To My Mother, Beyond Time and Memory.

The first woman I ever knew in my life was my mother. She also happened to be the woman with whom I had my first love affair, and the first woman with whom I spent an entire night.

At twenty-two, I published my first collection of Bengali poems. While the book has since vanished into the dredges of time, I remember the word “Mother” anchoring its title — a quiet portent of a lifelong devotion.

And I still envision the moment my PhD acceptance arrived; the memory is not of the letter itself, but of the warmth of my mother’s hand as she sat feeding me, celebrating a victory that belonged far more to her than to me.

Eventually, I left my dream city, Kolkata, and its 40°C heat waves to pursue an alien dream — coming face-to-face with the -40°C bite of a historic New York blizzard. On my first day on that unknown planet, in that blinding white silence, the person I missed with an ache I had not known possible was my mother.

As a man of science, my equations have made me a staunch believer in the block universe. I’ve known that the distinction between past, present, and future is merely a “stubbornly persistent illusion.” Time isn’t an arrow but a landscape — so the passing of my mother is not a finality.

Somewhere in this unchanging fabric of the cosmos, the event of me resting my weary head in my mother’s lap will always remain an eternal constant. And for an atheist, that is as close to religiousness as I can ever come: the hope that somewhere beyond grief, distance, and the illusion of time, my mother is still there — and I am still her child.