Jose.

The scalloped subdivisions, the strip malls, the stoplights on boulevards going nowhere in particular. One year, I remember a Christmas where they said there were mountain lions in the foothills.

The end came quickly, suddenly, but not unexpectedly. Ten days.

It was enough time for all of my mom’s family to gather. My sister from Rhode Island. Erin. My cousins from New Jersey. Everyone in California.

It was enough time for calls to come from every reach of the world, from every moment in her life. Her family. Her earliest friends in America. Friends of sixty years in California. Friends of forty years in Rhode Island. Her students. Fellow intellects. Fellow adventurers. Fellow spirits, full of passion, will, and verve. She heard them and felt them, even though she could only respond through light taps with her foot in my palm.

The end came quickly. On April 14th, in the evening. In a room in San Jose, California. Improbably and wondrously attended by all of her immediate family. Her husband, my father. My sister. My partner. Each of her living sisters. Performing acts of care and comfort, summoned from somewhere that I don’t know. Their husbands. Her brother. Many of her nephews. Improbably and wondrous, this collection of Bengalis, moved across continents, here, holding vigil, touching skin, watching her breath recede. Peacefully.

My mom lived a full life. Determined. Inspired. Full of adventure. She was a student and a teacher. She tried to make a difference in every act. She left an impression on everyone she met. Mostly good.

We wrote my mom’s story as a memorial in April. She wrote most of it in her own words at various points in her life, and I lightly edited it. She would love it if you read it and looked at all the pictures and took in all the fullness of her life here — and so would I.

The rest of this will be about my mom’s life, somewhat.

But it’s really about me, I suppose.

And making sense of this moment and what comes next.

The Great Arc
I have always had an understanding that the arc of my parents’ lives were a foundation for my own. It’s what you get as a child of immigrants. And as an immigrant myself — albeit a very young one, having brought to the US before the age of two.

The arc of your life moves in relation to your parents’ arcs. Maybe you retrace it, searching for meaning and purpose. Maybe you are bound by it, never fully able to transcend it. Maybe you extend that arc, pushing higher and farther.

My mom’s life was a rainbow — seven decades and seven continents. She lived fully and vibrantly. In her legacy, there is gold.

The fullness of my mom’s life was of her own creation — a testament to her will, talent, curiosity, and desire to live as completely as she could. She moved to the US at a young age, navigating a new world largely on her own. She blazed a professional path through academia in both India and the US, often as an outlier. A small, strong-minded woman in a sari, in rooms full of men. Influencing countless students and colleagues throughout the world. She made three homes in the US and raised two kids.

The fullness was also, perhaps, a happy accident of history. A life lived in these expansive decades in the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, where the world changed in such profound ways. Peaceful and prosperous. Hopeful and full of promise. A material life incredibly different at its beginning from its end, thanks to technology, air travel, globalization, and immigration.

A time in the world full of openness and opportunity. Souring a little at the end, as people grow strange.

Her journey — the joys & the struggles, the ambitions & accomplishments — is an arc vey much in conversation with my own at its midpoint.

Can I approach life with the same wonder and desire as my mom did throughout her life? Can I live as fully? What’s stopping me?

Her desire to see the whole world took her to seven continents. A fierce four-foot ten, heading out onto the Antarctic ice. At Nordkapp, at world’s end. Jumping off a cliff in Rio. Hiking to see Machu Picchu. At Petra. On fjords. Across deserts. In rainforests.

Diving into crowded markets, whether the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, or a street market in Beijing, or a weekend trip to the Ocean State Job Lot. Often tugging me along.

My Mom experienced most of the things she wanted to. She was voracious that way. Except for one — as a young person inspired by the space race of the 60s — she wanted to go to the moon.

My desire to consume the world is smaller than hers, I think. But from her I get a love of the great, big, delirious world. I don’t desire the moon, but within this world, I want to live many lives.

Will the arc of my journey feel bigger than hers, as I think she would have wanted me to feel? Or is it destined to be a little humbler?

Homes and Horizons
My mom was born in 1948, as one of midnight’s children in an independent India. In a chaotic Calcutta, still shaped by the legacy of the British, of partition, but essentially Bengali. Full of art and adda, color and culture, frenzy and fury.

The middle child in a family of eleven children. Precocious. Willful.

Sleeping eleven to a room (however unlikely). Taking the trams across town unattended. Dancing for the Russian navy on port call in Calcutta.

A Calcutta of her memories. Mythologized for me. A city of blues and beiges and yellows and off whites, where I spent many childhood summers. On verandas. On trams. In Ambassadors, packed six-eight-ten to a ride. A spiritual home, even though I have no direct home there any more.

For me, moments in Calcutta were formative. At five or younger. From a car window. Walking down the street, holding my mother’s hand. Being loaded into a hand rickshaw, pulled by a seemingly ancient man. Staring eye to eye with other kids, seeing poverty, seeing inequality. Near Wellington-bari. Near New Market. Asking my mom: why?

