asking her questions about that romance.
Wesley recounted how we’d met through Twitter.
“Do you know what Twitter is?” I asked Bishakha.
“Mmhmm. I don’t tweet but I know what it is,” Bishakha said. Talk about an evolution: from not knowing how to turn on a computer to understanding Twitter—though, really, who can ever understand such a thing?
“She has an iPad, babe,” Wesley said. A fair point. I began to wonder if my mother was about to ask me what my favorite hashtag was. We told Bishakha that Wesley was finishing up law school when we met, which I had mentioned on the phone.
“Oh, you’re a lawyer?” Bishakha said, her eyebrows raised. “Good.”
We moved on to discussing politics, something my mother and I had never done.
“These days, I don’t enjoy politics at all,” Bishakha said. “I used to enjoy watching what’s going on. It’s not news anymore. I used to love Charlie Rose. I used to watch every day.”
No longer. She added that she never liked Matt Lauer from the start. My mother, the media critic, said that the news had become too gossipy.
I told Bishakha that Trump had tweeted at me because he wasn’t a fan of a story I wrote.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bishakha said, with the belly laugh I hadn’t heard in years. “Oh my, you’re on a hit list! I remember that he made a very nasty comment about Meryl Streep.”
We finished lunch and cleared the dishes. I was feeling more comfortable than I had been when we first arrived. There was some chatting in my mother’s living room as we ate the cookies we’d brought. Bishakha asked if we wanted to take the piano, adding that she had no use for it, but there was no way we could give it a home in our small Manhattan apartment.
I had never seen my mother this happy. She insisted on taking a picture with Wesley. She took one with me too, but honestly, Bishakha seemed more excited about Wesley. I wasn’t complaining. I was just happy lunch went well.
On the car ride back, I had this gnawing feeling that I couldn’t shake. It made me grip the steering wheel harder.
“She lives a very sad life,” I said to Wesley, as we cruised the highway back to New York. No amount of one-off lunches would reduce my guilt about her having been by herself this whole time.
“She seemed really happy to have us there,” Wesley countered. She was right: Bishakha was happy when we were there. She was warm and embracing toward Wesley. And now Wesley’s voice was Bishakha’s phone greeting.
“I’ve never seen her like that around any of my friends,” I said.
“Do you know when her birthday is?” Wesley asked. I didn’t. I must’ve known at some point. I didn’t know Shyamal’s either.
“She doesn’t strike me as someone who sees value in things anymore,” I said. “The place is empty pretty much.”
When you visit someone’s home, you learn a lot about their biography just by what’s on their walls: the art they like, the family trips they’ve taken, their diplomas—even the very color of the wall symbolizes something. Bishakha’s walls were a pasty white, mostly bare, save for a smattering of muted paintings. Her home was a blank slate that would tell a stranger nothing about the occupant.
At some point, I’d have to learn what was supposed to be on my mother’s walls. And most important: Why wasn’t I on them?
Six
“To them, he is a common man.”
Do you have a goal in front of you? What you want to do next?” my father asked. We were strolling outside the complex of Belur Math, a sprawling forty-acre area located near Kolkata on a distributary of the Ganges River.
Shyamal, as I discovered on this trip, had a particular fascination with old temples and forts and was intent on showing us every one of them, along the way explaining their significance. It was monsoon season in Kolkata, meaning every second outdoors was hot and humid, ideal for long lectures about old Mughal invasions. All about the Mughals, this guy.
This series of striking temples, conceived by Swami Vivekananda, was stunning. Vivekananda, born Narendranath Datta in Kolkata in 1863, was the son of a lawyer and eventually became a famed monk. Known for his acceptance of all faiths, he delivered a notable speech in 1893 at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, an interfaith assembly in Chicago, where he extolled the virtues of tolerance and truth.
I could see why Shyamal would find this place an