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  • A Working Theory of Optical Illusions
  • Nina Sudhakar (bio)

I learned today that my mother's room had a view. The hospital complex was so labyrinthine I'd assumed her window looked out on a blank wall or some kind of building innards, copper pipes and errant wiring. Instead, the blinds collapsed to reveal the full moon, low as if it had been pinned there for the room's inhabitant to admire. The distant hills were caught up in the beam and I spied, for a moment, the glittering spike of a radio tower. In all these weeks it had never occurred to me to pull up the blinds or even tilt the slats. I wasn't sure if my mother had requested the insularity, wishing to cocoon herself, or if the blinds were opened only during the hours when I was not there. While I looked out the window, the night nurse stood by the doorless bathroom, studying her calloused hands. It was she who had suggested we open the window. When someone dies, she whispered, it's good to give the soul a place to go.

My mother's death was not shocking to me; she had been ailing for months, so much so that I began to hope I would not have to watch her reach the bottom of her seemingly endless deterioration. The only surprise at the end was what she said to me. We had been looking at one of my baby scrapbooks, gingerly turning pages already half unbound from years of handling. On the third page, we arrived at our only complete family photo: my mother, head thrown back, laughing; me, cradled in my mother's arms, napping; my father, arms crossed, smiling. In childhood, the longer his absence continued, the more I returned to this picture, sleuthing for clues, attempting to dismantle the growing mythos around his character. Did his crossed arms foretell a closed-off personality? Did his slight lean toward my mother indicate remorse about his coming abandonment? There were any number of traits to read into the picture, any number of ways to will an absence into a presence. When I grew old enough, I learned to read into my mother's silences instead.

I hadn't seen the photograph in quite some time when my mother stopped at its page. She took my hand, squeezing it gently, as she always did when I pulled a chair over to her bedside. For so many years it had been just the two of us; I'd grown used to this kind of easy intimacy.

Lately, beti, she said, I've had quite a bit of time to think. I know you value certainty, hard-won truths.

Here she paused and peeled the family photograph off the page. I stared at her, wondering if she was relishing this moment, knowing her to be passionate, prone to drama. She had also developed an otherworldly sort of clarity in the later stages of her illness that I found unsettling. After a brief glance at me, my mother ripped the photograph in half. I neither [End Page 12] gasped nor moved to stop her. I thought it best to let the scene unfold as she had planned it.

The man in the photograph, she continued, was a work acquaintance who had come by our apartment just after I was born, who had happened to pose that day for a picture in the dim living room. She'd gravitated to this colleague because he was a fellow immigrant from India, the sole other one in the export-import company in Jackson Heights where my mother worked as a secretary. Their relationship, though, had only ever been a friendship, which ended when he returned, shortly after my birth, to Hyderabad.

I imagine most daughters say this about their mothers, but mine was truly a beautiful woman. Primarily in ways a photograph could rarely capture: twinkling eyes, hair to mid-back swinging like a black sheet in the breeze, sharp features shifting, constantly, into expressions of delight or gleeful mischief. We were often mistaken in public for sisters. I was well aware that in her early twenties, my...

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