California was her home at the start of her journey to the US, and again, at the end. As a young, talented, curious, ambitious woman from Calcutta suddenly seeing up close the hopefulness of the American experiment set against the vastness of the American West. As a retiree, sinking her hands into the rich soils of her Hollister backyard, bringing to bloom flowers and a verdant vegetable garden, watching the hills go from green to brown as the seasons change.

The same California that I found for my collegiate years. My moments in California echoing hers, on opposite ends of the San Francisco Bay.

For her, a sixties California — radical, sunny, optimistic, psychedelic. A California that fascinated me. The myth of the America I grew up with.

Without history. Living in the forever present, shaping the future.

Green and gold and sparkling blue.

For me, a nineties California — reactionary, sunburnt, stoned. A California becoming more obsessed with exits than entrances.

Finally, a twenty-twenties California — diverse & developed. Confident in what it consumes, careless in what it creates. Perhaps uncertain of what it has become. Living in the near future, trying to erase the past.

Our home for forty years was Rhode Island, along the coast of the Narragansett Bay. Quiet, brambly woods turned into leafy subdivisions. Facades of individuality, when houses weren’t just all the same. Just enough different to allow your individual dreams.

Green with low grey skies and choppy, chalky blues.

It is where my parents raised me. I’d say, New England raised me, too.

My parents built a house in the early 80s. We watched the concrete poured to make foundations, the frame of the house go up. On a small hill, where nothing was, save for a stone fence somewhere in the back with a few graves. Deer and blueberries. As if here was the land, here was the opportunity.

Blissful in the summer, beautiful in the autumn, and quiet, low, and spare once the winter comes. Easy, yet unfriendly, in that good fences make good neighbors sort of way. For little brown kids growing up in a very white place.

A Rhode Island which I now find charming, endearing. Woods green and wet, it’s perfect little bay cutting up the center of the state twinkling blue.

Each of these places were homes, shared with me. But in truth, my mom’s home knew no horizons. She made homes all over the world, through her travel and work.

A PhD at Northwestern. Teaching in Ahmedabad and Calcutta. Working sabbaticals in Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Brazil. Conferences convened and attended in countries all over the world.

From her, I understood that you can be at home in the world. By being open to experiences. By building relationships. By doing good and meaningful work. By being generous, trying to give more than you receive.

In each of her homes, my mom welcomed and received friends and family from all over the world. Fellow immigrants from India. Young students, finding their way in a new country. Colleagues. Neighbors.

Each of my mother’s homes have been homes to me. A home in Wakefield. A house full of paintings, objects, and textiles. A solarium full of wooden birds. A home in Narragansett. A view of the cove. Her friend, an osprey. A home in Hollister. A return. A garden.

And the world.

I’ve spent this past fall back in my home (rented, of course) in Brooklyn, New York, and in my studio, a place and a space where I try to manifest many of the values I’ve received from my mom.

I would like to think that in many ways, I live up to her legacy of home-making. A legacy of spirit as much as place.

Creating space for openness and curiosity. For welcoming and generosity. And knowing there is more to do. To make good and meaningful work. To be positive and make good trouble. To invest in people and create lasting relationships. To give a little more than what I have received.

Inheritance
A ridiculous parlor game we would sometimes play was to count up the countries we’d visited. My mom would always win. Something like 60–30.

Sometimes visited, often lived in. Forged relationships in. Made a difference in. Left impressions in.

She earned her Fulbright to live in Belem, Brazil in her early seventies.

She would tell of walking from her apartment to the market, to the river, her colleagues sometimes telling her that she should’t go here, or she shouldn’t go there.

She would go there.

A sense that life was for the living. All of it.

Life without regrets. Were there regrets? There were.

But the life was lived, fully, completely.

My mom was an academic. A professor. Also a wife. And a mother. Some days, she said that was her most important role. Myself and my sister her greatest work.

My mom was demanding. She thought motherhood was didactic. That children were shaped through will and practice. I don’t think she got that right.

We were shaped through her example, her experiences, and her character.

It was in the showing, not the telling.

My sister and I share a strong sense of justice and fairness. A deep ethic of work. A desire for independence. Each of these I can trace to my mom.

And more than anything, a sense that life is your own. Life is your own to shape and to live as you please.

And yet, your life is not your own. You owe a debt to everyone that comes before you, who help bring you to where you are.

As you move through life, you have a responsibility to take whatever you are given — whatever talents, or luck, or opportunity — in the service of others. Because they could be you, and you could be them.

Double Rainbow
Grief is a strange thing. They say it’s different for everyone. They say it comes in waves. My year hasn’t been sad. But it’s been filled with reflection.

What do you lose when you lose your mom? I am sure it is different for everbody. It depends on your relationship. But one thing I’m sure you lose is having one person in the world who thinks about you every day.

My mom’s death was sudden, but not unexpected. She would have lived forever, if she could. But when the end came, she was ready to go.

My mom has completed her arc. I am somewhere in the middle of mine.

I wonder if I’ll be able to achieve the wonder, the fullness, and the impact of hers.

It’s a lot to live up to.